The reason is trust. Industry research puts the number at somewhere around 85% of people wanting to see a product actually used by a real person before they’ll trust it enough to buy – and UGC-style content consistently outperforms polished brand ads on click-through and conversion.
On a platform built on “for you,” a glossy studio shoot doesn’t stand a chance against someone’s actual bathroom mirror.
We see the effect of this directly running Goldwell’s organic and paid TikTok content. The account itself sits at a modest follower count – but that’s almost the point. Individual videos regularly reach far beyond it: routinely tens of thousands of views, several breaking past 100,000, one recent post past 290,000. None of that comes from follower count. It comes from real people, real routines, real product – the kind of content that gets saved, sent to a friend, and acted on, not just scrolled past.
Getting there consistently is the actual skill. Beauty gifting lives or dies on matching the right creator to the right product — a colourist showing a genuine transformation lands completely differently to a general lifestyle creator holding up a bottle, even though both technically “posted about the brand.”
“Real people, real routines, real product – the kind of content that gets saved, sent to a friend, and acted on, not just scrolled past.”
We shoot and edit a good chunk of this content ourselves, in-house, which means quality stays consistent even when volume needs to scale – something the wider industry is increasingly leaning on, as beauty brands are expected to produce more content, faster, across more products and audiences, without a proportional jump in cost.
The commercial case has caught up too. Beauty and personal care now sits as one of TikTok Shop’s very biggest categories, and the brands winning aren’t the ones chasing a single viral moment – they’re the ones building a steady, always-on drumbeat of creator content that quietly closes the gap between someone seeing a product and deciding to buy it. Gifting is where that content pipeline starts.
If you’re a beauty or personal care brand thinking about scaling creator content properly, get in touch – we’d love to talk you through how we’d approach it.