The New Beauty Influencer is Community

For a while now, online beauty culture has typically revolved around the individual. A product’s virality may be predicated on the endorsement of the beautiful woman with the immaculately edited GRWM, the hotel-esque bathroom lighting, the effortless presence.

We love her too. But, steadily, beauty lovers are starting to look away from the production and towards some of their fellow audience members for answers.

Reddit, a platform designed for conversation, is now the fastest-growing social platform among women in the UK, according to its inaugural Culture Index, and women now make up more than half of its UK audience. Beauty is a big part of this shift: 71% of women on Reddit have a personal interest in skincare, beauty and cosmetics, and are actively seeking out education and recommendations from other users.

Rather than deferring to the taste of one person who they “trust”, users are joining highly specific communities and asking hundreds of people to compare notes.

For most, if not, all beauty needs, there is a Redditor who can and will help. 

You need a moisturiser for sensitive skin in winter? Someone has a holy grail. 

Are you replacing a blush whose shade was discontinued? Someone else has the perfect dupe.

(RIP OG Nars Amour) 

Do you want to know what a specific perfume will smell like “arriving in a tropical country at 1am”? There is, obviously, a subreddit for that sort of question too.

Redditors are specific, solution-oriented and extremely effective. Think of it as collective problem-solving, or one of the internet’s most literal interpretations of a problem shared being a problem halved.

And people are noticing. Globally, views of beauty conversations on Reddit grew 76% year-on-year in 2025. r/SkincareAddiction alone attracts around 1.6 million weekly visitors, while r/MakeupAddiction receives 963,000 and r/30PlusSkinCare around 795,000. In the UK, r/skincareaddictionUK saw views grow 45% year-on-year last year.

Traditional influencer culture depends, at least partly, on a parasocial relationship. You follow someone long enough to understand their taste, trust their judgement and perhaps want some part of their life.

Their recommendation matters because they made it.

Reddit flips this. The person giving the recommendation can matter considerably less than whether their answer is useful.

A product recommendation might immediately be challenged or qualified by somebody with a different skin type. Users will compare ingredient lists and reformulations. They track down dupes for discontinued products. Someone asks a question and another person points them towards an even more niche community where people have already spent several years discussing exactly that problem.

Where the internet is filled with content designed to appeal to as many people as possible, this level of specificity is mesmerising.

The anonymity is refreshing too. You don’t need to cultivate an identity, build a following or make yourself part of the content before asking a question. You can just ask.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this, is also how niche beauty discovery is becoming.

Fragrance communities are a good example. Instead of asking for a particular brand or scent, people are asking what “2014 soft grunge Tumblr” smells like, or how to smell like a “snail girl”. It is faintly ridiculous, but also fantastic at something conventional beauty search hasn’t quite mastered: translating nostalgia, identity, mood into real product recommendations.

Ultimately, the power of these communities comes from the fact that nobody can entirely control the conversation. A £70 product could be adored in one conversation and dismantled in the next. Someone can recommend it, someone else can explain why it broke them out, and a third person can suggest something for half the price that does the same job.

None of this means influencers are disappearing. They really aren’t. But it does suggest that online influence is becoming less concentrated, and that authority can come from our collective knowledge as much as individual aspiration.

People aren’t always looking for another curated feed to tell them what to buy. It seems sometimes they actually want the opinions of 50 brutally honest strangers with the same skin problem, and no incentive to spare a brand’s feelings.

The new beauty influencer is community, and, increasingly, beauty lovers are finding their people.