Online beauty discussion in forums and on social media is rapidly changing the beauty market and could hold the key to future industry trends, according to a new report.

The research, carried out by Diagonal Reports has found that the number of online groups and communities dedicated to discussing beauty care and products has grown significantly over the past few years.

Diagonal Reports has used vocabulary and terminology used to interpret the data, which has been collected since 2009 and has tracked digital beauty communities, investigating beauty conversations and discussions.

These discussions are considered trustworthy by the consumer and represent the traditional word-of-mouth recommendation moving to an online platform and setting a new beauty agenda.

According to the report, digital communities are becoming just as important as the product house and retailer when it comes to shaping trends and ideas in the beauty market, helping to create “new cultural formations.”

Online chatter has been under-documented and under-analysed because it consists of unstructured and complex data. Because of this there is a high volume of informal discussions on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and various other social media outlets that the beauty industry knows very little about.