As influencer marketing continues to gain mainstream popularity, no industry is left untouched—from finance and B2B to real estate and even legal services. Yet beauty remains the leading vertical for influencer marketing along with fashion, according to our State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report.
This is no surprise considering the massive influence that beauty influencers have over buying decisions. Case in point: Influencers powered Glossier’s growth into a $1.8 billion beauty empire.
Yet the beauty industry is also one of the most challenging verticals for influencer marketing. It’s massively competitive and highly vulnerable to changing trends, making it crucial to stay on top of the latest trends affecting the beauty influencer marketing space. That’s exactly what this post is all about. Let’s break down some of the beauty influencer marketing trends and insights to watch out for in 2025.
- Nano and Micro Influencer Will Continue to Dominate Beauty Campaigns
- Authenticity Over Perfection: The Rise of Deinfluencing
- Sustainability Will Shape Beauty Campaign Narratives
- Live Shopping Events Will Drive Instant Purchases
- “Beautility” Products and Content Will Reign Supreme
- Personalized Beauty Campaigns Through AI and Predictive Analytics
- Inclusivity Will Drive Long-Term Engagement
- Gen Z Will Shape Beauty’s Content Aesthetic
- Influencers as Creative Directors Will Revolutionize Campaigns
- Male Influencers Are Redefining Beauty Standards in 2025
- Slay Your Beauty Influencer Marketing in 2025
- Frequently Asked Questions
Nano and Micro Influencer Will Continue to Dominate Beauty Campaigns
With audiences experiencing a form of influencer fatigue, their attention is shifting to smaller creators like nano and micro influencers. Not only are these smaller influencers more relatable to everyday consumers, but they’re trusted to give more authentic recommendations.
This explains the 2x-3x higher engagement rates they get across different social platforms compared to larger influencers. According to our State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report, Instagram accounts with less than 5k followers see an average engagement of 4.21%, while engagement stands at 0.95% for those with over 100k followers. On TikTok, accounts with 1k-5k followers see an average engagement of 15.04%, while accounts with over 1 million followers see an average engagement of 10.53%.
Brands are paying attention, too, as we noted a growth in their preference for smaller influencers. While 39% opted to use nano-influencers in 2023, the number jumped to 44% in 2024. We’re likely to see this trend continue into 2025 as brands realize the value that smaller influencers can bring to their beauty campaigns.
Influencer Preferences
BIODERMA leverages nano- and micro-influencers for their influencer gifting programs. This helps them to collect authentic product reviews from content creators who can engage a relevant audience. Their TikTok and Instagram campaigns generated engagement rates of over 5%.
@jimmycmakeup1 Tye new @Bioderma UK & Ireland SENSIBIO RANGE is excellent fir anyone that is in tye look out for cleaners that is kind to sensitve skin , they ate also fragrance free 🤗 I am Currently using the facewash also , more in that soon 🥰 #gifted #biodermaireland ♬ original sound - jimmycmakeup1
Actionable Tip:
As engaging as these smaller influencers may be, the biggest challenge is finding and activating the right ones. Use scalable tools like Skeepers to source nano- and micro-influencers who are actively looking for brands to partner with. The platform makes it easy to reach influencers, collect influencer-generated content, and manage your campaigns in one place.
Authenticity Over Perfection: The Rise of Deinfluencing
In the same vein, trends like deinfluencing speak for the growing value that consumers place on authenticity. Originating from the beauty industry, the trend has since caught on to other industries. Now the influencer marketing landscape as a whole is starting to shift its focus from promoting endless products to advocating mindful consumption and sustainable choices.
This ties into broader sustainability trends in beauty, such as the demand for clean and ethical products (more on that later). The beauty influencer marketing industry is particularly affected by the deinfluencing trend since it sees higher product churn and shorter buying journeys where people can easily make impulse buys.
Beauty influencers are creating content that calls out overhyped products, telling people what not to buy instead of what to buy. So marketing campaigns aimed at “going viral” could easily become a target to deinfluencers.
@jocelynisabellac Save your 💸💸 #foryou #beauty #skincare #makeup #influencer #viral #fypシ゚viral #beautytips #beautyhacks #deinfluencing ♬ original sound - Joce
Instead of fighting it, beauty brands can buy into the trend by prioritizing authenticity to build trust and customer relationships. The focus should be on nurturing these relationships to earn long-term customers instead of attracting lots of sales from short-term buyers. User-generated content and tutorials are some of the most effective ways to build trust with your audience.
Actionable Tip:
Brands need to focus on partnering with influencers known for their honesty. Encourage them to be transparent about your partnership. Give them the creative freedom to share what they truly feel about your product, even if it means pointing out something that needs to be improved on. Better yet, enlist them to collect honest feedback on how to improve your products.
Sustainability Will Shape Beauty Campaign Narratives
On a related note, sustainability is a central theme in today’s beauty industry. Beauty and skincare consumers are increasingly demanding eco-friendly and socially responsible products.
A CleanHub survey even found that a whopping 93% of consumers consider “clean beauty” to be at least somewhat important when buying cosmetic products. When we say, “clean beauty,” we’re looking at factors like non-toxic, cruelty-free, sustainable packaging, organic ingredients, and zero waste.
In fact, 70% research the sustainability credentials of a beauty brand before making a purchase. And with influencers playing a significant role in people’s buying decisions, the information they share about a brand’s sustainability initiatives will help with the research process.
Brands like Garnier are leaning into this by partnering with clean beauty influencers like Eli Leimer, who’s known for her honest product and brand reviews. In a paid promo video, the influencer educates her audience about affordable Vitamin C serum options with non-toxic, acne-safe ingredients.
Brands can take it a step further by extending your transparency initiatives to your influencer partnerships. This may go beyond simply highlighting your ingredients but also other sustainability efforts in terms fo environmental impact and social consciousness. Provided you’re actually making a move toward sustainability, being transparent about these efforts will help you win over customers in an era of conscious consumerism.
Actionable Tip:
Weave sustainability into your campaign narratives. Work with influencers to highlight your sustainability efforts, such as clean ingredients, recyclable packaging, or ethical sourcing. Include these initiatives as talking points that influencers can use when creating content about your brand.
Live Shopping Events Will Drive Instant Purchases
In a market as saturated as beauty, authentic audience connection is what sets successful brands apart from the competition. And real-time engagement is the name of the game when it comes to building those connections. Brands can nurture this type of engagement by incorporating live shopping events into their beauty influencer marketing campaigns.
These live broadcasts offer the opportunity for shoppers to ask questions and get answers in real time. So they can easily clear up doubts and remove barriers to purchase, giving them the confidence to go through with their purchase.
This can be particularly effective on platforms like TikTok, which offer advanced live shopping features to drive instant purchases. Several TikTok Shop stats support this. TikTok users are 1.7 times more likely to watch a brand’s live broadcast to buy a product. They’re also 2 times more likely to consider TikTok LIVE the most reliable medium for buying something.
However, TikTok isn’t the only place to host influencer-led live shopping sessions. Platforms like Amazon Live also offer a great opportunity to combine live broadcasts with instant buying options. For example, Carla Stevenné is a beauty influencer who regularly hosts Amazon Live sessions where she demonstrates how to do makeup while her viewers have the option to buy the featured products during the broadcast.
Actionable Tip:
Create engaging live shopping experiences with influencers showcasing products in real time. For this strategy to work, it’s important to work with influencers who have a massive influence and are known for their expertise. This will ensure that they bring in the kind of viewership you expect while also having the knowledge to answer key audience questions in real time.
“Beautility” Products and Content Will Reign Supreme
“Beautility” is another key trend that we can expect to see dominating the beauty industry in 2025. With a growing consumer demand for practicality, brands are increasingly coming up with multifunctional beauty products. These are products with benefits beyond their primary purpose (think foundation with SPF or hydrating lipstick).
Needless to say, the beauty influencer marketing landscape will be affected by this trend. For influencers, beautility products create an opportunity to be authentic with their promotion efforts since they can focus on multiple benefits. For brands, it’s important to ensure that influencers can effectively showcase their product’s multifunctional benefits.
Here’s an excellent example from ColourPop Cosmetics where an influencer demonstrates the multiple uses of their Sunnyvale Crème Gel Liner.
Actionable Tip:
Focus your campaigns on educating audiences on your products' dual (or multiple) benefits. At the same time, don’t neglect the importance of engaging your audience. The key is to find the perfect balance between informative and engaging.
Trust your influencers to be able to engage their audiences. Give them the creative freedom to authentically showcase the product’s benefits in their unique voice and using engaging formats.
Personalized Beauty Campaigns Through AI and Predictive Analytics
From virtual try-ons to tailored product recommendations, AI has made waves in the beauty industry, enabling brands to deliver hyper-personalized experiences. For 2025, we can expect these benefits to seep into beauty influencer marketing campaigns. This will involve the use of AI to create hyper-personalized influencer campaigns that are tailored to a niche audience.
The rise of AI-powered influencer marketing platforms will drive this trend, with the ability to easily analyze influencer profiles, hashtag performances, and social media conversations. These tools will then make tailored suggestions to help brands develop hyper-personalized campaigns that resonate with the right audience.
For instance, platforms like Linqia make use of predictive algorithms based on millions of influencer posts to help you build creative strategies to engage your target audience. It’s also powered by Google Vision to quickly analyze thousands of images and identify metadata such as brand logos, labels, and objects. This helps you narrow down influencers who are a perfect fit for your brand.
Linqia influencers
Additionally, brands with hyper-personalized beauty offering can also leverage influencers to spread awareness and increase adoption of their AI tools. Prose partnered with hair care influencer Sophie Marie to share an informative guide targeting women with wavy hair. The influencer shared a Reel with her wavy hair routine and explained how Prose products are customized for each user based on factors like hair type, strand attributes, diet, and local hard water content.
The rise of AI influencers is another trend that brands should watch out for. Although their popularity isn’t explosive, they’re not going anywhere. With the right strategies, brands could find creative ways to leverage them for their beauty campaigns.
Actionable Tip:
Use AI-driven personalization to create campaigns that are more relevant and targeted to specific niche groups. Use AI tools to discover influencers who can effectively promote your offerings to niche audiences. For example, find an influencer who can speak to people with curls, another who can speak to people with fine hair, and so on.
Inclusivity Will Drive Long-Term Engagement
Consumers want representation, with 63% saying that diverse representation is important to them. In fact, 47% even say that they’d want to buy from a brand that includes diversity in advertising. People want to see representation for their race, ethnicity, age, and even disability.
As a result, inclusivity is no longer optional, especially for beauty brands that have to cater to people from diverse backgrounds and needs. For instance, makeup brands should consider people with different skin colors and tones, skincare brands should consider people’s different skin types and concerns, hair care brands should consider different hair textures and types, and so on.
Your influencer campaigns should also reflect this inclusivity with diverse influencers who can effectively represent different types of people. However, take care not to make it an afterthought. Instead, inclusivity should be closely knitted into your brand DNA for it to feel authentic.
As highlighted in our latest report on digital marketing strategies, brands like Fenty Beauty perfected this during their launch. By activating diverse micro-influencers, the brand successfully built a movement and generated over $600 million in sales during the first year.
But their inclusive promotion efforts work only because the brand actively works to be inclusive, developing products that appeal to people with different skin tones and shades. To this day, diverse influencers continue to play a central role in every Fenty Beauty campaign.
Actionable Tip:
Create campaigns involving influencers who can represent diverse communities. Aim to drive authentic connections with your audience through these efforts and build a loyal brand community.
Gen Z Will Shape Beauty’s Content Aesthetic
For a while now, Gen Z has been setting social media’s content aesthetic and will continue to do so in 2025. And as an industry that’s all about visual expression, the beauty landscape will embrace these aesthetic trends for their own content.
Unlike previous generations, Gen Z is all about creativity and authentic expression as opposed to perfectly curated visuals. This means they tend to favor authentic and visually bold content over heavily edited imagery.
You can see this preference for creative self-expression reflected in the latest visual trends, such as Aura Beauty, which focuses on makeup looks with an aura effect. Sea Witchery is another bold visual trend that’s likely to be big in 2025 and particularly notable for the beauty industry.
If you can’t already tell from the name, this trend involves getting decked out in sea-inspired makeup and hair. Think: sultry shimmering eyes, wet wavy hair, seashell manicure…the works.
Actionable Tip:
Stay on top of trending aesthetics and find a way to incorporate them into your influencer marketing campaigns. Get influencers to put together makeup looks or content around specific visual themes related to these trends. Fill your Feed with influencer-generated content that aligns with trending aesthetics and captures Gen Z's attention.
Influencers as Creative Directors Will Revolutionize Campaigns
People look up to influencers for many reasons, including their expertise and creativity. Brands can differentiate themselves from the competition by tapping into this and extending their partnerships beyond sponsored content. This means leveraging their creativity and expertise to involve them in things like campaign development and design.
Recently, influencers have taken on more creative roles, helping to shape everything from campaign narratives to product design. Instead of simply being the “face” of a brand, they’re taking on roles that allow them to get more involved in campaign creation and even product development. This aligns with the growing demand for authenticity and influencer-led storytelling.
This trend originated from the fashion industry but is gradually being adopted into beauty influencer marketing as well. Some are even going beyond having influencers help shape their campaign narratives. Now you can find beauty brands collaborating with notable influencers to develop new products, kits, and collections to further appeal to their existing audiences.
Actionable Tip:
Find the most creative influencers whose voice aligns with your brand and involve them in the campaign development process. Make use of their creativity to come up with engaging campaigns that resonate with the target audience. Better yet, consider letting them pick out their favorite products for a co-branded kit. Or involve them in the development process of a brand new product (think: a new lipstick shade or a new eyeshadow palette that perfectly matches their aesthetic).
Male Influencers Are Redefining Beauty Standards in 2025
The beauty industry has undergone massive transformation over the past years. One major change is in the way makeup and skincare are perceived. Once thought of as products for women, the beauty landscape has become more encompassing of all genders.
In fact, 15% of heterosexual American men aged 18 to 65 use cosmetics and makeup, and 17% would consider using it in the future. Further, a Mintel study found that 43% of male makeup users between the ages of 18 and 44 apply makeup more often than they did a year ago.
This growing use of makeup among male consumers is partly due to the rise of male influencers generating awareness and expanding the industry’s appeal across all genders. By boldly showcasing that makeup is for everyone, these influencers are helping to redefine beauty standards. Their high engagement rates speak for this, with male beauty influencers seeing far more engagement (2.3%) than their female counterparts (1.8%).
Notable influencers like Bretman Rock and Gabriel Zamora have successfully collaborated with major beauty brands. These partnerships have helped to boost acceptance and change perceptions about makeup use among men.
Actionable Tip:
Find male beauty influencers whose values align with yours. For example, a male influencer who creates content about clean beauty could be ideal for a brand that develops clean products. Involve them in your campaigns to diversify your brand’s reach and engage new audience segments.
Slay Your Beauty Influencer Marketing in 2025
2025 has a lot in store for beauty brands, with endless potential for creative and authentic influencer partnerships. The key to win at the game is to be inclusive in your influencer partnerships, focusing on smaller influencers representing diverse communities. We’re talking partnerships with influencers from different age groups, genders, ethnicities, and races, as well as varying beauty concerns. You can make use of AI-powered influencer discovery tools to streamline your search.
Moreover, it’s important to start authentic conversations that help to highlight your focus on sustainability. Make the most of the insights and trends shared above to shape your beauty influencer marketing campaigns in 2025.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the influencer trends in 2025?
Some of the main influencer trends in 2025 are the use of smaller influencers, inclusive campaigns with diverse influencers, and AI-powered campaigns.
How are nano and micro-influencers shaping beauty campaigns?
Nano and micro-influencers are helping shape beauty campaigns with authentic and relatable content that garners trust and resonates with the audience. Instead of portraying an aspirational lifestyle like larger influencers, these smaller influencers are building genuine connections and leading the conversations on beauty.
Why is sustainability important in beauty influencer partnerships?
With more and more consumers buying into the “deinfluencing” trend and making more mindful purchases, they’re supporting brands whose values align with theirs. As such, it’s important that your beauty influencer partnerships highlight your brand’s sustainability efforts to appeal to these conscious consumers.
What role do AI and predictive analytics play in selecting beauty influencers?
AI and predictive analytics can analyze influencer profiles and content to match brands with the right beauty influencers. This allows you to narrow down influencers who have the best chance of engaging your target audience.
How can brands leverage live shopping and social commerce with influencers?
Brands can feature influencers in their live shopping events to encourage real-time conversations and instant purchases. Live tutorials and demonstrations of your latest products are a great way to drive this type of interaction.
Additionally, they can get influencers to promote shoppable product links to support their social commerce efforts. On TikTok Shop, influencers can select products to feature in their posts, allowing their audience to shop the products directly without leaving the app.
What are the benefits of using TikTok for beauty marketing versus Instagram?
TikTok is the birthplace of many social media trends, offering an excellent opportunity for content to go viral. It also sees a whole lot of beauty-related content with hashtags like #BeautyTok garnering millions of views.
Moreover, influencers on the platform can select products to feature in their content, which will allow their viewers to buy the products directly on the app. These factors make it a much more impactful platform for beauty marketing compared to Instagram.
Why are short-form videos so critical for beauty campaigns in 2025?
Short-form videos are a highly engaging format, allowing brands to demonstrate what their products look like and how to use them. The audio-visual nature of the content make it easier for viewers to get a clearer idea of how the product looks in a real-life setting as well as how to use it. This makes short videos perfect for beauty campaigns in 2025.
How can brands create shoppable content with beauty influencers?
Brands can feature beauty influencers in their shoppable content, adding product tags to the product being featured in the post. Another option is to host live shopping sessions with influencers, having them demonstrate how to use the product, and encouraging viewers to shop using the shoppable product links. Additionally, you can get TikTok creators to feature your product in their shoppable posts and generate instant sales.
What is the impact of user-generated content on beauty campaigns?
User-generated content is the perfect way to build trust for your beauty campaigns. Seeing real people using the product puts it into context, giving them the confidence to buy it. Similarly, seeing how the product benefits others could entice them to try it themselves.
How are consumer expectations shaping influencer marketing in beauty?
Consumers are increasingly expecting authenticity from beauty brands, which is compelling them to collect authentic and honest reviews for their influencer marketing campaigns. More specifically, brands are turning their attention to smaller influencers like micro-influencers and nano-influencers, trusting them to share their authentic opinions about their products.
Additionally, consumers are expecting brands to be transparent about their business practices, specifically with things like ingredients, sustainability, sourcing, and ethicality. These expectations are influencing how brands shape the narrative for their influencer campaigns. Brands and influencers are also being more transparent about their partnerships, which also ties into the growing demand for authenticity.
