Most Impactful Fashion & Beauty Influencers in 2022

In this article, we will explore the most impactful Influencers of 2022 and how their high-quality content, authenticity, and loyal followings can benefit beauty and fashion brands, as well as boost performance and Media Impact Value™ (MIV®) in 2022.

Throughout the past few years social media has grown more central when it comes to brand strategy and marketing, and a large portion of brands have started to shift their marketing focus on social media. This is due to the many advantages social media provides for brands, including the possibility to connect with their audience more and increase visibility. However, it is important to know how to use these social channels to make the most out of this approach and perhaps the most effective way to do so is through influencers. Influencers are incredibly useful when it comes to fast tracking a brand's success and visibility on social media and growing organic audiences and they do this by acting as a bridge between the brand and potential customers. Working with Influencers is a great way to draw attention to the brand and it also provides trust in the products if customers are referred to the brand by someone they have built a preexisting relationship of trust with. This is what influencers bring to the table. During a period when trust and authenticity are in such high demand, having the right brand partner that your customers can trust is crucial. Below we have listed some of this year’s best-performing influencers that are driving the fashion and beauty industry and demonstrating first hand the power of influencers today.

Huda Kattan

Huda Kattan is an American beauty blogger, makeup artist and entrepreneur with her own cosmetics line Huda Beauty. Huda first launched her blog in 2010 and ever since she has exploded in popularity and is now one of the most recognized voices in the beauty industry with 2.6M followers on Instagram and impressive 4.14M subscribers on YouTube. In 2013, Huda started Huda Beauty, a cosmetics line that has achieved great success and was even named the top beauty brand in 2021. Showing no signs of slowing down this star influencer is actively creating new content and she generated a total of $50.1M in MIV® in 2022 alone.

Chiara Ferragni

Chiara Ferragni is known as one of the most powerful fashion influencers in the fashion and beauty sector. After starting her blog in 2009, Chiara quickly gathered attention and started broadening her reach as a digital entrepreneur. Today, Chiara has over 28M followers on Instagram, and 5.9M followers on TikTok, a series streaming on Amazon Prime and multiple industry honors including being listed in the Forbes 30 under 30 rankings in 2015. This year Chiara gathered $43.8M in MIV® with an Instagram post from the New York Fashion Week ranking as her top placement. The post features her wearing MiuMiu’s abstastic cropped fashion uniform that went viral earlier this year and Chiara’s post certainly leveraged this, generating $845K in MIV® from a single post. Chiara also has her own brand where she sells everything from clothes and beauty to stationery and earlier this year she collaborated with Pigna to produce a collection of back to school stationery products. She is also a brand ambassador for several high profile brands including BVLGARI’S and Hublot Global.

Leonie Hanne

Leonie Hanne is a fashion influencer and industry leader with 4.5M followers on Instagram and 1.6M followers on TikTok, where she actively posts fashion focused content. Starting out as a former Strategy Consultant, Leonie is very familiar with the world of luxury fashion and over the years she has worked with brands such as Dior, Fendi and Tommy Hilfiger who she fosters partnerships with. Leonie has also been featured in global campaigns for Louis Vuitton and La Mer and earlier this year Leonie Hanne teamed up with Liu Jo to create a capsule collection that featured shoes and accessories. In 2022, Leonie generated a total MIV® of $32.2M and her top placement from this year is an Instagram reel from the Paris Fashion Week. The reel is from the Coperni show, immortalizing the viral moment of the spray on dress, generating $426K in MIV®.

Lena Mahfouf

Lena Mahfouf is a French YouTuber and fashion blogger who initially started her career in YouTube in 2013. Today, Lena has grown into a massively popular influencer with 2.44M subscribers on YouTube and 3.9M followers on Instagram, establishing herself among the influencer elite. Having worked tirelessly all year on new ventures while keeping up with posting quality content on her social media channels, Lena gathered a total MIV® of $30.9M this year. Amongst all of her content, her top placement was an Instagram carousel done in collaboration with the French high-end accessories e-commerce site Monnier Freres and generated an impressive $999K in MIV®.

Jeremy Fragrance

Jeremy Fragrance is a relatively new face in the influencer scene as he gained a notable boost in recognition during the past year on social media, and is now considered to be the leading fragrance influencer with 1.1M subscribers on his main YouTube channel. Jeremy also has 1.9M followers on TikTok and 283K followers on Instagram where he produces content about the world of fragrances. This includes reviewing and commenting on different fragrances. Incidentally, his top placement is a TikTok video where he attempts to figure out which one smells better by comparing the “best fragrance” with the best top note to what he considers to be the “best smelling thing that exists” - Nutella. The placement declaring Paco Rabanne’s 1 Million perfume victory over Nutella gathered $496K in MIV® and overall his content has seemed to gather an audience as he generated a total MIV® of $26.5M during the past year.

Mariale Marrero

Mariale Marrero is a YouTuber and a beauty influencer who started her influencer journey after moving to America from Venezuela several years ago. Her profound passion for the beauty industry gathered her a loyal audience of over 20M followers across her social media channels. Throughout her career, Mariale has collaborated with several notable beauty brands including L’Oréal and Too Faced. Mariale recently collaborated with the makeup brand ColorPop to create a collection. She also has a long-standing partnership with a beauty brand Murad Skincare, whom she actively promotes on her social media, including in one of her Instagram posts that ranked as her top placement of this year. In the picture she is sporting a green look from head to nails and in the caption she lists all the products she used to achieve this look, including Murad Skincare retinol youth eye serum. The post generated $602K in MIV® and her total MIV® this year came to $10.2M.

Karen Bachini

Karen Bachini is a Brazilian blogger and influencer who gained popularity with her eponymous YouTube channel. Karen started out with posting travel content but over the years her content has become focused on beauty content and she is currently in the process of developing her own beauty brand that is set to launch on 12.12.2022. She also has collaborated with other beauty brands and was featured in Beatriz Werebe’s campaign to help spread a message about breast cancer awareness. With 2.65M subscribers on YouTube and 1.1M followers on Instagram, Karen is one of the more recognizable beauty influencers today. This year Karen generated a total MIV® of $8.3M, with her top performing placement being a YouTube video where she tested products from Ariana Grande’s makeup line. The video was almost an hour long and generated $138K in MIV®.

Sanaa El Mahalli

Sanaa El Mahalli is a French YouTuber and an influencer who specializes in fashion, beauty and lifestyle consulting. Sanaa has been in the industry for awhile, gradually growing her audience since 2010 when she first joined YouTube and now having an incredible 3.02M subscribers on YouTube and 2.7M followers on Instagram. She has worked with several large scale beauty and luxury brands including Yves Saint Laurent and L’Oréal and managed to gather a total of $8.3M in MIV® in 2022. Her top placement this year came from her YouTube channel from a video titled “Goodbye Otrera Beauty”. In the video she explains the decision behind closing her beauty brand and this placement managed to generate up to $228K in MIV®.

Bailey Sarian

Bailey Sarian is a beauty influencer and podcaster known best for her video series “Murder, Mystery & Makeup” on her YouTube channel and podcast “Dark History”. This professional makeup artist and true crime connoisseur combined two of her interests True Crime & Makeup into one successful brand. This mix of genres proved very successful and Bailey has gathered a massive following of 6.66M subscribers on YouTube and 2.9M followers on Instagram. After taking a short break from posting videos this year Bailey still was able to generate a total MIV® of $5.5M and her top placement was a Mystery&Makeup video she posted returning after the aforementioned break. Like expected the community was happy to see her back and the video earned $93K in MIV®.

Allie Glines

Allie Glines is a self taught makeup artist from Utah who started her career from YouTube where she created her channel as a place where people could come together to celebrate their love for makeup. This community forward approached appealed well to the public and now Allie has 810K subscribers on YouTube and a growing 201K followers on her Instagram where she posts beauty focused content. As of lately, Allie has started to incorporate lifestyle related content onto her channel after announcing her pregnancy and incidentally her top performing video is a video titled “The moment we found out I’m pregnant”, generating $93K in MIV®. Whether we get to see more family related content from her in the future remains to be seen as this rising influencer continues to make her mark in media visibility, earning a total of $4.6M in MIV® this year alone.