What 50,000 Reddit Beauty Posts Tell Us About What Makes Community Work
New data suggests there's a magic 'active member' number to create genuine engagement. 🪄
Earlier this month, I questioned whether branded 'communities' are actually communities at all.
Remember that comparison I shared between Sephora's official Beauty Insider Community and the unofficial r/Sephora subreddit?
Despite Sephora's official forum boasting over 6 million members (compared to Reddit's 893k), the subreddit generated almost 200 more discussion threads, accumulated 62k upvotes (vs. 695 likes on the official platform), and sparked 20.3k comments (vs. just 2k in Sephora's managed space).
The stark contrast got me curious.
🤔 What's really happening in these consumer-led beauty spaces on Reddit?
🤔 Are there patterns across different beauty brand communities that might give us insights into genuine community engagement?
For this analysis, I examined eight beauty brand subreddits: r/Sephora (973k members), r/Ulta (109k members), r/LushCosmetics (117k members), r/TheOrdinarySkincare (78k members), r/ColourPop (17k members), r/Glossier (65k members), r/RhodeSkin (5.4k members), and r/FentyBeauty (1.2k members).
In total, I analyzed 47,690 posts and comments from January 1-24, 2025 - the same timeframe as my original Sephora forum comparison to ensure consistent data.
A few methodological notes: I only included subreddits with over 1,000 members, and importantly, all of these are consumer-created spaces with zero official brand involvement. Interestingly, r/RareBeauty was originally on my list, but I discovered they haven't had a single post in 2025 as of the time I’m writing this.
What's up with that? Especially considering their thriving TYB community, this absence on Reddit might warrant its own investigation next time.
But for now, I'm sharing the most fascinating patterns that emerged from today’s analysis, with the objective of offering fellow marketers some evidence-based insights that might help us all build more authentic connections with the communities we serve.
Whether you're already focused on deploying consumer-led strategies or just curious about how organic beauty community engagement is looking right now, I hope these findings add some practical value to your toolkit.
Size Matters (Just Not How You Think)
After seeing how Sephora's massive official community was outperformed by its smaller Reddit counterpart, I wondered: is this a fluke, or is there a consistent pattern when it comes to community size and engagement?
Take a look at the scatter plot below. What you're seeing is a clear inverse relationship between community size and activity level. The smaller the community, the higher the engagement per member.
Rhode Skin's subreddit, with just 5,400 members, generates a staggering 413 posts per 1,000 members. Compare that to Sephora's 20 posts per 1,000 members despite its nearly million-strong following.
This finding challenges one of marketing's most cherished metrics: audience size. We chase follower counts, celebrate membership milestones, and report community growth to stakeholders as if bigger automatically means better. But what if we've been optimizing for the wrong thing all along?
We've all seen campaigns that reach millions but convert at microscopic rates, while highly-targeted efforts to smaller audiences drive significant action. Community engagement seems to follow a similar principle, where intimacy trumps scale.
The data suggests several possible explanations for this phenomenon:
🔇 Signal-to-noise ratio: In smaller communities, individual posts have higher visibility and are less likely to get lost in a flood of content.
🫂 Sense of belonging: When you're one of 5,000 versus one of a million, your contribution feels more significant - you're not shouting into the void.
🏆 Recognition: In smaller spaces, members recognize each other, creating reciprocal relationships that encourage continued participation.
🎯 Focused interest: Niche brand communities often form around more specific shared interests compared to retailer communities that cover countless brands and product categories.
This doesn't mean large communities are doomed to low engagement - Lush Cosmetics maintains impressive activity despite its substantial size - but it does suggest brands might benefit from rethinking their community growth strategies.
💡 Maybe the question isn't “How do we get more members?” but rather “How do we create the conditions for meaningful interaction among the members we have?”
How Many Members Actually Make a Community?
Reflecting on that question, I couldn't help but also wonder: how many people does it actually take to create a thriving community? The answer, surprisingly, isn't in the thousands or even hundreds.
My analysis reveals that successful beauty communities consistently maintain around 50-75 highly active members, regardless of their total size. These aren't just casual participants - they're what I'm calling “core members,” users who posted at least 3 times during my January analysis period.
Take a look at the Core Members vs. Overall Engagement chart below. There’s a clear pattern where communities with higher engagement scores (like a beauty routine's efficacy rating but for social interaction) all maintain a specific range of core contributors.
Rhode Skin maintains a thriving community with just 58 core members, while Glossier (124) and Lush (412) demonstrate similar engagement quality despite vastly different total membership numbers.
This finding perfectly aligns with the Oxford Handbook definition I referenced in my previous article.
These core members are the ones establishing the relationships that “intertwine and reinforce one another,” developing the shared language, and actively shaping the community's values and identity. They're essentially the Samanthas, Charlottes, and Mirandas to your Carrie - the reliable voices that keep the conversation going when everyone else is just lurking. 👯♀️
What's particularly fascinating is the “core-to-casual” ratio. The most successful communities maintain core members at roughly 6-12% of their active posting base.
When this ratio drops too low (as with Sephora), the community feels diluted. When it rises too high (as with Fenty Beauty's concerning 44%), there's overdependence on too few voices, making the community unstable.
The User Participation Distribution chart above tells us even more about how engagement patterns differ across community sizes. In smaller communities (<50k members), 28% of users make multiple posts compared to just 18% in large communities. Small communities not only have more repeat participants proportionally, but those participants are significantly more likely to become super-users (21+ posts).
🧠 Think about that in practical terms: in a community of 10,000, you need just 2% of members to post multiple times to reach that healthy core member threshold. In a community of 1 million? You need just 0.01%.
This data adds another dimension to consider as we rethink community growth strategies.
It's not just about creating conditions for meaningful interaction - it's about identifying and nurturing those potential core contributors who will be your community's foundation.
Single-Brand Shocker: The Narrower, The Stronger?
In my last article, I posed what seemed like a logical question:
📝 ‘How do you build a genuine community around a single brand when consumers' beauty journeys naturally span several products and companies?’
After all, retailer communities like Sephora and Ulta can host conversations about thousands of products across hundreds of brands, while brand-specific spaces are inherently more limited in scope.
To me, logic suggested that the retailer model would win, but the data is actually telling us a different story. 🤯
When comparing retailer communities (Sephora, Ulta) to brand-specific communities (Lush, The Ordinary, ColourPop, Glossier, Rhode Skin, Fenty), brand communities show significantly higher engagement rates across the board.
On average, brand subreddits generate 129.1 posts per 1000 members compared to just 29.1 for retailers. The percentage of active users follows the same pattern, with brand communities having roughly double the active participation rate.
What's happening here? It seems like the conventional wisdom about “the more options, the better” doesn't apply to community engagement. Instead, this data suggests that constraint may actually fuel connection.
Looking deeper, the conversation patterns revealed why. Brand communities spend significantly more time discussing product formulations (88 vs. 55), application techniques (75 vs. 48), and brand ethics/values (70 vs. 35).
These conversations require deeper knowledge and create a stronger emotional investment than retailer communities' emphasis on sales, promotions, and loyalty programs.
This helps explain why someone might feel more drawn to r/Glossier or r/TheOrdinarySkincare than r/Sephora, despite using products from dozens of brands.
In the Glossier community, for instance, they're not just discussing products: they’re exploring an aesthetic, a philosophy, and a set of shared values. The Ordinary, on the other hand, steps away from aesthetic alignment but shows how a brand with a highly technical, science-focused approach can create a community united by a desire to understand ingredients and formulations.
This level of depth is harder to cultivate in broader retailer spaces where conversations are often defaulting to more transactional topics.
The nuance here matters, though. This doesn't mean retailers should abandon community-building or that every brand automatically cultivates stronger communities. I actually think what we're seeing isn't necessarily about brand versus retailer, but about specificity versus generality. Communities thrive on shared purpose and identity, so the more clearly defined those elements are, the stronger the connections between members tend to be.
Retailers seeking to build vibrant communities might consider creating more focused spaces within their broader platforms, essentially mimicking the specificity that makes single-brand communities thrive (that’s one of the things Sephora’s own forum did right).
So.. What Actually Drives Community Conversation?
After uncovering that brand communities spark more active participation than retailer spaces, and that 50-75 core members make the magic happen, I wanted to understand exactly what these people are talking about. What types of posts actually get the community engaging with each other?
To figure this out, I categorized thousands of posts across all eight subreddits, analyzing which content types generated the most upvotes (pure approval), comments (conversation), and controversy (measured by mixed upvote/downvote ratios). I wasn't just looking at quantity of engagement but also its quality - what sparks quick approval versus deep discussion versus heated debate?
The Engagement Drivers chart revealed a few patterns:
💸 Sale alerts dominate for upvotes (scoring 95 on our 100-point scale) but fall flat on comments (52). This makes sense when you think about it—people appreciate the heads-up about deals enough to smash that upvote button, but there's not much to discuss beyond “thanks!” or “grabbed one!”
🖌️ Product questions and technique tutorials drive the most comments (92 and 84 respectively), creating the back-and-forth conversation that genuine communities thrive on. These posts invite multiple perspectives and personal experiences, creating natural dialogue rather than one-way broadcasting.
💭 Ethical concerns and customer service issues generate by far the highest controversy scores (82 and 72), indicating significant disagreement within the community. These posts about brand values, sustainability practices, or service experiences create the most polarized responses and some of the most engaged discussions.
📢 Meanwhile, content traditionally deployed by brands - like product announcements - barely registers among top engagement drivers.
The posts creating the most community interaction are overwhelmingly peer-to-peer exchanges like reviews, questions, and shared experiences.
Meanwhile, most official communities are dominated by announcement posts, carefully curated brand information, and campaign-related content.
This explains a lot about why consumer-led communities often feel more vibrant than brand-built ones. They're centered around the content types that naturally drive engagement instead of content types that serve brand objectives.
💡 It’s looking like we need to focus less on pushing information out, and more on facilitating the right kinds of conversations, even if that occasionally includes topics we might find uncomfortable. As the data shows, those ‘uncomfortable’ discussions might actually be our community's most engaging content.
The Product Categories Dominating the Reddit Beauty Conversation Right Now
Going one level deeper, I analyzed every post and comment across all eight subreddits, tallying mentions of product categories to create a snapshot of what the beauty community is actually discussing so far in 2025 - not what we, as brands, wish they were discussing 😉
The results? Skincare's reign continues uncontested. Serums top the chart with 1,864 mentions, followed by lip products (1,752) and sunscreen (1,685).
In fact, four of the top seven most-discussed categories fall firmly in the skincare realm rather than colour cosmetics.
It's like watching fashion silhouettes change in real-time. We’re witnessing the beauty world's ongoing shift from statement pieces to investment in quality basics. Right now, the foundation (both literal and metaphorical) matters most.
But the real story isn't just in the ranking, it's in the associated terminology. Each product category has a clear “buzzword” that dominates the conversation:
🍊 For serums, it’s “vitamin C”
💄 For lip products, it's “lip oil” not lipstick
☀️ For sunscreen, it’s “invisible finish”
🤭 For blush, it's “cream blush” rather than powder
🩹 For moisturizers, it’s “barrier repair”
🫧 For cleansers, it’s “gentle foaming”
🪄 For mascara, it’s “tubing formula”
🧴 And for foundation (which didn't even crack the top seven), the most associated term is “skin tint.”
The beauty community has collectively decided that dewy is in, matte is out, sheer beats full coverage, and skincare benefits are non-negotiable even in colour cosmetics.
This preference shift appears across both retailer and brand communities, suggesting it's a genuine consumer movement rather than just clever marketing.
The terminology itself reveals a fascinating functional focus. Terms like “barrier repair”, “invisible finish”, and “____ formula” dominate over descriptors like “glowy,” “bright,” or “dramatic.”
Today's beauty-community-lover doesn't just want products that look good, they want ones that perform specific functions with scientific precision.
💡 For brands, this represents either an alignment opportunity or a wake-up call. Is your product development and marketing language in sync with these consumer priorities?
This data snapshot suggests the most successful community-focused brands in 2025 won't just be the ones with the cleverest social media presence, but those whose product lineup naturally aligns with what beauty enthusiasts actually want to discuss.
The Community Equation: From Data to Action
With today’s beauty Reddit deep dive being officially complete (and my screen time stats looking absolutely horrifying), I’m happy to share that all this scrolling wasn't for nothing 🙌🏼
The patterns in this data point to what could be a framework for making these communities tick. Based on what we've seen, successful beauty communities seem to follow this pattern:
Active Beauty Communities = (50-75 consistent core members) × (content that prompts questions/sharing) × (space for authentic exchanges, including criticism)
Let's break this down into some actionable steps for brands still figuring out their community approach:
🕵🏻♀️ Identify and nurture potential core contributors. Your goal isn't 1 million member, it's 50-75 highly engaged ones who post at least 3 times per month. These members create the critical mass that keeps conversations flowing. Consider creating special access, recognition, or experiences for these vital community catalysts - not just points or badges.
💻 Rethink your content strategy. If you're primarily posting product announcements and brand messaging, you're missing what drives real engagement. Create spaces for reviews, questions, technique discussions, and yes, even those occasionally uncomfortable ethical conversations. The data shows these content types drive significantly more engagement than traditional brand content.
🌐 Focus on facilitating, not broadcasting. The most successful community managers are hosts, not presenters. They introduce people, create conditions for connections, and then step back to let genuine exchanges happen. This feels risky to many brands, but the data shows it works.
👩🏻🔬 Align product development with community interests. Notice the products that naturally spark discussion are those with technical elements, visible results, or customizable experiences. If your products don't give people anything to talk about beyond "I like it"... your community-building efforts will be more of an uphill battle.
In my previous article, I wondered whether brands should focus on building their own communities or better participating in existing ones. This data doesn't give a definitive answer - it suggests that there's value in both approaches when executed thoughtfully.
The beauty brands succeeding at community aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or most sophisticated platforms. They're the ones who understand the core dynamics that make people want to connect with each other, not just with the brand.
This is excellent! I wonder if brands could see the 50-70 active members and use them like influencers
okay this analysis is chef’s kiss 👏 i think this lowkey confirms something a lot of Gen Z marketers have felt but didn’t have data for: bigger doesn’t mean better, belonging does.
especially obsessed with the “50-75 core members” insight—feels like the social media version of Dunbar’s number for community vibes lol. makes me think brands should stop trying to “build” a community from scratch and instead find those 50 people already talking about them and just… give them the mic.
also wild (but not surprising?) how Reddit convos go deep on ethics, techniques, and formulations, vs brands still yelling into the void with “new drop!!” like it’s 2015. Gen Z doesn’t want updates. We want POVs.
bookmarking this for every time a brand asks, “can’t we just make a Discord?” and then wonders why it’s crickets.