What beauty figured out about Gen Z that other categories haven't
If you want to understand what it looks like to be culturally embedded with Gen Z, look at beauty.
Our Gen Z Brand Radar tracks brands by cultural momentum across categories. Beauty brands are not just well represented among the top performers. They are disproportionately present across multiple conversation types.
That is the finding other categories should pay attention to.
The numbers
- Glossier ranks #2 globally and appears in 5 of 6 conversation types in the US
- The Ordinary ranks #6 globally
- E.l.f. Cosmetics ranks #16 globally
- Rare Beauty sits at #9 in the US
- CeraVe is #17 in the US
- Charlotte Tilbury is #50 in the UK
- Fenty Beauty is #78 globally
This is not a coincidence. Beauty as a category has figured out something structural about how to enter Gen Z conversation across multiple modes. Other categories are still trying to crack one.
Why beauty shows up everywhere
Most categories generate conversation in one or two modes at best. A sneaker brand might dominate The Drop but not appear in The Edit. A tech brand might lead The Verdict but have no presence in The Remix.
Beauty spans the full range because the category naturally touches multiple parts of Gen Z life.
- Credibility (The Verdict). Skincare and beauty are research-heavy. Gen Z reads ingredients, watches comparison videos, crowdsources reviews. Brands that show their work, like The Ordinary, thrive here.
- Retention (The Edit). Beauty products are repurchased. Holy grails get talked about precisely because they survive the edit. “The only concealer I use.” “I’m on my fourth bottle.” This is not hype. It is earned loyalty expressed publicly.
- Self-expression (The Remix). Makeup and skincare are inherently creative. Tutorials, get-ready-with-me content, fit checks that start with the skin. Beauty gives Gen Z tools to express identity, which generates conversation that other categories can only envy.
- Advocacy (The Crowd). Beauty is one of the most recommendation-heavy categories in Gen Z life. Group chat recommendations, Reddit threads, TikTok comments asking “what lip is that?” This peer-to-peer advocacy compounds over time.
- Participation (The Moment). Product launches in beauty are treated as cultural events. Rare Beauty drops. Glossier pop-ups. Sephora exclusives. These create reasons to show up that go beyond the transaction.
Very few other categories touch all five of these. That is why beauty brands cluster at the top of the ranking and consistently outperform brands with larger media budgets.
The Glossier model
Glossier is the clearest example of what breadth looks like in practice.
The brand started as a blog, turned readers into a community and turned the community into the marketing engine. It did not buy attention. It earned conversation across multiple types.
- People trust it (The Verdict)
- They repurchase it (The Edit)
- They style with it and film content around it (The Remix)
- They recommend it to friends unprompted (The Crowd)
- They show up for launches and pop-ups (The Moment)
A brand that shows up in five conversation types is not just popular. It is culturally embedded. That is the difference between a brand people buy and a brand people build into their identity.
Only 5% of the US Top 80 achieve anything close to that breadth. Glossier is one of them.
What other categories can learn
Beauty is not winning because Gen Z is uniquely interested in skincare. Beauty is winning because the category understood, earlier than anyone else, that Gen Z brand relevance is multi-dimensional.
The question for other categories is not “how do we copy Glossier?” It is: which conversation types does our category have natural permission to enter, and are we building for breadth or staying stuck in one?
- A CPG brand might never dominate The Remix. But it could own The Verdict through ingredient transparency and compete in The Crowd through peer advocacy.
- A financial services brand might never trigger The Drop. But Monzo proved you can enter The Verdict and The Crowd by designing a product worth talking about.
- An apparel brand already in The Drop could ask whether it is also showing up in The Edit. Urgency without retention is a spike, not a strategy.
The lesson from beauty is not about the category. It is about the architecture. The brands winning with Gen Z are the ones that show up in more than one type of conversation.
Beauty figured this out first. The rest of the market is still catching up.
Download the full Gen Z research report
The Gen Z Brand Radar includes:
- Complete rankings: Global Top 100, US Top 80, UK Top 68
- Scoring across six conversation types for every brand
- Analysis of what’s driving the winners and what’s missing
- US and UK deep dives with brand-level case studies
- Methodology and data sources
Explore our Gen Z research series
How we conducted this Gen Z research
The Gen Z Brand Radar uses our Ideas methodology, which combines:
- Proprietary data lake. Over 50 million organic signals from social, search and digital behavior across platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Discord. What Gen Z says and does when no one’s asking.
- Custom AI models. Brands scored on a composite of conversation volume, sentiment and momentum within each conversation type. Ranked by Strength (average percentile score, weighted 60%) and Breadth (number of conversation types a brand appears in, weighted 40%).
- Human insight consultancy. Our team interprets the patterns and translates them into strategic recommendations.
This approach surfaces signals traditional research misses. Social listening requires knowing what to look for. Surveys capture responses to your questions, not organic behavior. Our Gen Z research captures what’s actually happening.
