A viral skincare product, a glowing influencer review, and a long ingredient list are usually enough to convince consumers to click “add to cart.” But UAE resident Aishwarya Tyagi wants shoppers to pause before spending.
The founder recently launched Data of Beauty, an Instagram and Substack platform that reviews beauty and skincare products using clinical studies, ingredient analysis, and marketing audits rather than traditional influencer recommendations.
Speaking to Khaleej Times, Tyagi said the idea came after years of watching beauty marketing blur the line between science and sales.
“Beauty marketing is incredibly clever. At its best, it sits right at the intersection of psychology, science, storytelling, and aspiration,” she said. “But that same machine is also what allows brands to take advantage of how most of us shop.”
After nearly a decade working across fashion and beauty media, including editorial, PR, and healthcare communication, Tyagi said she noticed how the same product claims repeatedly moved from press releases to influencer captions with little scrutiny over whether the science actually supported them.
She said the concept for Data of Beauty first emerged while she was pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics, where her dissertation focused on aesthetic clinics and patient volume.
The idea became more personal during pregnancy and motherhood, when she became increasingly conscious of the products she used and consumed.
“The more you know, the more you realise that a lot of the marketing is quite misleading,” she said.
Tyagi also said modern consumers are overwhelmed by fast-moving social media trends and often buy products without fully understanding the claims behind them.
“That was the gap I wanted to build into,” she said. “Rigorous, independent, culturally aware, and written for people like me.”
Unlike traditional beauty platforms, Data of Beauty does not rely on sponsorships, affiliate links, or paid product placements. Instead, Tyagi reviews products by examining peer-reviewed studies, ingredient lists, pricing structures, and marketing language.
Every product, she explained, goes through what she calls a “four-axis audit”, evaluating the science behind the claims, the gap between marketing promises and evidence, the actual value of the formulation, and the psychological tactics used in advertising.
“I’m watching for scientific-sounding vocabulary that means nothing, for manufactured urgency, and for the quiet flattery that talks you into a problem you did not walk in with,” she said.
Tyagi believes consumers today are more ingredient-aware than ever before, but says many are still navigating skincare through buzzwords rather than genuine understanding.
“Most people now know they want retinol, niacinamide, peptides, or vitamin C in something,” she said. “But awareness is not the same as understanding.”
She also pointed to concerns around products being marketed to brown-skinned consumers despite limited testing across diverse skin tones.
“Marketing a lot of products are being sold without any clinical trials or the trials have not been done on brown-skinned people and they’re being sold to brown-skinned people,” she said.
She pointed to how social media has transformed beauty recommendations into a business model, especially on platforms like TikTok.
“In most cases on BeautyTok, the influencer is no longer a person sharing what they happen to love,” she said. “The influencer is a business. The feed is a storefront, and every recommendation is a revenue line.”
She also raised concerns about the growing use of AI-generated beauty content online, saying feeds are increasingly filled with “synthetic faces, generated routines, and marketing claims reworded by machines and posted at volume.”
Among the biggest misconceptions she has encountered while researching products is the way collagen is marketed in skincare and wellness products.
“You cannot apply collagen to your face and expect it to become your own collagen,” she said. “At best, topical collagen can help hydrate the surface of the skin. That does not make it useless, but it does make the marketing around it wildly overexcited.”
Since launching the platform last month, Tyagi said audience engagement has come less through likes and more through shares and direct messages from consumers relieved they avoided expensive purchases.
“One of the clearest examples was the post I did on premium LED masks,” she said. “The responses ranged from shock at what I had found, to relief from people who had been very close to spending Dh2,000 on one.”
For Tyagi, the long-term ambition for Data of Beauty goes beyond product reviews.
“The aim is to turn Data of Beauty from a page into a proper consumer advocacy platform,” she said.
She hopes to eventually create consumer discussions, in-person events, and partnerships with ethical beauty founders, clinicians, and regulators in the UAE.
“Consumer protection should not depend on one woman reading clinical studies at night,” she added. “But until the system catches up, I am very happy to be that woman.”
Source: Khaleej Times