Beauty Brand’s 2024 Review

In 2024, luxury beauty in Europe reconfirmed its cultural authority, not through ubiquity, but through nuance. In a market where perception outweighs volume, the brands that led the conversation on Instagram did so with intentionality, restraint, and narrative coherence. Their success was not measured by how often they appeared, but by how deeply they resonated.

Visibility with Purpose

According to data from Kolsquare, Europe’s most impactful luxury beauty brands on Instagram in 2024 combined scale with carefully curated narratives. Below, we highlight those that maintained their prestige while effectively leveraging digital influence.

Brand EMV (€) Posts Key Opinion Leader Engagement Rate
L’Oréal Paris €288,299,723 121,251 18,735 4.2%
Charlotte Tilbury €160,739,143 82,432 16,167 4.6%
YSL Beauty €140,736,378 67,252 12,965 5.0%
Dior Beauty €139,544,951 62,137 12,230 7.5%
Lancôme €117,441,431 65,839 12,175 4.1%
Huda Beauty €113,446,978 55,127 9,661 4.9%
Armani Beauty €94,322,907 44,869 8,570 3.8%
Rare Beauty €92,740,225 33,918 8,194 11.6%
Fenty Beauty €92,243,064 35,984 9,091 10.1%
Chanel Beauty €29,164,193 29,930 6,441 4.0%
Diptyque €406,407* 55 26 7.9%
Byredo €600,528 * 166 62 4.7%
Parfums de Marly €329,711 * 55 16 1.8%
Acqua di Parma €517,549 * 37 4 1.2%
Gucci Beauty €214,836 * 45 19 2.0%


*Note: Data marked “DK” refers to Denmark-specific figures from the European report.

While the top five are largely heritage brands, their digital strategies are anything but traditional. Their influence stems from high-frequency publishing, elevated production quality, and deeply integrated partnerships with regional KOLs.

At the other end of the spectrum, boutique fragrance houses like Diptyque, Byredo, and Parfums de Marly gained ground through scarcity, signature identity, and a deliberate resistance to massification, often achieving higher engagement rates with significantly less content.

National Signatures and Cultural Codes

Luxury behaves differently across markets. In Europe, these distinctions are particularly pronounced:

  • France remains the stronghold of olfactory heritage and ritualised elegance. Fragrance brands that lean into storytelling and timelessness tend to outperform.

  • Italy fuses glamour with intimacy, particularly in skincare and colour cosmetics, producing campaigns that feel both aspirational and tactile.

  • Germany and the Nordics favour credibility and minimalism, elevating science-backed skincare with clean aesthetics and restrained messaging.

  • The UK continues to be a creative laboratory, where expressive individuality, especially in makeup, drives niche loyalty and cultural influence.


What 2024 Revealed About Luxury Influence

Three macro-patterns emerged this year:

  1. Depth over scale: Campaigns with fewer creators but more curated storytelling outperformed large-volume strategies in engagement and sentiment.

  2. Fragrance as emotional architecture: In a digital world, successful fragrance brands are translating scent into language, employing memory, cinematography, and intimacy to evoke presence through absence.

  3. The return of ritual: Skincare is re-embracing sensuality, with increased attention on texture, gesture, and the emotionality of self-care. Clinical minimalism is giving way to quiet indulgence.

Beauty 2024

A Market Moving Toward Discretion

If 2019–2022 were dominated by volume and visibility, 2023–2024 marked a pivot: toward refinement, curation, and editorial presence. The new codes of luxury beauty are more aligned with cultural capital than with reach. Less noise, more nuance.

Instagram remains the main stage, but what now defines success is not exposure, but expression. The brands winning in this landscape are those that understand influence as a long game, rooted in trust, consistency, and cultural fluency.

As 2025 approaches, the conversation is no longer about how much attention a brand can gather, but how gracefully it can hold it.