What Influencer Marketing is Doing to How We Feel About Ourselves

There's a reason influencer marketing took over the beauty and fashion industry so completely: it doesn't feel like advertising.

When a brand runs a TV ad, you know what it is. There's a logo, a voiceover, a product shot. Your brain files it under "trying to sell me something" and adjusts accordingly. But when someone you've been following for three years holds up a serum and says it genuinely changed their skin? That lands differently. It feels like a tip from a friend; and that's exactly what makes it so effective, and worth understanding a little better.

Influencer culture didn't appear out of nowhere. It evolved from a much older idea: that we trust people we feel we know. Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful form of marketing, and what influencers figured out — or what brands figured out and influencers got swept along with — is how to scale it. Build an audience, earn their trust, then monetise that trust.

When you don't know a recommendation was paid, your brain processes it as a genuine endorsement.

Beauty and fashion were early adopters because the fit was obvious. These are categories where purchase decisions are deeply personal, comparison is constant, and aspiration is baked into the product. If someone with good skin tells you what they use, you're going to listen. For a while, it worked reasonably well for everyone. Smaller brands could reach audiences they couldn't afford to advertise to. Creators could turn a following into an income. Followers got recommendations that felt more real than a billboard. The disturbing part is how quickly this spiralled out of control.

As the money got bigger, the lines got blurrier. Paid partnerships, gifted products, affiliate codes, brand trips — all of it creates a financial relationship that doesn't always get disclosed as clearly as it should. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has rules about this. In practice, a "#ad" buried under eight other hashtags isn't exactly the transparency those rules were designed to create. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US has repeatedly had to update and reissue guidance on this because the industry keeps finding ways around the spirit of it while technically complying with the letter.

This matters because trust is the whole mechanism. When you don't know a recommendation was paid, your brain processes it as a genuine endorsement. Research consistently shows that undisclosed sponsorship damages audience trust more than openly disclosed advertising does. Hiding it doesn't protect the relationship. It just delays the damage.

How Influencer Marketing Gets Under Our Skin

This is where it gets more complicated, and where the mental health impact becomes harder to ignore.

A lot of beauty and fashion influencer content — even the kind that isn't technically selling anything — is built around appearance. Outfit checks, skin routines, body transformations, "what I eat in a day." The sheer volume of appearance-focused content that regular users are exposed to is significant, and the research on what that does to body image is pretty consistent: more exposure to idealised appearance content links to lower body satisfaction and higher rates of social comparison, particularly among younger audiences.

What makes influencers specifically powerful here is the parasocial relationship. You feel like you know them. You've seen their flat, their difficult week, their dog being weird on a Tuesday. That familiarity makes comparison feel more personal than it would with a model in a magazine. It's not "that's a professional shoot." It's "she just woke up like that." Even when you know logically that what you're seeing is curated, the emotional response still lands.

Instagram has faced significant criticism and legal scrutiny over research showing its platform was linked to body image issues in teenage girls, with internal documents suggesting the company was aware of this and continued anyway.

There's also a subtler dynamic worth naming. A lot of influencer content is framed as self-improvement— better skin, better habits, a cleaner diet. The framing feels positive and aspirational. But the underlying structure is still one of inadequacy. You could be better. The product, the routine, the transformation— it's all built around a gap between where you are and where you could be. That gap is what gets monetised.

It's also worth being clear that individual influencers are operating inside systems that were designed without them (or anyone's wellbeing) particularly in mind. Instagram has faced significant criticism and legal scrutiny over research showing its platform was linked to body image issues in teenage girls, with internal documents suggesting the company was aware of this and continued anyway. TikTok's algorithm is extraordinarily good at identifying what keeps you watching, and what keeps a lot of people watching is appearance content, aspiration, and comparison. The platforms profit from engagement, and anxiety drives engagement. That's not a bug, it's closer to a feature.

Some creators are genuinely careless with the trust they've built. Promoting products they've never used, pushing extreme diets or detoxes to audiences who look up to them, editing their appearance while performing authenticity.

None of which means individual influencers are off the hook entirely. Some creators are genuinely careless with the trust they've built. Promoting products they've never used, pushing extreme diets or detoxes to audiences who look up to them, editing their appearance while performing authenticity. That's not the system's fault alone. People with large audiences have real influence over how their followers feel about themselves, and some of them behave as though that influence comes with no responsibility.

The more honest picture is that most influencers sit somewhere in the middle. They're working within incentive structures that reward certain aesthetics and certain content, they're under pressure to maintain a particular image, and they don't always stop to think about the downstream effects. That's not malice. But it's not harmless either.

What to do with all of this

We're not here to tell you to quit social media or unfollow people you enjoy. But there's something genuinely useful in understanding how the economics work and what they're designed to produce. When you see a recommendation, it's worth a quick mental check: is this disclosed as an ad? Does the content consistently leave me feeling good, or does it leave me feeling like I need to fix something?

That last question is probably the most useful one. Content that reliably makes you feel like you're not quite enough — regardless of whether it's technically labelled as an ad — is doing something to you whether you notice it or not. The first step to being harder to manipulate is just knowing you're in the room where it's happening.

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Index:MH is an independent non-profit that sets measurable standards for how beauty and fashion marketing affects mental health — because awareness alone doesn't change industries. Learn more at indexmh.org.