Thesis
The skincare advice you read online is, structurally, advertising. Affiliate links are everywhere, undisclosed brand partnerships are the norm, and the algorithm rewards the recommendation, not the truth. The result is a system where the most-circulated skincare advice is the most monetizable, which is rarely the most useful. We write to that fact, not around it.
A friend who runs a small dermatology clinic in Brooklyn told me last winter that she now spends part of every patient consultation undoing the previous month’s TikTok routine. She didn’t used to. She does now. The patients come in with elaborate stacks recommended by people they trust online, and her job has become, partly, gentle deprogramming. She is not the only dermatologist saying this.
How the economy actually works
An influencer with a few hundred thousand followers can earn between two and twenty thousand dollars per sponsored skincare post, depending on the brand and the engagement profile. Affiliate links pay out between five and fifteen percent of the sale. Some of the largest skincare creators make more from a single Amazon affiliate quarter than most of us make in a year. None of this is hidden, exactly. The disclosure layer is usually a small “#ad” or an affiliate badge under the bio. The economic incentive is structural.
The mechanism that bothers me is not that influencers earn money. It’s that the products that pay the highest affiliate rates are the ones most aggressively promoted, and those tend to be the newer launches with the biggest marketing budgets, which are also the products with the least long-term data behind them. The economic gradient and the evidence gradient run in opposite directions.
What the distortion looks like in practice
The same five products get recommended every week for six months, then disappear when the affiliate program changes. A new launch from a brand with a big affiliate budget gets dozens of “holy grail” mentions in its first month, before anyone could possibly have used it long enough to know.
The boring products — the established cleansers, the well-formulated drugstore moisturizers, the unsexy mineral SPFs that dermatologists actually recommend — go uncovered because their affiliate margins are too thin. The $30-a-month routine piece is one of our most-read articles, and almost none of the products in it pay meaningful affiliate. That gap explains a lot of the current shape of online skincare advice.
The contrarian position: even well-meaning creators are part of the problem
I want to be careful with this section. Most skincare creators are not cynical. Most of them genuinely like the products they recommend. The structural problem is not individual bad faith. It’s that the system selects for certain content shapes regardless of individual intentions.
If you only earn money when someone clicks and buys, you will gradually emphasize the products that get clicked and bought. If your engagement is highest on “holy grail” videos, you will make more of those. If long-form skeptical content underperforms, you will make less of it. None of this requires anyone to be dishonest. The algorithm and the affiliate program quietly co-author your editorial calendar over time, and the more successful you become, the louder their vote.
I include myself in this. We sell skincare. I have an obvious interest in our products being recommended. The founder note walks through how we try to handle that tension. The honest answer is that I don’t fully trust myself either, and the only protection is to write pieces that point readers away from us when something else genuinely serves them better.
What we try to do differently
We don’t run affiliate links on third-party products. The Journal recommends other brands’ products fairly often, and never with an affiliate tag, because the moment we added one, the gradient I described would start operating on us too.
We don’t run sponsored content. We have been offered six-figure deals to integrate sponsored placements into our weekly newsletter. We have said no every time. The newsletter exists to be readable, not monetized.
We publish pieces that hurt our own sales. The skinimalism manifesto tells readers to use fewer products. That advice, taken seriously, lowers our average order value. We accept that. It is the only version of an editorial position we can defend.
The numbers worth knowing
A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology by Park and colleagues analyzed 1,876 skincare-related posts from the top 200 beauty influencers over six months. 81 percent of posts contained at least one product recommendation. Only 24 percent disclosed any commercial relationship to the recommended product. Of the recommendations made, dermatology review found that 49 percent contradicted at least one major dermatology guideline, and 17 percent recommended practices considered potentially harmful for the stated skin concern. These numbers have not improved in the years since.
FAQ
Are all influencers like this? No. Some are excellent and disciplined. The structural problem is that the system rewards the others.
How do I find good sources online? Board-certified dermatologists with their own practices, peer-reviewed literature, and a small number of long-form publications. The bar is higher than the average follower count implies.
Does Elelaf use influencers? Occasionally for product seeding, never on a paid-commission basis. The difference matters to us.
What about your own newsletter recommendations? We recommend our products, transparently, in product-focused emails. The Journal stays editorial.
Where should I read instead? The slow skincare manifesto and the dermatology references it cites are a useful starting point.
Where can I see more like this? The skincare myths tag collects the related pieces.
Sources
Park JH et al. Disclosure and accuracy of beauty influencer recommendations: a content analysis. JAAD.org/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>Journal of the AAD.org/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>American Academy of Dermatology, 2022. Federal Trade Commission, endorsement guides for influencer marketing, 2023. American Academy of Dermatology, position on social media misinformation, 2024.