In March, Charlotte Tilbury topped The Sunday Times Beauty Rich List with a net worth of £350 million. Her mantra, “Dare to dream it, dare to believe it, and dare to do it”, seems to have paid off.
The Charlotte Tilbury brand is everywhere. In 2024, it was the UK’s most-mentioned beauty label on Instagram. And over the past six months, it’s been tagged in over 100,000 posts on TikTok and Instagram.
So why can’t the internet stop talking about it?
With fresh data from influencer marketing platform Kolsquare, we break down how Tilbury keeps her brand top of feed, from smart creator partnerships to low-risk, high-scale tactics.
Let’s dive into the most recent data about the Charlotte Tilbury brand.
Instagram is the go-to beauty platform. It's visual, offering Stories, reels, carousels, and posts to show makeup looks from every angle.
On the platform, Charlotte Tilbury (@charlottetilbury, 7m followers, Instagram) generated a whopping €355m in earned media value (EMV) over the last 6 months. For context, EMV measures how much the same level of exposure would have cost through traditional advertising.
As you can see in the Kolsquare graph below, that’s around €8m to €20m worth of buzz every week.
Over the same period, more than 25,230 key opinion leaders (KOLs) tagged the brand in 32,910 Stories, 16,180 posts, and 34,580 reels. That’s between 1,000 and 2,000 reels each week.
This constant stream of content, especially in viral-friendly formats like Reels, keeps the brand top of mind.
Micro-influencers do most of the heavy lifting, accounting for 61.1% of mentions. With tight-knit, niche audiences, they often drive higher engagement. Meanwhile, 24% of posts come from macro-influencers. These creators offer visibility and a level of prestige.
Creating a balance between different types of KOL helps brands target niches, build relationships with audiences, and appear highly desirable.
The Kolsquare graph below shows a breakdown of the KOLs tagging Charlotte Tilbury on Instagram.
Engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves, etc) indicates that a post motivated the audience to take action. These actions signal that social media users found the post interesting, relatable, or entertaining.
Posts mentioning Charlotte Tilbury brought in 137.16m engagements, with an average engagement rate (ER) of 3.74%, well above Instagram’s typical 0.41%. Tagged content is certainly connecting.
But how many people saw the content?
Content tagging Charlotte Tilbury received between 150m and 250m impressions each week (4.8bn over the six-month period). Impressions are the number of times content appeared on users' feeds. If the same post featured multiple times on the same user’s feed, every appearance counts.
On TikTok, Charlotte Tilbury (@charlottetilbury, 1.2m followers, TikTok) lacks some power. It amassed a lower amount (€266.14m) of EMV from posts on the platform.
Here are the weekly numbers.
In addition, a smaller cohort (7,610) of KOLs tagged the brand. But again, micro-influencers (53.5%) and macro-influencers (30.1%) were most prolific.
While these creators shared just 23,820 posts, they generated significantly more (192.38m) engagements, achieving a higher (4.96%) ER.
This reflects expectations, as TikTok has a higher average engagement rate of 2.6%. The TikTok algorithm supports influencer content going viral, even with smaller audiences.
With Charlotte Tilbury’s strong presence, it feels like the brand has been around forever. Yet, founded in 2013, it’s a relatively new player on the luxury beauty scene.
So, how did it become so popular?
Famous makeup artists launching brands is nothing new. But the heights Charlotte Tilbury has reached are rare.
Already a makeup artist to the stars, Tilbury ran a YouTube channel and blog, sharing tutorials on glam lips, flawless foundation, and the perfect smokey eye.
With a growing audience, in 2013, the Charlotte Tilbury brand hit Selfridges, London. The launch event featured celebrities like Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne. It fit the branding. Tilbury leaned into her A-list background, pairing Hollywood glamour with a touch of rock’n’roll.
The gold-toned packaging felt fit for the red carpet. It gave her products prestige, making them stand out in a crowded market.
A flagship store in London’s Covent Garden soon followed. Within two years, Charlotte Tilbury had reached over 60 countries.
Let’s look at some of the brand’s famous products:
Thanks to these cult products, and no doubt Tilbury’s relatable and warm personality, the brand has remained a favourite on and off the red carpet. Celebrities like Sienna Miller, Lizzo, Salma Hayek, Kate Moss, and Sabrina Carpenter regularly champion it, keeping its Hollywood appeal alive. Amal Clooney even chose the brand for her wedding makeup.
Charlotte Tilbury often highlights these celeb moments on its social media accounts, as seen below.
In 2020, Spanish beauty giant Puig acquired a majority stake in the brand. Tilbury stayed on as Chief Creative Officer and the face of the brand, while the investment accelerated the company’s international growth. In 2023, Puig reported a turnover of £448.5m, up 45% year-on-year.
Today, the Charlotte Tilbury brand continues to expand its popular lines. It also keeps up with new trends, introducing virtual consultations, an AI-powered Foundation Finder, and a fragrance line.
With countless industry awards under its belt, Charlotte Tilbury has become a powerhouse brand in just over a decade.
Let’s see how Charlotte Tilbury compares with other beauty brands.
As of 2024, Charlotte Tilbury holds the #1 spot as the most popular beauty brand on Instagram in the UK, with a remarkable £44.60m EMV. That’s a fair distance ahead of its closest competitors, L'Oréal Paris (£38.66m) and Huda Beauty (£32.18m).
The content tagging Charlotte Tilbury generates a 3.6% ER. This shows strong resonance, but it is slightly lower than other brands on the list.
Instead, it’s the number of activated KOLs (5,066) and scale of posts (33,997) that help the brand take over the conversation. To provide context, that’s double the number of posts tagging L'Oréal Paris (16,604).
Across Europe, there’s a different story. L'Oréal Paris wins with €288.29m EMV from 121,251 Instagram posts. Tilbury ranks second, with €160.73m from 82,432 pieces of content. Here, L’Oreal has a slightly lower ER. But again, it’s the volume of posts that makes the difference.
It’s a domino effect: the more influencers post about your brand, the more it becomes relevant, and the more other users join in.
On TikTok, Charlotte Tilbury ranks 6th in the UK – up four places since 2023. It generated an impressive £20.98m in EMV through 1,247 KOLs and 4,374 posts. While it doesn’t take the top spot, we should note the close margins – just £3.5m between the top seven brands.
Huda Beauty wins first place with £23.65m EMV from fewer (879) creators. Its high ER (8.5%) helps it take the top spot. While Tilbury targets Millennials and young Gen Xers, Huda Beauty targets Gen Z, who comprise most of the platform’s users.
Here’s a list of the influencers sharing the content with the highest EMV on social media tagging Charlotte Tilbury over the past six months:
This list is incredibly varied. While the top performer is a celebrity influencer, one-third of the top six have under 300,000 followers. In addition, the majority of the content is organic. Influencers genuinely endorse the makeup brand because they use the products day-to-day. This creates a wealth of authentic content, and the variety of posters allows shoppers to see how products look on different skin tones and styles.
The list becomes even more varied further down. Micro-influencer Gaia (@gaiamassano, 32,900 followers, Instagram) ranks 13th, generating €2.8m EMV through eight stories and 18 reels. But mega-celeb Demi Moore (@demimoore, 6.34m followers, TikTok) only brought in €2m EMV from nine pieces of content. This suggests smaller creators can beat star power if the content is right.
However, the most popular reel shared by Gaia critiques the beauty industry.
Below are the TikTok creators who generated the most EMV for Charlotte Tilbury over the past six months:
The most popular content types are GRWMs and makeup tutorials. Influencers showcase Charlotte Tilbury products alongside several other brands as part of their makeup looks.
On TikTok, macro and mega-influencers dominated. The creators who generated the most EMV tend to have large audiences and high ERs.
The only micro-influencer in the top-30 is Kayla Henry (@kkayla.henryy, 12,000 followers, TikTok), who generated €1.4m in EMV through two posts which reached an incredible 3,004% ER with 735,960 engagements.
But again, this micro-influencer’s content went viral for critiquing the makeup industry. This time, the video highlighted rising makeup prices in the US.
It’s worth noting that critique in one post doesn’t mean an overall negative attitude. In another post, Henry showcases Charlotte Tilbury’s fragrance line positively. This suggests that consumers are frustrated by certain aspects of the beauty industry, but still enjoy the brands and products.
Charlotte Tilbury’s influence was built through standout campaigns that combine creativity, community, and business intelligence.
One of the brand’s most successful tactics is using hashtags to encourage users to share content.
Here’s how Charlotte Tilbury hashtags perform on Instagram:
This encourages influencers and everyday users to tag the brand’s hashtags in GRWMs, product reviews, and tutorials. This is known as unpaid user-generated content (UGC).
How does it work? If a product line, hashtag, or brand is popular, creators want to get in on the hype to share their perspective. This means more mentions and a bigger stake in the conversation.
One UGC poster is Barbie Markova (@barbie.markova, 5,920 followers, Instagram), who shared UGC tagging the brand. The reel, which gained 354,282 likes, shows the influencer sipping a drink while wearing makeup.
Affiliate marketing is a growing phenomenon. This tactic is popular in the mature UK market because it’s low-risk, low-cost, and practically guarantees a positive ROI.
How? It switches upfront fees for a safer pay-by-commission framework. Brands track which purchases came through influencers using unique discount codes or links. Scaling becomes easy, allowing the brand to dominate conversations without breaking the bank.
Like many beauty and fashion brands, Charlotte Tilbury runs a global affiliate program, offering the following incentives:
These benefits encourage genuine fans to apply. They become part of the club, getting early access to launches and becoming part of the community.
Alia.sam (@alia.sam0, 10,200 followers, TikTok) is an affiliate marketer for the makeup brand. In the post description, she links her unique discount code “aliasFA0SE”. The post is an unboxing. Perfectly manicured nails and hands framed by lace sleeves complement that ultra-feminine Pillow Talk packaging. The video is faceless, and the viewer feels like they are opening the product themselves.
Diana.manmua (@diana.manmua, 2256 followers, TikTok) follows suit. If we’re honest, looking at their hands and styling, these influencers could be the same person. But that’s the advantage of faceless affiliate content. The brand sets the standard. This creates a streamlined marketing campaign in which every video strengthens the brand narrative and image.
In the description, the influencer adds her unique Mother’s Day discount code.
Charlotte Tilbury’s success shows how personality and strong branding also win on social media. Developing products with packaging that’s so luxurious that people immediately want to share the experience helps you dominate conversations. It’s about creating a great experience and a successful product.
For Tilbury, macro-influencers and celebrities are the top performers. However, content generated by its affiliate program encourages more posting, sharing, and tagging, which helps the brand dominate the online conversation.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
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