For years, beauty marketing operated on a simple hierarchy: Instagram for aspiration, TikTok for virality, YouTube for tutorials. Reddit was an afterthought, a forum for anonymous complaints. That is changing rapidly.
According to Reddit Q4 25 report, the platform now reaches 121.4 million daily active users, with weekly engagement hitting 471.6 million, a 24% year-over-year increase. More importantly for marketers, 71% of users visit the platform specifically to validate a purchase before committing, a behaviour that makes it structurally different from other social channels.
My infographic below, based on data from SPATE, the leading AI-powered market research consumer trend intelligence platform that recently launched a dedicated Reddit monitoring tool, maps the top 10 beauty brands by upvotes over the last twelve months.
Interestingly nine of the ten brands are makeup rather than skincare, which makes sense: Reddit’s community culture rewards opinionated, product-specific conversation that makeup naturally generates. “Does this liner actually last?” is a better Reddit thread than “Explain your moisturiser.”.
The volume gap with other platforms is real but misleading. Holo Taco, for instance, accumulated 438K upvotes on Reddit over twelve months, against an average 643K TikTok weekly views for #holotaco over the last four weeks, according to Spate. A much smaller number but which carries structurally different weight. Reddit is often described as a “low-BS” environment where consumers, increasingly sceptical of influencer content, seek real peer opinion. An upvote on Reddit is not a passive scroll but a more deliberate act of endorsement.
The growth trajectories in the ranking also signal something important. Brands like Sally Hansen (+47% QoQ), Essence (+31%), and Fully (+167%) are gaining ground precisely because they have leaned into authentic community participation. In skincare, Dove went further, building an entire product campaign “the r/eal Reviews activation” directly from Reddit user testimonials, then bringing it into print and in a New York City pop-up.
The question for brands is not if they should include Reddit in their strategy but how. I reckon the answer to that question involves three moves. First participate in existing subreddits before creating owned ones. Then deploy “Ask Me Anything” with genuine subject-matter expertise rather than product pitches. Finally, treat Reddit’s organic conversation as a real-time consumer intelligence feed. The platform rewards patience and penalises promotion. Brands that understand that distinction, as the ranking above already shows, are pulling ahead.