Influencer Beauty Brands

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Like any stereotypical teenage girl, I was obsessed with YouTube makeup tutorials. Michelle Phan, Tati Westbrook and NikkieTutorials taught me everything I ever needed to know about blush application for face shape; eyeliner to elongate or open my eyes; and how to use contour to make my nose unnaturally thin and upturned.

Although now divorced from the YouTube beauty community, I notice a new influencer-affiliated cosmetics brand seemingly every other week. Where do all of these brands come from? Is this new concealer formula really so much better than the last? And most importantly, how are these brands impacting the environment?

Jeffree Star Cosmetics, one of the first and most successful influencer beauty brands, was founded in 2014 and is still in business today. Best known for their Skin Frost™ highlighters and Velour Liquid Lipsticks, Jeffree Star Cosmetics’ pink-and-gold branding exudes pop-queen maximalism that aligns with Jeffree’s eccentric personality. 

The brand is cruelty-free and vegan, and has been since its conception, but does not claim “clean” status. The beloved Skin Frosts contain mica, which is linked to unethical mining practices–including child labor. All 14 shades of the Magic Star Setting Powder also contain talc that is energy-intensive to extract, potentially carcinogenic and may be contaminated with asbestos. 

Another early staple of the influencer beauty brand surge was Kylie Cosmetics. Founded in 2015, the brand shot to fame with the Kylie Lip Kits, a duo of liquid lipstick and lip liner that Kylie claimed transformed her lip size and shape. The original formulations were not vegan or clean, but that didn’t seem to matter to the makeup lovers and Kylie fans who bought out the 15,000 available units almost instantly upon their initial release. 

In 2021, Kylie Cosmetics got a makeover. The packaging, once glossy and black, is now matte powder pink. But the change was not limited to packaging. The new-and-improved Kylie Cosmetics is now clean, cruelty-free and vegan. Although some Kylie Cosmetics products contain mica, Coty, the owner of Kylie Cosmetics since 2020, is a member of the Responsible Mica Initiative, a global coalition that hopes to promote more responsible and sustainable mica extraction. 

While these efforts are a promising step toward a more ethical beauty industry, Kylie Cosmetics falls short in the arena of sustainable packaging. Plastic is a mainstay of Kylie Cosmetics packaging, and there are no apparent sustainability initiatives on the website. It is not obvious if the products are recyclable or if they are made from recycled materials, and in such cases it is difficult to know what to do with empty products. Most empty cosmetics containers can’t be recycled at home, so in order to recycle them you need to go through a third-party program like TerraCycle.

More recent additions to the plethora of influencer beauty brands include Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez and rhode skin by Hailey Beiber. Setting aside the speculated man-fueled feud between the two women, both of their brands show promise for the future of sustainable cosmetics.

Rare Beauty was founded in 2019 and has since released a full line of face and body products. Most popular are its Soft Pinch Liquid Blushes, which went viral on TikTok for their potent pigmentation. As with other brands, Rare Beauty is clean, cruelty-free and vegan. The company also contributes 1% of all sales to the Rare Impact Fund, which works to improve mental health support for young people. 

Rare Beauty shipping boxes are completely recyclable–including the tape, tissue, and card–and the foam packaging is compostable. However, the limited edition product packaging is not guaranteed to be completely recyclable. Their sustainability page claims that they “plan to gradually introduce post-consumer recycled materials into [their] packaging beginning in late 2021,” but as of March 2025, I can find no evidence of this. 

Rhode Skin was launched in 2022 with the peptide glazing fluid, barrier restore cream and peptide lip treatment. Since then, the line has expanded to include a cleanser, blush and the most recent drop: peptide lip shape, a “contouring lip shaper.” Rhode Skin’s limited line adheres to the brand’s philosophy of making “one of everything really good,” emphasizing quality over quantity. Their products are vegan, cruelty-free and considered clean by third-party retailer standards. The brand has also pledged a minimum of 1% of sales to support women’s health and career growth through their Rhodes Futures Foundation. In response to the devastating LA fires that occurred in January, the foundation pledged an additional $1 million to support women in affected communities. 

Where Rhode really shines is in its commitment to sustainable packaging. Rhode uses Boox boxes to ship their products, which contain a QR code for instructions to return the box to be reused. They use post-consumer recycled materials for their bottles, tubes and caps; each product page also contains information for recycling, mostly instructions to contact the brand for a free shipping label that sends the empty container to a recycling partner to be processed.

Celebrity- and influencer-affiliated brands have been moving toward more sustainable practices. However, it is still difficult to justify the plastic production and carbon emissions produced by product manufacturing and distribution. As consumers, we must use our purchasing power to support brands that demonstrate a dedication to sustainability. 

If celebrity- and influencer-brands appeal to you, be sure to check in next time, when I’ll be doing a deep dive into Pharrell William’s skin and body care brand Humanrace.