Objective.
Provide an independent, reproducible list of the world’s most prominent cosmetic (beauty) brands using exclusively publicly available statistics. No paid submissions, private surveys, or undisclosed datasets are used.

Brand Universe Construction.

• Seed list (>1,000 brands): consolidated from multiple public sources and industry coverage.
• Retailer coverage enrichment: brands present at prominent online beauty retailers were added to reflect availability breadth.
• Entity hygiene: normalization, alias resolution, parent–sub-brand mapping; duplicate removal.

Measured Variables (point-in-time).

• Annual Google searches (2024)
• Instagram followers & engagement rate
• Instagram hashtag posts
• Search growth (2024 → 2025)

Statistical Treatment. Log transform heavy-tailed variables, winsorize, standardize to z-scores, and build a weighted composite popularity score. Index to 0–1000.