With consumers taking a more conscious approach to beauty, new research has crunched the numbers to find the hottest vegan beauty brands on social media.
The research conducted by Easy Vegan Recipes compared several factors to determine the most popular vegan beauty brands popping up on social media right now. These factors included: followers, likes, views, comments, shares, and overall engagement across both Instagram and TikTok. Each category was scored out of 10 to give the brands an overall score of 100.
| Rank | Brand | Score /100 |
| 1 | Florence By Mills | 70.1 |
| 2 | Rare Beauty | 61.0 |
| 3 | R.E.M. Beauty | 49.5 |
| 4 | ELF Cosmetics | 35.1 |
| 5 | Haus Labs | 26.9 |
| 6 | Truly Beauty | 25.2 |
| 7 | Milk Makeup | 18.0 |
| 8 | Mecca Max | 8.7 |
| 9 | Beauty Bay | 7.7 |
| 10 | Pacifica Beauty | 7.1 |
According to the data, Florence By Mills has been crowned social media’s leading vegan beauty brand. Since being founded in 2019 by Millie Bobby Brown, Florence by Mills has taken to extraordinary heights, amassing 3.3 million followers on Instagram and another 3 million on TikTok, making it the most followed account in the top ten. Followers of the brand have also shown some of the highest engagement rates on the list, with Florence by Mills averaging 1,151 comments per Instagram post and a 0.22% comment rate on TikTok.
Coming up in a close second is Rare Beauty, another celebrity-owned brand, this time by Selena Gomez. Founded in 2019, the brand has gained the second-highest number of TikTok and Instagram followers on the list at 3.1 million and 3.8 million, respectively. Rare Beauty also averages the highest average number of Instagram likes per post at 74,642.
Launched in 2021, Ariana Grande’s brand, R.E.M. Beauty, takes third place. This award-winning brand places ethics and sustainability at the heart of its practices, with 3.2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram and the highest % of TikTok engagement out of the top ten, with 17.77%.
Well-established makeup company, Elf Cosmetics, is the fourth-most famous vegan beauty brand. Elf Cosmetics has 6.4 million Instagram followers, the highest on the list and 928,000 TikTok followers. Additionally, the brand has the third-highest TikTok engagement rate in the top ten at 10.68% behind Haus Labs and R.E.M. Beauty.
Inspired by individuality and inclusivity, Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs is social media’s fifth-most popular vegan brand. The brand’s success across America has been partly attributed to it being the first significant beauty line to launch on Amazon exclusively. As a result, the beauty brand has gathered almost 1.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. Haus Labs has the highest comments rate on TikTok at 0.72%, 106% more than the next highest TikTok comment rate in the top ten.
Taking the number six spot on the list is Truly Beauty, a brand that amassed a significant social following through its vibrant products and viral videos. The brand’s how-to videos are shared with over 2.3 million followers on TikTok, the third-highest of the ten brands. Truly Beauty also has the highest number of TikTok likes on the list, with 62 million, which is 4.6 million more than Florence by Mills in the top spot.
Milk Makeup is the seventh-most popular vegan beauty brand on social media. Founded in 2016, Milk Makeup is well-known for its on-the-go-focused products to help support busy lifestyles. Although the brand has one of the smallest TikTok followings on the list, with 722,000 followers, it has the joint fifth-highest TikTok share rate on the list at 0.07%.
Despite having the lowest number of followers on both platforms in the top ten, Mecca Max ranked as the eighth-most popular vegan beauty brand on social media. Mecca Max has a TikTok comments rate of 0.18%, which is a 126% higher than Rare Beauty which holds the number two spot.
Online superstore Beauty Bay makes its way into the number nine spot on the list. Since releasing its own-brand collection in 2018, it has become the top-selling brand on its site, with a strong focus on its cruelty-free practices. Beauty Bay has the seventh-highest Instagram engagement rate on the list at 0.13% and the seventh-highest number of Instagram followers, with 1.9 million.
According to the data, Pacifica Beauty is the tenth-most popular vegan beauty brand on social media right now. The brand’s social media presence blends conscious beauty, educational content and how-to videos, resulting in a combined 971,100 followers across TikTok and Instagram.
A spokesperson for Easy Vegan Recipes commented on the findings: “It is clear that beauty brands have recognized the growing importance of online presence and are not only competing against each other in terms of sales nowadays but also for the biggest online following.”
“As we can see from the top ten, there is a clear link between the founders of these brands and their popularity online. Many of these celebrities have a huge following, meaning their corresponding brands have a recognisable face that fans can attach to them.”
Raggedy Ann
Vusi Thembekwayo – CEO of Motiv8, and Founder of The Inspiration Project, My Growth Fund and Iconoclast: At 25, Vusi Thembekwayo served on the operations board of Metcash Africa. He was tasked with launching a new division, which he built into a R461 million turnover business. He then left to launch his own business in 2013, Motiv8 his own consulting business, which he bootstrapped with speaking engagements. \”In my experience, the only way to succeed is to invest time in your own development and have \”skin in the game.\’ Time enables you to build technical ability and establishes your credibility in the market,\” says Thembekwayo. He went on to become one of the \”dragons\’ on the South African edition of Dragons\’ Den, where he was responsible for allocation over R10 million worth of investment, as well as one of the \”sharks\’ on M-Net\’s Shark Tank. In 2011, he co-founded Watermark Capital Partners, a private equity firm. In 2013, he was appointed non-executive director at RBA Holdings Ltd. In 2014, he founded The Inspiration Project, a tech enabled narrative lab reshaping the story of Africa, qualified to join the National Speakers Association of New York, and founded My Growth Fund, a fund to support business people as they start, build and grow their businesses. In 2015, he founded Iconoclast, a boutique specialist public speaker representation management agency.