Tracking Conversations about Makeup on Reddit (Continued)

Aug 3, 2019

I’ve spent almost a year collecting data from r/MakeupAddiction (despite the ongoing drama there), and I’m ready to update an earlier post with the most frequently discussed and mentioned makeup brands.

Since February 2018, I’ve been scraping r/MakeupAddiction every night to collect thread and comment data. There was one instance in March 2019 where my raspberry pi got turned off and the scraping jobs didn’t run for a month, but otherwise, I’ve got about a year’s worth of data. This post builds on an earlier one here

Here’s what I’ve found:

The Top Fifteen

The top most-often discussed brands on r/MakeupAddiction from June 2018 to August 2019 were:

Rank Brand Total Mentions 1 Anastasia Beverly Hills 4244 2 Mac 3562 3 Urban Decay 2977 4 Too Faced 2817 5 Morphe 2765 6 Fenty 2247 7 Tarte 2035 8 Nyx 1941 9 Kat von D 1905 10 Huda 1616 11 Wet’n Wild 1279 12 Pat Mcgrath 1111 13 Jeffree Star Cosmetics 1058 14 Elf Cosmetics 805 15 Benefit 791

For comparison, here is how the top 10 most-discussed brands trend on a month-to-month basis. ABH looks to continuously dominate, though brands like Too Faced and Urban Decay trend upward in months where they have new releases.

This next graph breaks down mentions on a day-to-day cumulative basis. Again, please excuse the flat lines in March and part of April–the machine that runs the cron job had gotten turned off.

Methods

I run a nightly cron job on a raspberry pi (though any server would do) to query reddit’s API and collect posts and comments from r/makeupaddiction. These posts are saved as a (poorly formatted) JSON file. To analyze, I used Python, relying particularly on Pandas and MatplotLib.