Reddit has long been known for snarky reviews and celebrity gossip, but over the past year beauty brands have become increasingly tapped into the platform for a multitude of reasons.
Just take Dove, which earlier this month made a whole campaign for its Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Mask based on Reddit reviews — the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Dove r/eal reviews campaign was built entirely from the reviews of the first 50 Redditors that gave permission exactly as written. The idea behind the program, which came to life via digital and print media and a New York City pop-up, is to show confidence in the product’s efficacy through transparent, real-life performance.
Emily Barfoot, head of Dove North America hair and skin care, said: “What we loved about Reddit culture, and Reddit as a platform in general, is that it is completely a culture of candor. It is a culture of honesty and transparency and anonymity, and because of that, it enables people to feel like they are completely trustworthy and trusted in that environment, and able to be freely and truly themselves and what they think.”
Dove New York City pop-up.
Wini Lao Photography
According to Reddit, interest in beauty on the platform has certainly piqued. In 2025, there was a 76 percent increase in views to beauty conversations on Reddit year-over-year.
Conversations run from how-to to routines to product reviews to ingredient deep dives to dupes to brand behavior and everything in between. And while Reddit has recently stopped showing subscriber numbers on a lot of subreddits, some of the most popular conversations include r/MakeupAddiction, r/beauty, /Sephora, r/glossier, rSkincareAddiction, r/brownbeauty and r/Asianbeauty.
The major differences between Reddit and other platforms is that Reddit is anonymous, which means conversations can be more blunt and honest, while the discussion-first, community-led vibe opens the door for niche brand communities.
This has in turn led to more participation from brands in different ways.
Recent partnerships include SkinCeuticals hosting a mod-approved AMA in r/SkincareAddiction featuring a board-certified dermatologist. That thread now lives on as a searchable, evergreen resource for consumers.
MAC Cosmetics, meanwhile, used its official profile to ask Reddit which discontinued products they should bring back. This turned a standard organic post into a live focus group.
“We’ve shifted from the ‘experimental’ phase to multiyear, multiregion partnerships with the world’s largest beauty groups, including Sephora and Ulta Beauty,” said Paulita David, head of U.S. large customer sales at Reddit. “Reddit is now a standard line item in beauty RFPs; it’s no longer a question of if a beauty brand should be on Reddit, but how.”
A key reason, David said, revolves around trust. “Reddit is a ‘low-BS’ environment. In a category where consumers are increasingly skeptical of highly polished, sponsored influencer content, they turn to Reddit for the ‘unvarnished truth,’” she said, noting that more than half of the beauty enthusiasts who are on Reddit report making a purchase based on information they found on the platform.
The rise of ChatGPT and other AI platforms like Gemini have also led to brands approaching Reddit in another way. That’s because for some time Reddit was the biggest citation source for AI searches, although it was surpassed by YouTube at the beginning of this year, according to data by AI Marketing platform Bluefish.
Jacob St. John, founder and chief executive officer of Navigo Marketing, said: “We have a lot of brands that are more quiet observers on Reddit, and others that try to actually participate in the conversation and flag, here’s XYZ thing about it. But what we’re seeing more and more is that as those conversations and the plain language is pulled into Gemini, ChatGPT and all of the other LLMS, the returns that are coming back are much more in natural language based on question/answer, which is why it indexes so highly with Reddit.”
Therefore, being active in Reddit chats can inform that outcome. “There’s really three or four ways that a lot of our brands are trying to participate in GEO and, ‘hey, how active are we on platforms like Reddit?’” said St. John. “Can we help control the narrative a little bit more, or at least do some damage control if there’s bad things out there? The other is starting to write more Wikipedia-style pages for their product, so less sell the product, but more general information. It’s still very early days and it’s been difficult to measure how successful that can be.”
