Beauty went big in 2022.

Most-loved Products  For the primary time, prestige beauty sales surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels, growing to $6 billion for the third quarter, in accordance with The NPD Group.

The mass market, too, saw regular increases across categories all 12 months, except facial skincare sales, which dipped in the course of the third quarter, per NielsenIQ.

Overall, though, searching through year-end data, what emerges is an image of an evolving landscape when it comes to social media strategies and category shifts. While only time will tell what 2023 has in store for beauty — and whether a comedown looms — here’s a snapshot of a number of the industry’s key moments this 12 months.

Brands Winning on Instagram vs. TikTok

In 2022, the polarity between a winning TikTok formula and a winning Instagram formula became increasingly apparent. As data from Traackr makes clear, content was king.

Brands delved deep into TikTok — which just three years ago, was principally No Man’s Land — while continuing to advance their Instagram strategies.

The endeavor has proven to be a balancing act.

“Instagram is sort of a soap box: you could have a megaphone to announce things, but your audience can’t deeply engage or perpetuate the message,” said Evy Lyons, chief marketing officer at Traackr. “Meanwhile, every bit of content on TikTok has the actual potential to generate a domino effect, because TikTok embraces derivatives.”

Largely attributable to the platforms’ inherently different ecosystems, their respective brand leaderboards look markedly different.

Brand Vitality Rating, or VIT, is Traackr’s proprietary metric to measure the reach, engagement and quality of a brand’s influencer content, with a view to assess how a brand’s investment in such content correlates to its sales performance.

Here, Traackr’s breakdown of the 12 months’s winning brands on Instagram and TikTok, respectively, ranked by brand VIT.

Instagram: 

TikTok: 

Beauty Brands’ TikTok Engagement Rates, Ranked

TikTok’s average engagement rate is 10 times that of Instagram’s.

In its biannual TikTok Benchmarks Report, social media marketing software company Dash Hudson reported that Instagram feed and Reels net a collective 0.49 percent engagement rate, while TikTok garners a 5.8 percent average engagement rate.

Equally as impressive is Dash Hudson’s finding that at the same time as a brand’s TikTok following grows, its engagement rates often remain on the incline, which contrasts to other channels, where the alternative often proves true.

Here, Dash Hudson’s rating of beauty brands’ engagement rates in 2022, categorized by brand TikTok following size.

Top-performing Growing Beauty Brands (10k to 100k followers)

Top-performing Established Beauty brands (100k to 500k followers)

Top-performing Large Beauty Brands (500k+ followers)

Ulta Beauty’s Most-loved Items of 2022

Under the leadership of chief executive officer Dave Kimbell, Ulta Beauty has been flying high.

This 12 months, it unveiled a latest store layout, inked a slew of major partnerships — including one with Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty — and within the third quarter, saw a 17.2 percent sales increase to $2.3 billion, surpassing Wall Street estimates.

It’s been a landmark 12 months for the retailer, which forecasts net sales for fiscal 2022 to be between $9.65 billion and $9.75 billion.

Here, a have a look at the most-loved (or wish-listed) products on Ulta Beauty’s website that helped fuel its success.

Cosmetics:

Skin and Body Care:

Hair Care: 

Fragrance:

Spate’s Top-growing Makeup Brands of 2022

Makeup made a comeback in 2022. Here, a have a look at which makeup brands saw the best increases in consumer interest versus last 12 months, compared to those who saw essentially the most significant positive changes in average monthly searches in 2022, in accordance with data from Spate.

Most important year-over-year growth in U.S. Google searches in 2022:

Most important positive change in average monthly search volume this 12 months: