How to Find Beauty Influencers with Real Followers, Not Just Big Numbers

You’ve probably worked with an influencer where a post got a good number of likes and comments, but sales stay the same. In such cases, the numbers have likely been inflated by fake, inactive, or low-quality accounts.

The best way to avoid this is to check engagement rate, comment quality, and audience demographics before you reach out to an influencer. But if you’re trying to build a complete list of 10-15 influencers, doing that manually for every candidate can take hours. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to find beauty influencers with real followers and how a tool like Aria can speed up the process.

You’ve probably worked with an influencer where a post got a good number of likes and comments, but sales stay the same. In such cases, the numbers have likely been inflated by fake, inactive, or low-quality accounts.

The best way to avoid this is to check engagement rate, comment quality, and audience demographics before you reach out to an influencer. But if you’re trying to build a complete list of 10-15 influencers, doing that manually for every candidate can take hours. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to find beauty influencers with real followers and how a tool like Aria can speed up the process.

Find Beauty Influencers with Real Followers Easily With Aria

You can find beauty influencers manually by exploring hashtags, checking the Instagram/TikTok explore page, and even googling influencers in your niche. The problem is, this can take a long time, especially when you’re going profile to profile trying to find the right creators.

There is an easier way to find beauty influencers at scale using Aria, our AI-powered influencer discovery tool that acts like an aggregator for influencers. It is designed to be straightforward and easy to use for anyone looking for a specific look, niche, or aesthetic in an influencer. 

Here’s how you can use Aria to speed up your influencer search:

1. Launch the Aria Influencer Search Platform

You can sign up for free today to gain access to Aria and start searching for influencers. Once you’ve entered your email address, you’ll receive a confirmation that you’re on the list. 

2. Describe Your Ideal Influencer Profile

In the search bar, you can write what kind of influencer you’re looking for. Be as specific as you like, for example: “blonde influencer specialising in skincare with a focus on acne-prone routines”: 

Aria will source thousands of influencer profiles matching this description:

For example, there are a total of 3,960 influencers matching the description of a blonde beauty influencer speaking about acne issues. You can immediately see the follower count and average engagement rate, as well as the type of influencer – nano, micro, macro, or mega influencers. 

You can also list through the matched posts that are specific to what you’re looking for, which, in this case, is tips and routines for acne-prone skin. In this example, that’s an AI influencer search for the beauty niche, though the same search works no matter what industry you type in.

3. Sort Your Results and Find Similar Creators

Once Aria returns your matches, you can sort them by relevance, follower count, or engagement rate to filter the best ones. You can run an even deeper search using the “Similar Creators” option on their profile to pull up more accounts with a similar audience and content style:

How to Spot Fake Followers on an Influencer’s Profile

When looking at an influencer’s profile, the number of followers can make it seem like they get a lot of attention. However, once you know what to check, it’s usually pretty easy to tell which influencers are faking their numbers:

Follower count can look impressive at first glance, but it tells you far less about an influencer’s real impact than it once did. As the creator economy has matured, brands have moved beyond vanity metrics and instead focus on whether an audience recognizes and trusts the creator, whether their content earns genuine attention, and whether there’s a natural fit between the creator, their community, and the brand.

1. Check the Engagement Rate

A large follower count does not always equal good engagement. One tell-tale sign of fake followers is when an influencer seemingly has a lot of followers, but very low overall engagement (low number of likes, very few comments, etc.). If the audience is real and active, metrics such as engagement rates should generally make sense for the size of the following.

2. Look at Comment Quality

A high number of comments isn’t the same as a high number of meaningful comments. You can spot real engagement through comments like someone asking where to buy a product, mentioning their own skin type, or reacting to something specific in the post. 

When the comments are fake, there will usually be a lot of them from profiles with no pictures or usernames made up of a string of numbers/letters. The comments will also mostly be one-word replies or include direct CTAs to the product being advertised in the post.

3. Watch for Sudden Follower Spikes

Profiles that gain a lot of followers overnight have either done something to mass-generate engagement (such as going viral) or have simply purchased their followers. You can verify this by quickly scrolling through their follower list: do you see a lot of random profiles, or do they look legitimate and fit the target audience of the influencer?

Why Fake Followers Are So Common in Beauty

Beauty is one of the most competitive influencer niches, which means there’s a lot of incentive to grow an audience and “appear” established. And buying fake followers is the easiest way to make one’s profile look impressive to brands.

Not to mention that the gifting and seeding culture makes this even worse. Some brands send products to thousands of small creators, so there’s a sea of influencers trying to turn free products into paid collaborations. 

So, yes – a bigger follower count can definitely make an influencer look good at first glance just because not everyone thinks to look at what’s behind the number.

There are also just a lot of beauty influencers to choose from. With so many nano and micro influencer accounts competing for the same opportunities, it’s easy to fake followers.

None of this means you should avoid beauty influencers. It just means you need to look beyond the follower count before deciding who to partner with.

Why Checking Influencers One-By-One Doesn’t Work for Campaigns

Searching for creators by hand only works if you’re doing a quick check of a small number of influencers. But let’s say you’re launching a product campaign, and you need 10-15 beauty influencers to market your product.

Before even narrowing them down, you need to go through hundreds, if not thousands of profiles so see which ones are a good fit. This adds up to hours of work before you send even a single outreach message. Not to mention that cutting corners to save time is exactly how brands end up working with influencers with fake followers. Instead, you need to focus on optimising this process as much as possible.

Quick Checklist to Vet Beauty Influencers

And even if the followers are real, running a full audience credibility check on the influencer still means looking at a few more things before investing your money:

• Engagement rate in line with what’s typical for their follower tier
• Comment quality – look for specific, on-topic reactions rather than generic phrases or bot-like replies
• Follower growth pattern – ensure the followers happened steady over time and not overnight
• Audience location and demographics matching your target market
• Disclosure history – consistent, clear labeling of past sponsored content
• A quick manual spot-check of recent posts and comments as a final filter.

Finding Influencers Doesn’t Have to Take Hours

Finding beauty influencers with real followers takes time, especially when you’re searching across multiple platforms. 

Working with an agency can help you take care of this tedious process. At Socially Powerful, our influencer marketing services completely automate the process, from finding the right creators to developing and managing full campaigns.

Sign up with Aria, describe the influencer you’re looking for and get back a shortlist of matching, real profiles instead of working through hundreds one at a time.

Ready to find the right beauty influencers? Discover creators with Aria →  

FAQs

Who is the most followed beauty influencer? 

Kylie Jenner is consistently cited as the most-followed creator in the beauty category, with an Instagram audience  over 380M. However, remember that the follower count alone doesn’t tell you whether that audience is engaged or a fit for your brand.

Who was the first ever documented beauty influencer?

Michelle Phan is widely credited as the first modern beauty influencer. She started posting makeup tutorials on YouTube in 2007 and eventually went viral with her 2009 ‘Barbie Transformation’ video.

Is there a free tool to find influencers? 

Yes, Aria is completely free to start. Sign up with your email and begin searching by description right away, without manually vetting hundreds of profiles first.

How do you check if an influencer’s followers are real?

You can usually tell if an influencer’s followers are real just by how people interact with their posts and whether their following has stayed fairly consistent over time.

What’s the difference between engagement rate and reach? 

Reach is how many people saw a post, and engagement rate is what share of them interacted with it (via a like, follow, comment, etc). If you come across a post with a very high reach but low engagement, they might be buying followers.

What’s a good engagement rate for a beauty influencer? 

It depends on the number of followers. Nano and micro accounts typically have higher engagement rates than mega influencers, so the best thing to do is to compare creators against others their size. This is a good baseline to go off of:

• Nano creators (1K-10K followers) average 4-8%
• Micro creators (10K-100K) average 2-4%
• Macro or mega creators average 2%