Introducing The Shopfluence Creator Index: UK Skincare

Every brand knows roughly how much they spent on creators last month. Almost none knows how it compares to the twenty brands sitting either side of it – or how much of their creator conversation is sponsored or organic.

That’s the gap we built the Creator Index to close, starting with our first UK skincare influencer marketing report.

Starting this month, Shopfluence is publishing a monthly, sector-by-sector ranking of which UK brands are working hardest with creators on Instagram, and which ones are earning attention. Our first edition covers skincare. 

The Top 10 Skincare Brands

Here’s a first look at the Creator Index: the 10 brands currently leading the table, ranked by sponsored creator mentions in August.

But this is only the preview.

The full report goes beyond the top of the table to show you the complete 58-brand index, where every brand sits, how much of its creator conversation is sponsored versus organic, and which competitors are gaining attention without necessarily spending more.

The table below gives you a snapshot. Download the full report to see the complete picture – and find out where your brand really stands.

 

CREATOR INDEX / AUGUST 2026

#	BRAND	SPONSORED	TOTAL	ORGANIC %
01	Tropic	199	269	26%
02	Garnier	119	178	33%
03	No7	105	116	10%
04	CeraVe	101	155	35%
05	Kiehl’s	66	89	26%
06	Simple	56	63	11%
07	Vaseline	45	57	21%
08	Medicube	37	117	68%
09	COSRX	36	57	37%
10	Liz Earle	35	39	10%
11	Anua	33	75	56%
12	Beauty of Joseon	30	64	53%
13	MEDIHEAL	28	40	30%
14	Haruharu Wonder	26	43	40%
15	Rhode	25	136	82%
16	ELEMIS	24	46	48%
17	La Roche-Posay	21	42	50%
18	ABIB	21	33	36%
19	The Inkey List	19	33	42%
20	Templespa	18	43	58%

Five questions the report answers that your own reporting cannot

 

1. 1. Where are you in the full fifty? Twenty brands are published above. Thirty are not, and most of the interesting movement in this sector sits below the line.

1. 1. Is your presence real, or is it rented? The sector runs at 46% organic. If yours is under 25%, your visibility exists only while a campaign is running. The report ranks every brand on organic mentions earned per sponsored one, which is the single number that separates the two.

1. 1. Who is winning your category without you noticing? Eleven Korean brands, broken out individually, with the activity gap against the established Western brands they are quietly outworking.

1. 1. Why do clinical brands get talked about for free? Twelve professional and clinic led brands, on their own terms, running at 74% organic on 6% of the sponsored activity. There is a repeatable model in there and almost nobody has copied it.

1. 1. What is actually being counted? Full methodology, so you can challenge any number in it.

What the Index actually measures

Most influencer benchmarking tells you about spend, reach or follower counts – numbers brands report about themselves, on their own terms. Our Creator Index measures how often a brand actually shows up in creator content, and whether that content was arranged or unprompted.

Every mention we track falls into one of two buckets:

Sponsored – The creator has flagged a commercial relationship with the brand. That can be a paid partnership, an affiliate arrangement or product gifted under an agreement, which the platform does not separate. What it always means is that brand and creator were working together on purpose.

Organic – Mentions with no commercial flag. Not part of the rank, but shown for every brand, because thirty sponsored mentions alongside a hundred organic ones is a very different position to thirty alongside none.

The distinction matters because it’s the only honest way to answer the question every brand actually wants answered: are people talking about us because we paid them to, or because they wanted to?

Each edition is scoped to one sector, in one country, over one calendar month – UK-based creators, UK-relevant brands, thirty days of public activity. We rebuild it from zero every time, so nothing about the ranking is inherited from the month before.

How we’re pulling the data

The Index is built from public Instagram activity, not survey data or brand-submitted figures:

 

1. 1. Daily capture. We monitor public posts from UK-based creators, including Stories, which we capture before they expire at 24 hours.

1. 1. Brand attribution. Every post is matched to a brand through tagging, mention and caption analysis. Where a brand runs multiple handles, we combine the activity and attribute it to the primary brand.

1. 1. Classification. Each mention is sorted into sponsored or organic based on whether the creator disclosed a commercial relationship.

1. 1. Ranking. Brands are ordered by sponsored mention volume for the month. Where two brands are level, total mentions (sponsored plus organic) break the tie.

The skincare edition: what August told us

58 skincare brands recorded sponsored creator activity in the UK in August – a smaller commercial market than most people in the category assume.

A few things stood out once the table was built.

1. Skincare earns nearly half its own attention. 

46% of all skincare mentions carried no sponsored flag at all. That’s a far higher organic share than beauty tends to run at as a whole, which says something about how the category is actually discussed versus how it’s marketed.

2. The competitive set is smaller than you assume 

Only 58 skincare brands ran any sponsored creator activity in the UK in August. Knowing every one of them is realistic.

3. Eleven Korean brands, and roughly a fifth of the whole market.

Eleven Korean brands together account for 18% of all sponsored mentions in the index. A larger share than any single heritage skincare group. No individual Korean brand cracks the top nine, but as a group they’re running at roughly 51% organic, almost exactly the category average: buying reach and earning it in equal measure.

4. The least active brands are talked about most. 

Twelve clinical and professional brands take 6% of the sponsored creator activity in the index and run at 74% organic, because their creators are practitioners posting their own client results.

5. Rhode is the most talked-about skincare brand in the UK. 

111 organic mentions against 25 sponsored – more than four organic mentions for every one sponsored. At the other end, Nu Skin recorded sixteen sponsored mentions and zero organic.

The report goes further: the full top ten with sponsored/organic splits, the complete ranked table of 58 brands, the Korean brands broken out brand by brand, and the clinical and professional segment on its own terms.

A summary gives you the headline numbers. It cannot tell you where you sit, and that is the part that changes what you do on Monday.

The Shopfluence Creator Index is published monthly, one sector at a time. Want to see where your brand ranks against your competitors? Get in touch at matt@dyzio.co.