1. Anastasia Beverly Hills – $47,641,211

2. Urban Decay – $37,219,733
3. Benefit – $35,117,487
4. MAC – $30,501,661
5. Tarte – $28,543,119

6. NYX – $26,102,511
7. ColourPop – $23,283,298

10. Morphe – $22,276,638

Tribe Dynamics shared the top color cosmetics brands on social media for the month of May, revealing their Earned Media Value (EMV), a prescribed metric that quantifies the estimated value of publicity gained through digital earned media and its respective engagement levels. Tribe’s holistic approach assigns a specific dollar value to each piece of content, based on the publishing channel’s perceived value of digital word-of-mouth to brands within the industry. EMV serves as a tool for benchmarking across marketing activities and across brands. Here, some key learnings from two brands to place on May’s leaderboard, ColourPop and Tarte.

ColourPop Runs Campaign With Certain “Jenn Ne Sais Quoi”

One of May’s standout influencer campaigns came from ColourPop’s collaboration with Jenn Im (Instagram’s imjennim and YouTube’s clothesencounters). After a long period of working together, the brand and influencer unveiled the #jennnesaisquoi campaign to promote their partnership on the Jenn Ne Sais Quad eyeshadow quad and two lipstick shades, “Dohee” and “Jenneration X.”

Following an initial announcement of the collaboration on May 5, Jenn made sure to promote her product early and often. Her enthusiasm largely took the form of Instagram posts, where she continually sported the “Dohee” lip color from the collection, her personal favorite. Whether getting a new haircut in New York or showing off a headband she had picked up in Seoul, Jenn seamlessly integrated the lip shade into her glamorous, jetsetting lifestyle. After a full month of hype, the #jennnesaisquoi campaign earned $2.2M EMV in May, with $1.3M of this total coming from Jenn’s own posts.

The campaign’s single highest EMV-driving post was, appropriately enough, Jenn’s “Jenn Ne Sais Quoi” Makeup Tutorial on YouTube. In addition to the Jenn Ne Sais Quad, the influencer used ColourPop’s Brow Pencil, the Jenneration X matte lipstick, “Dohee” lip pencil, and “Dohee” liquid lipstick to help build one of her characteristically soft, glowy looks. Acknowledging her preference for the latter product, Jenn noted that “Dohee” has been “my favorite coral shade, I’ve been rocking it everywhere…I love this formula because it seriously does not smudge, and I think it’s beautiful on any skin tone.” The influencer also made it clear that the collaboration was a deeply personal endeavor, and not merely transactional. Explaining the origins of “Dohee,” Jenn shared that, “Dohee is my Korean name. I just thought it’d make sense to name my signature color with the name I was brought up with.” She concluded the video with heartfelt thanks to ColourPop for collaborating with her, and to her loyal fans for making the project possible.

Tarte Listens to Followers with Grav3yardgirl Collaboration

Tarte partnered with one-of-a-kind YouTube sensation Bunny Meyer (grav3yardgirl) to release the ultimate product collaboration: Swamp Queen, a palette containing blush, bronzer, highlighter, and nine shades of eyeshadow, and two aptly named limited-edition Lip Paint shades, “Swamp Family” and “Texas Toast.” The Swamp Queen Palette was launched with great fanfare from Bunny, her followers and fellow influencers, with the Swamp Queen herself driving $735.1K EMV. The collaboration represented not only the culmination of Tarte and Bunny’s long-term friendship—in 2015, the brand had touted Bunny as the inspiration for its peachy—cream “Free Spirit” eyeshadow shade—but the ultimate validation of the deeply genuine relationship between Bunny and her millions of followers. In May, the influencer released an emotional 49-minute video introducing the palette to her 7.1M subscribers (who have gleefully adopted the moniker “swamp family”). Bunny spent the video’s first eight minutes effusively thanking her followers, emphasizing how pivotal her followers were to each step of the collection’s journey, and shouting out individual followers who had catalyzed the collaboration.

In the video, Bunny explained how over a year ago, two dedicated fans had posted Tarte’s corporate addresses and phone numbers in an Instagram post, urging the rest of the community to contact the brand and ask for a Bunny x Tarte collaboration. Swamp family members then wrote letters to the Tarte headquarters, jammed the phone line and proliferated the hashtag #bunnypalette online, clamoring for a Bunny collaboration. A visibly emotional Bunny pointed to her fans as evidence that a community working together “can make anything happen.” She called their passion “overwhelmingly amazing” and repeatedly referred to Swamp Queen as “our palette,” a three-way collaboration. True to Bunny’s words, “our palette” closely channels the aesthetic preferences of both the swamp family and its Queen. The palette’s faux-wood exterior and antique font appeals to Bunny’s fascination with the “Wild, Wild West,” and the alligator printed on the palette lid represents the “swamp family crest.” In selecting shade names, such as “Mancat” (the name of Bunny’s cat), “#sfs” (“Swamp Family Strong”), and “Does this thing really work?” (an homage to her TV product review videos), Bunny drew explicitly from the suggestions of her followers. In her video, she repeatedly stressed that the color selection, heavy in neutral and warm shades, was based on her followers’ endless requests for “wearable” makeup looks.

Indeed, follower responses to Bunny’s video and the Swamp Queen collaboration underscored the authentic, supportive nature of the relationships between the influencer, brand, and everyday users. Subscriber ConcreteRoseK commented that the video had made her “teary-eyed” because she was “so happy for Bunny,” while Lacey Noel said that the Swamp Queen collaboration made her “fall in love with makeup again.” Above all, Tarte’s most notable partnership yet gave Bunny and her millions of fans a deeply meaningful way to interact and connect over the years to come, keeping their “Swamp Family Strong.”

For all Tribe reports, click here.

Hear more social media insights from Tribe Dynamics’s Co-founder and President Conor Begleyon October 13th, where he will discuss the importance of direct relationships between brands, influencers and consumers at CEW’s Beauty Insider Series, Turning Social Media into Sales. Learn more.