The Creator-First Skincare Sensation That's Owning the Moment (HBBIP # 140)

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Today I’m going to tell you about one of the craziest brand growth stories I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some pretty crazy ones.

How might I begin to quantify this craziness?

How about this: back in 2020, this brand was mentioned in 700 posts from 142 creators—pretty modest numbers, but we all have to start somewhere. Cut to 2025, and this brand was tagged in 102.5k posts from 23.9k creators. Now if you go on their website, you’ll see Kendall Jenner staring back at you.

Imagine being one of those initial 142 creators. Bragging rights for life. But imagine being the brand itself, and so rapidly undergoing such a dramatic change. Such is the power of creator marketing: from relative obscurity to global ubiquity in six short years. Also, there might just be something to this whole ‘skincare’ thing.

Here’s how this mystery brand pulled off its meteoric rise, and what other brands can learn from its success:

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Anua

That’s right, it’s only one of the hottest brands in one of the hottest industries around. If you haven’t heard of Anua yet, you probably don’t get a lot of sun exposure under that rock, which is good news, but the brand surely still has something for you all the same.

What Is Anua?

Founded in 2019, making it one of the newer brands featured in this newsletter, Anua is a Korean skincare purveyor that’s well on its way to world domination. Anua is quite literally built for this: the brand was conceived in an incubator, focus group-tested for maximum appeal and market share.

Anua consolidated power for several years, largely thanks to a creator-first promotional strategy. As noted on the blog Arktastic, “Similar to Cosrx, Anua didn’t spend their money on traditional marketing and advertisement. Instead, they invested in influencers, online spaces and giving out free samples to get hype out there.”

Clearly, Anua did it the right way. The brand experienced a quantum leap in late 2022, when it entered the U.S. market via Amazon. Following expansions into Ulta in 2024 and further Amazon expansions across EMEA in 2025, Anua remains on the move. As previously mentioned, look no further than the recent unveiling of Anua’s first global brand ambassador, a certain ‘Kendall Jenner.’

It’s all a little surreal. Let’s put some more numbers behind it, to see just how unbelievable this growth really is.

How Is Anua Performing on Social Media?

I have seen some pretty spectacular social media growth in my time, and Anua (spoiler alert!) ranks right up there among the spectacularest.

Anua Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

Anua grew from 142 creators in 2020 to 23.9k creators in 2025, an extraordinary 168x increase over six years.

As we’ll see from other data points, Anua’s growth was relatively modest through 2022. Then, with market expansion in 2023 and beyond, the brand experienced a major inflection point. Anua’s creator count surged from just 329 creators in 2022 to more than 2k in 2023, then exploded again to 10.6k in 2024 and nearly 24k in 2025.

Anua Post Count, 2020 - 2025

With creator count accelerating, content volume followed. Anua’s number of mentions increased from just 700 creator posts in 2020 to 102.5k posts in 2025, good for a 146x improvement.

Interestingly, Anua’s post volume declined slightly in 2022, prior to the brand's breakout year in 2023. From that point onward, creator activity scaled at an exceptional pace, growing more than fourteen-fold between 2023 and 2025 alone.

Anua EMV, 2020 - 2025

Anua saw even more impressive growth when it came to Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that reflects a brand’s share of viral conversation on social media. Here, Anua’s totals rose from $665k in 2020 to $290.5M in 2025, a staggering 437x rise.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: 2023 marked a transformational year for Anua. Through 2022, the brand generated less than $2M EMV annually; in 2023, Anua surged to $23.8M. Its momentum only accelerated thereafter, reaching $135.4M in 2024 before more than doubling again in 2025.


                                                                                                       Anua Impressions, 2020 - 2025

We saw a similar, yet singularly dramatic, expansion for Anua's impressions, which surged 1,566x (you read that right) from 2.2M impressions in 2020 to 3.5B impressions in 2025. As with EMV, the acceleration began in earnest during 2023 and continued through 2024 and 2025, when impressions more than doubled year-over-year.

Anua Engagements, 2020 - 2025

Finally, Anua’s engagements climbed from 191k in 2020 to 135.6M in 2025, a 709x return.

This engagement growth closely followed impression growth, suggesting that Anua's expanding audience was actively interacting with content. The brand crossed the 10M threshold in 2023 before rocketing to nearly 70M in 2024, and then surpassed 135M in 2025.

Which Social Channels Were Key to Anua's Growth?

When you grow as much as Anua has, you’re usually seeing progress across all fronts.

Anua Share of Impressions by Platform, June 2025 - May 2026

In this case, from June 2025 to May 2026, TikTok generated approximately 50.6% of all impressions, narrowly outperforming Instagram at 46.0%, while YouTube contributed roughly 3.6%.

Unlike many skincare brands that rely overwhelmingly on a single platform, Anua has built massive reach across both TikTok and Instagram. The relatively even split suggests the brand has successfully diversified its audience strategy.

Anua Share of Engagements by Platform, June 2025 - May 2026

…At least until you get to engagements. Here, the picture is a little different: TikTok accounts for approximately 71.3% of all engagements, compared with 26.6% for Instagram and 2.0% for YouTube.

While Instagram contributes nearly as much reach as TikTok, TikTok drives a clear majority of audience interaction. This aligns with general trajectories for each platform: looking at YoY change, Instagram is leading in impressions growth, while TikTok is leading in engagements growth. Moving forward, Anua's growth will likely continue to be driven by a combination of these platforms.

Who Are Anua's Creators?

Across platforms, Anua presents a diverse, dynamic creator community. When you drill down into the specific creator archetypes who are driving growth, several trends emerge:

1. TikTok-First, Skincare-Focused

The scale of Anua's creator ecosystem is striking: from June 2025 to June 2026, more than 36.5k creators authored roughly 125k posts about the brand. TikTok is the undisputed engine behind this activity, accounting for 71% of the total EMV driven by Anua’s top 1k posts.

The brand’s community is dense with dedicated skincare creators. How do I know? It’s right there in the name. No points for guessing what the following creators are focused on: @mysistersskin (#3 overall, $2.6M, 140 posts), skinwithjen ($1.8M, 21 posts), skincarewithlola ($1.4M), glowforyourskins ($1.3M), addicted.to.skincare ($856k, 107 posts), skinby.zosia ($675k). All this skin talk on SkinTok signals that Anua's core audience is certified skincare-obsessed, and continuing to grow with the category’s underlying expansion.

2. Celebrity and Retail Amplification

Alongside organic breakouts within its creator community, with multiple impactful creators boasting quadruple-digit YoY EMV growth, the data contains two high-profile celebrity signals.

First, Cardi B appears with $314k in EMV across just two posts, contributing $203k via a single TikTok. Meanwhile, K-pop star Suzy generated $194k via a lone Instagram post. Neither celebrity had posted about Anua in the prior 12 months, suggesting that these were one-time or early-stage activations meant to spark brand awareness.

Even as Anua is scoring with some of the world’s biggest stars, it’s sliding into some of the world’s biggest markets. Simultaneously, Ulta Beauty ($776k, 54 posts, +3.4k% YoY) and sephora.romania ($1.3M, new entry, 43 posts) both emerged as top 20 contributors by EMV, affirming that Anua's retail distribution story is generating its own wave of creator content.

3. Geographic and Gender Diversity

Thanks to its international ethos, the geographic spread of Anua's top creators is broader than most Western beauty brands. Mariale Marrero, a Venezuelan-American powerhouse creator, is Anua’s No. 1 overall EMV-driver at $2.9M and 64 posts, a 461% YoY increase. Some of Anua’s most impactful posts came from creators like linpascalin (French/Portuguese-language creator), Dania Kobeissi (Lebanese creator), Nadina Ioana (Romanian creator). Meanwhile, Sephora accounts posting about Anua span Romania, France, Serbia, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Singapore, and Hong Kong. All of these retailer accounts were new or nearly-new entrants, reflecting a global retail rollout picking up creator volume in real time.

Additionally—and particularly exciting for me—male skincare creators are making a tangible impact amid Anua’s community. Skincare boys like lorenzodereinarz ($1.5M), emanuelboliveira ($1.2M), Phil Cowley ($1.1M), @karimgj2.0 ($969k), Rodrigo Andrade ($692k), Sean Anthony ($662k), and Daus Mendoza ($646k) all ranked among the brand’s top 100 creators by EMV. For a Korean skincare brand, having male creators authentically generating this level of earned media points to an exciting audience expansion for both Anua and the industry at large.

The Takeaway: Anua’s Success Was Built by Creators

With the growth it’s already experienced, Anua appears poised for even crazier success down the line. What’s most notable about this growth, as written in the Los Angeles Times, is how Anua achieved success with an influencer-first strategy, rather than a splashy celebrity endorsement:

“Brands like Anua built their American market share from the bottom up by leveraging TikTok virality, hyper-engaged Reddit skincare communities, and peer-to-peer word of mouth driven by visible results. The credibility was established first; the mainstream cultural moment was secured after.”

Even Jenner was an organic fan of the brand, with a pre-existing passion that laid the groundwork for an official collaboration.

Simply put, Anua is one of the most successful examples of creator marketing across all markets and verticals in recent memory. Consumers know it. Numbers prove it. And now, HBBIP confirms it.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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