A new “Social Media Sustainability Playbook” report from Eyecue Insights, a creator of an AI-powered visual analytics platform, suggests that for industry-wide sustainability to succeed, brands must improve their messaging across social media.

While sustainability content has grown consistently, it still represents only 5% of all beauty content, according to Eyecue Insights. The chasm between consumer interest in sustainability demands and beauty brands’ coverage of the topic represents an opportunity to earn consumer trust and increase engagement, says the company, which is based in Uruguay.

“Sustainability is an issue that applies to all industries, but especially beauty,” said Eyecue Insights Founder Carolina Bañales. “Given the nature of the beauty industry and the amount of waste it generates and the size of its audience, brands in this space carry an obligation to not only ensure they are taking the measures to be more sustainable, but also to educate consumers on their sustainability efforts. Only through a shared responsibility – brands educating the public and consumers engaging with and supporting sustainable content and products – can meaningful sustainability become a practical reality. Our data shows a critical breakdown in communication between brands and consumers when it comes to this topic — and it is to address this that we’ve created the playbook.”

Data analysis was performed using the company’s proprietary image and text recognition technology on more than 160,000 Instagram posts from January 2020 through April 2022 posted on 130 Instagram accounts across skincare, makeup and fragrance as well as retailers.

While only 5% of beauty content across all of the accounts analyzed is about sustainability, the report identifies a subset of brands that post 4x more sustainability-related content than the average across all other accounts (sustainability-led brands). Eyecue contends not only do sustainability-led brands feature more sustainability content, they also generate up to +60% higher engagement with this content type compared to other content. Additionally, the best performing accounts leveraged celebrity mentions in their sustainability content, implying that they are investing marketing budget on promoting sustainability topics. 

Which brands did Eyecue single out for excelling in sustainability content? Leaders included La Bouche Rouge, Circumference, Tata Harper, Kjaer Weis, Everday Humans and Cocokind, among others.