DIY beauty

DIY beauty

Fr?d?rique Passot eCairn Inc. May 2014

Table of contents

Copyright eCairn Inc. DIY Beauty, May 2014

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1. Context and objective

Social media is teeming with tips, tutorials and recipes for making your own beauty products. The DIY beauty trend ties in with several other areas where influencers are actively relaying and publishing content demonstrating their skills and expressing their creativity thereby encouraging their readers and followers to claim ownership of the process of making their lives more beautiful.

In numbers, beauty influencers and others are building a virtual community of individuals and consumers, i.e. a market, where new values emerge. If those values for the most part stand clear of those of the mainstream industry, they are not necessarily in contradiction with them.

The objective of this study is twofold: to make the case for the existence of a new market defined around the values and concerns dear to the DIY beauty influencers to provide insights on the issues covered within this community of beauty afficionados and identify the ones mainstream actors in the industry can leverage to participate and eventually enter the market.

Indeed, this new space where doing things yourself and doing things together is a defining feature offers great potential for growth and innovation for brands big and small.

2. Methodology

To provide data points to measure and analyse the phenomenon, eCairn compiled a tribe of social media influencers interested in this new model of production for products related to beauty and fashion. About 1800 influencers sensitive to our issues were gathered: influencers with an interest in DIY cosmetics and perfume, DIY fashion, as well as minimalism.

Leveraging the eCairn ConversationTM application, we will study our tribe along three axes (or topics) pertaining to DIY beauty: "make your own": the conversations found on this axis include recipes and tutorials in which influencers share their knowhow in the area of homemade beauty products. "socially conscious": the conversations found on this axis include concerns about the economic, social and environmental impact of producing and therefore consuming cosmetics and other beauty products. "perception of beauty": the conversations found on this axis include threads about beauty as an expression of the self, as well as beauty as an external ideal, a product of normative edicts.

Our social media analysis will bring answers to the following questions to gauge the scale of the

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DIY beauty market and define it further: Who are the influencers who are the most sensitive to the DIY issues? What are their favorite social media outlets? What kind of reach do they have? How much of the conversation is devoted to the topics through which the DIY trend is expressed? What are the most commonly used keywords and keyphrases in each of the three contexts and how do they relate to one another?

3. Getting to know the DIY beauty influencers

3.1 Centrality of the DIY beauty topics in the tribe

The following graph presents the core of the network of connections between influencers (blogs) within the tribe. In blue are bloggers relevant to the "make your own" topic. In yellow are bloggers relevant to the "socially conscious" topic. In green are bloggers concerned with both types of issues.

The number and distribution of colored nodes show that the topics are very widespread and evenly covered across the network, regardless of the main focus of the blogger (cosmetics, perfume, fashion, or minimalism). The high proportion of green nodes indicates that both topics ("make your own" and "socially conscious") are frequently covered by the same influencer.

This picture shows how central the DIY beauty topics are to the tribe of 1800+ influencers we are looking at. In this tightly knit network, any influencer is within at most two degrees of separation

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from someone who publishes content pertaining to DIY beauty. It is obvious that the interest for DIY beauty is not a marginal phenomenon, and that it goes beyond the cosmetics tribe to include influencers with a slightly different focus.

The widespread interest for DIY themes across the domains under scrutiny suggests that the cosmetics and perfume industries should be able to learn from other related industries. These industries may indeed be ahead of them in identifying and engaging the conscious consumers in ways that make sense to them, and therefore in penetrating the growing market they constitute.

3.2 Top influencers on the DIY beauty topics

3.2.1 "Make your own" influencers

The following are influencers who publish a significant amount of content relevant to the "make your own" topic. The number next to the bar chart symbol indicates the percentage of relevant content published by each of them. For example, one out of five conversations (19%) published by Holly of is relevant to the topic.

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3.2.2 "Socially conscious" influencers

The following are influencers who publish a significant amount of content relevant to the "socially conscious" topic. For example, one out of three conversations (34%) published by Holly of is relevant to the topic. This particular influencer, also in the list of influencers relevant to the "make your own" topic, is very sensitive to the DIY beauty issues.

3.2.3 "Perception of beauty" influencers

The following are influencers who publish a significant amount of content relevant to the "perception of beauty" topic. For example, one out of three conversations (34%) published by Carol Tuttle of is relevant to the topic. On top of being very relevant to the topic, this influencer also has a lot of reach (as symbolized by the green signal strength icon).

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