Two of the Five Biggest Indie Beauty Brands on TikTok Shop Are Black-Owned
- Jul 31
- 4 min read
Bask & Lather and Canvas Beauty accounted for nearly $50 million of the $512.8 million generated by the platform’s 25 top-selling indie brands. Both founders have appeared on the cover of Black Beauty Founders.
Charm.io released its ranking of the 25 strongest-selling indie beauty brands on TikTok Shop for the 12 months ending June 2026, first reported by Beauty Independent. Together, those 25 brands generated approximately $512.8 million in revenue.
Two of the top five are Black-owned.
Bask & Lather ranked third with $29 million in revenue and more than 1 million units sold. Canvas Beauty ranked fifth with $20.6 million and 702,267 units. Between them, the two brands moved nearly 1.8 million products and pulled in roughly $49.7 million, close to 10 percent of the entire list.
They are the only confirmed Black-owned brands in the top 25. They also happen to be two of the most disciplined operators in the category, and both have sat on the cover of this publication.
The Number Nobody Is Talking About
The headline data point in the ranking belongs to K-beauty. Dr. Melaxin took the top spot with $142.2 million, nearly 28 percent of the group’s total, powered by viral balms and exfoliators. Men’s grooming brand Based Bodyworks placed second with $50.6 million. Oral care company GuruNanda took fourth.
But the more interesting story is buried in the efficiency column.
Canvas Beauty generated $20.6 million on 57.3 million video views. Every other brand in the top ten posted views in the hundreds of millions or the billions. Dr. Melaxin needed 6.5 billion views to reach its number. Bask & Lather needed 945 million to reach its own.
Run the math and Canvas converted roughly 36 cents of revenue per video view. Bask & Lather converted about 3 cents. Dr. Melaxin converted about 2 cents.
The advantage is not reach. It is conversion, and on this platform, conversion has a name: live selling.
Stormi Steele generated more than $1 million in a single TikTok Shop live session, one of the earliest moments a beauty founder hit that level of real-time revenue through live commerce. What the Charm.io data shows is that the record was not a stunt. It was a repeatable operating model, and it produces the highest revenue-per-view ratio on the entire list.
Neither Brand Is Discounting to Get There
The average beauty item sold on TikTok Shop runs under $19. Bask & Lather’s average unit price on the platform is $26.63. Canvas Beauty’s is $29.43.
Both brands are selling above the platform average, in a channel widely assumed to be built on dupes, bundles and price cuts. Six of the brands ranked above or near them are selling at or below $23.
That matters for every founder watching this channel and wondering whether entering it means racing to the bottom. The two Black-owned brands on this list are the proof that it does not.
Bask & Lather’s Number Is More Impressive Than It Looks
Shaina Rainford’s brand placed third on a TikTok Shop ranking while TikTok Shop accounts for roughly 15 percent of her revenue.
At one point the platform represented close to 40 percent of the business. Rainford deliberately brought that number down, diversifying into direct-to-consumer, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace and wholesale into Black-owned beauty supply stores she sells to directly, without a distributor in between.
So the $29 million on this list is a minority of what Bask & Lather actually does. The brand is a nine-figure business, entirely bootstrapped, launched in December 2020 with $400 and no investors and no debt. Rainford was working as a nurse practitioner when it started. She resigned in June 2021 because the business had outgrown the job.
A third-place finish on a platform that represents 15 percent of your revenue is a very different achievement than a third-place finish from a brand that lives there.
What This Says About the Channel
The broader context is not subtle. Beauty sales on TikTok Shop reached $980 million in gross merchandise value in the second quarter of 2026, up 82 percent year over year, according to Charm.io. Skincare led all categories, rising 123 percent from the prior period. Haircare and fragrance also landed in the top five.
For Black beauty founders, the channel has done something traditional retail has not done at speed. It removed the gatekeeper. There is no buyer meeting, no distributor markup, no planogram fight, no waiting for a category reset. There is a camera, a product that works, and an audience that decides in real time.
Both women on this list built for that reality before the industry named it. Steele built trust in front of a live audience. Rainford built an operation that could absorb the demand when her son took over the brand’s TikTok in 2023 and the videos started crossing into the millions.
The ranking is a snapshot of who understood the shift early.
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