Why Beauty Brands Overlook Male Influencers

How Often Beauty Brands Actually Hire Male Influencers

Source: MyWall Genie · 2,846 collabs · 2026-08-02 to 2026-10-31

The Men's Grooming category isn't a niche corner of the market: 131 brands ran 2,846 tracked collaborations with 1,621 creators in the last quarter alone. That's an active, competitive space — the question is who brands are actually hiring to fill it.

Engagement is strong, especially outside mega tier

Source: MyWall Genie · 2,846 collabs · 2026-08-02 to 2026-10-31

Nano creators post the highest median engagement rate in the category at 2.29%, and nano plus micro creators together account for 66.3% of all collabs. That mirrors the pattern across most of beauty: smaller, more specific audiences convert attention into likes and comments more reliably than reach alone does. Macro creators, who are often added mainly for scale, actually post the lowest median engagement rate in the tier breakdown.

Beauty overall isn't that different — which is the point

Makeup, run through the same three-month window, logged 5,580 collabs across 2,938 creators and 215 brands, with a median engagement rate of 1.52%. Men's Grooming's median of 1.67% is marginally higher, and the gap between the two categories' engagement is small, about 0.15 percentage points. Grooming also has 84 fewer active brands than Makeup in the same window. If engagement is comparable and the audience exists, the shortfall in Men's Grooming isn't a performance problem; it's a sourcing one. Fewer brands are actively building out this lane, so fewer male-specific creators get regular, repeat work, and the category's repeat rate (17.9%) trails Makeup's (20.7%).

Why Male Influencers Still Get Left Off the Beauty Shortlist

Legacy targeting habits

Most beauty media plans were built when skincare and makeup marketing assumed a female buyer and a female creator audience. Media planning templates, past campaign decks and agency rosters all still skew that way, so briefs get written for "beauty creators" when what's meant is "female beauty creators." Nobody re-examines the assumption because it has never been named.

The top posts in men's grooming are often won by women, not men

Look closely at who actually appears in the highest-viewed Men's Grooming posts from the same dataset: alongside male creators, several of the top-viewed collaborations in this category went to female and celebrity creators promoting grooming or personal-care brands to a general audience, not a specifically male one. Among the twelve most-viewed posts in the sample, roughly a third carried a male creator; the rest were fronted by women, often with far lower engagement rates on the same brand category. That's a strong signal that reach-first booking (celebrity, mega-follower, broad-audience) crowds out the smaller male creators who'd likely convert better with a grooming-specific audience.

Fewer creators are categorised and searchable as "male beauty"

Search and discovery tools, including creator databases, are often built around subniches like skincare, makeup and haircare that were populated by female creators first. Male creators talking about the same products frequently get tagged under "lifestyle," "fashion" or "fitness" instead of grooming or skincare, so a beauty-specific search misses them even when they're active and relevant. A brand team searching only inside "beauty" filters will structurally undercount the available male talent pool.

Risk-aversion in a category with less precedent

Because fewer large grooming-specific campaigns exist as case studies, brand and agency teams have less internal precedent to point to when proposing a male creator for a product typically marketed to women a men's serum, a tinted moisturiser, a grooming kit framed as "self-care." Without a visible playbook, teams default to what has worked before, even when the audience for the product has shifted. Case studies of brands that did break from the usual script, like the D2C brands that scaled with influencer marketing, show that testing an unconventional creator mix is often what produces the breakout campaign.

Real Campaigns That Show the Upside

A handful of posts in the current dataset illustrate what strong male-creator fit looks like in practice. Philips India's grooming-tool collaboration with a mega creator and Beardo's partnership with a male grooming creator both post materially higher engagement rates than the category median, pointing to audience relevance doing real work, not just reach. L'Oréal Pro's education-focused collaboration with an actor-creator and Wishcare's partnership with a lifestyle-social creator add further examples of beauty and personal-care brands actively testing male voices, rather than treating grooming content as an afterthought layered onto a female-first campaign.

These aren't isolated anomalies; they're evidence that when a brand briefs a male creator specifically for a grooming or personal-care product, rather than defaulting to the brand's usual female roster, engagement tends to track with relevance rather than follower count alone.

Strategies for Beauty Brands to Work With Male Influencers

Start the brief at nano and micro, not macro

Given that nano and micro creators post the category's strongest median engagement rates, a test budget is better spent across five or six focused male creators in skincare, haircare or grooming than on a single mega name chosen mainly for reach. Smaller audiences built around a specific grooming routine tend to trust the recommendation more, and that shows up in the engagement numbers.

Write grooming-specific briefs, not recycled female scripts

A men's serum or beard-care product deserves its own content brief: different pain points, different routine framing, different language rather than a script lifted from a female-creator campaign with pronouns swapped. Creators who already talk routine, texture and results in their own voice will outperform a borrowed script.

Expand search beyond the "beauty" filter

Because many male creators are tagged under fashion, fitness or lifestyle rather than skincare or grooming, brands should search by bio keywords ("grooming," "skincare," "beard care") and hashtags in addition to niche filters, to avoid missing relevant creators who sit just outside the usual beauty taxonomy.

Track repeat partnerships, not one-off tests

Men's Grooming's repeat rate of 17.9% is lower than Makeup's 20.7%, suggesting brands test male creators once and move on rather than building an ongoing relationship. A short pilot (three to four creators, two posts each, over a quarter) followed by renewing with the two best performers builds the kind of case-study precedent that makes the next budget approval easier.

Measure engagement rate before follower count

Across every tier in this data, the follower count with the highest reach (mega) does not carry the highest engagement rate (nano does). A brand optimising purely for views will keep landing on the same reach-first creators regardless of gender; optimising for engagement rate naturally surfaces smaller, more specific creators, including male ones currently underrepresented in beauty budgets. Brands new to the India market can pair this with the benchmarks in the India Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report for International Brands before setting campaign targets in India.

Key Takeaways

• Men's Grooming collabs post a higher median engagement rate (1.67%) than Makeup (1.52%) over the same three-month window, despite fewer active brands (131 vs 215).
• Nano and micro creators drive the category's strongest engagement and two-thirds of its collab volume, the opposite of where reach-first budgets usually go.
• Among the category's top-viewed posts, male creators are outnumbered roughly two to one by female and celebrity creators, even though the products being promoted are grooming-specific.
• The gap is structural: legacy targeting habits, taxonomy that under-tags male creators, and low repeat rates, not a lack of audience or engagement.
• A focused pilot with nano/micro male creators, a grooming-specific brief, and repeat bookings for top performers is a low-risk way to close the gap this quarter.

Brands building out a broader creator mix can start by partnering with an influencer marketing agency in India, which tracks creator and collaboration data across beauty subniches including grooming, skincare and haircare to help teams find and vet male creators who are often missed by standard beauty searches. For a ranked starting list, see Top Male Beauty Influencers in India on Instagram, and for the category-wide benchmarks this piece draws comparisons from, see Beauty Influencer Marketing Statistics India (2026).