DIY beauty
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.
Objective
The objective of this study is two-fold:
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.
Methodology
To provide data points to measure and analyze 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 Conversation™ 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 know-how 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 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?