When E.l.f. Beauty was founded more than two decades ago, the idea that consumers would buy beauty products online was something of a novelty. But in 2026, consumers are happily buying cosmetics on digital platforms, plus their online behavior is evolving faster than most companies can anticipate.
E.l.f., which owns E.l.f. Cosmetics, as well as Naturium and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode brand, is attempting to keep up by diving headfirst into social e-commerce platforms like TikTok Shop and making use of artificial intelligence and large-language models like ChatGPT, even as their usage remains controversial among consumers.
“One thing for sure is that almost 60% of discovery is happening on LLMs, specifically ChatGPT and Google,” E.l.f. Beauty chief digital officer Ekta Chopra told Glossy during Shoptalk Spring. “It’s not [only] about the checkout. It’s more about being there as part of the consumer’s journey, because the whole funnel is collapsing.”
And adapting to new technology is not only a consumer-facing proposition, Chopra added. Chopra said E.l.f. has developed an internal team to make its products more visible to LLMs and is using AI to scrape for data to help its products show up in the more specific searches that customers are inputting into platforms like ChatGPT to help them search for products.
“This is not just, ‘Hey, this is what the consumer is searching for. I’m going to build this content.’ It’s a whole mindset shift for our copy teams and our product marketing team,” said Chora. “What not trying to solve for a short-term problem, but how the workforce is going to work in the future — that’s what we’re trying to solve for.”
But even as consumers and companies are still adjusting to the rise of AI, TikTok’s impact on beauty is clear.
Since the social media platform’s arrival in the U.S. in 2018, the network has accelerated beauty trends, launched a new class of influencers and content creators and, with the launch of TikTok Shop in 2023, introduced a route for consumers to discover and purchase beauty in one window. And big players are taking notice: Sales from brands with at least $30 million in annual revenue increased 97% year-over-year on TikTok Shop in 2025. In March, Ulta Beauty announced it would join the platform.
For E.l.f., keeping up amid increased competition on the platform means thinking of itself as selling more than just mascara and lipstick.
“The world is evolving for us. We call ourselves not a beauty brand anymore. We are entertainment, when you really think about it,” said Chora. “Being on these platforms requires you to have a muscle in entertainment. When you’re on TikTok, entertainment is coming from what’s trending, the trendiest song, things like that. So I would say that we have to stay in tune with the culture, and culture is moving at the speed of swipe.”
Not all major beauty players are taking the same approach to adopting new commerce channels. The same month Ulta placed its bets on TikTok Shop, Sephora announced an integration between its app and ChatGPT. Chopra sees Sephora’s move as signaling the LVMH-owned retailer’s belief in ChatGPT as a trusted platform for consumers.
“It’s always the Ulta-Sephora wars. Ulta went to TikTok, and then Sephora went to the LLM,” said Chopra. “Sephora is actually trusting to connect their 80 million loyalty members with ChatGPT for personalization. That is insane, when you think of all the trust issues [with AI] and everything.”
Sephora is not the only company betting on LLMs like ChatGPT. Shopify and Walmart have also announced integrations with the OpenAI-owned chat model in recent months. Chopra said E.l.f. invited Google to its New York Offices to help its team learn to better use AI. But she maintains that while E.l.f. is using AI to increase efficiency, it will not erase its reliance on human input.
“There are things that will use AI in creative. ‘Hey, here’s one shot. Can you cut it in 50 different ways, change the background?’ Absolutely, that’s efficiency,” she said. “Even though you can train the LLMs, it depends on where you, as a brand, draw the line on the value of human input. And E.l.f. really values the human input.”
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