The grooming shelf, and where the gaps are

The grooming shelf, and where the gaps are

Nutrafol, we analyzed our database of 700,000+ sponsored YouTube videos to map the grooming and hair loss landscape and find which niches are OVER-SPONSORED and UNDER-SPONSORED.

We measured your 12 closest rivals:

Manscaped, Tiege Hanley, Hers, Keeps, Harry's, Geologie, Hims, Curology, Roman, Native, Every Man Jack and Dr. Squatch.

1,546 sponsored creators and 5,431 sponsored videos since April 2017.

That runs from a video uploaded on 19 April 2017 to one uploaded on 7 August 2026, and averages 3.5 deals per creator. One company holds most of it. Manscaped is on 37.8 percent of every recorded deal, Tiege Hanley on 18.0 and Hers on 12.7, so the other ten brands split under a third of the shelf between them.

(One chart per brand below)

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals across the thirteen brands, pulled 12 August 2026. April 2017 is the shelf's own oldest video and it belongs to Tiege Hanley, which is the longest running programme here. The biggest buyer, Manscaped, only started in October 2020.

What each one took

Roster size is the number everyone quotes and it is the least useful one. What separates these thirteen is who they bought, how many times they went back, and which pocket of YouTube they went back into. For the wider picture of who pays creators across every category this year, that is the brands paying YouTube creators most in 2026.

Hers

Hers took podcasts and sport. 104 creators, 690 videos, 6.6 bookings each, the deepest repeat roster on the map.

72 percent of its creators came back, the highest rate of anybody here, and 23 of them have been booked ten times or more off a roster of only 104 names. Media took 116 deals, sports 91 and lifestyle 86, and its two loudest leans are religion at 7.1 times the shelf average and politics at 5.2 times.

That is a prescription brand living inside long unscripted conversations, which is a very different buy from a scripted sixty second read, and it is the reason the compliance section below exists.

Geologie

Geologie took gaming and collectibles, at 21 times the average.

Collectibles is that 21, precisely 20.9 times the shelf average off 13 deals, which is a small number doing a lot of work. Gaming took 45 deals at 20 percent of its buying, and fashion 22 at 3.5 times the average.

The whole programme is 81 creators and 225 deals at 2.8 bookings each, so it misses a chart by 19 people, since 100 creators is the floor for one of these pyramids.

Hims

Hims took comedy and entertainment. 52% of its deals sit in entertainment alone.

That is 84 of its 163 deals in one category, across only 42 creators, with comedy at 6.2 times the shelf average. It books each creator 3.9 times and gets 62 percent of them back, the third best repeat rate here, and it started late, with its first recorded deal in February 2024.

Forty two creators is not a programme yet, it is a preference, and it works out at 3.0 percent of the shelf.

Curology

Curology took women's lifestyle. 51% of everything it bought, 4 times the average.

That is 74 lifestyle deals out of 145, across 80 creators, with education at 3.7 times the shelf average behind it. It books each creator 1.8 times and gets 28 percent of them back, so the category focus is sharp and the relationships underneath it are not.

The bottom of the shelf is quiet enough to be worth naming too. Harry's has 156 creators at 1.6 bookings each, Roman has 12 creators and stopped buying in August 2022, Native has 12, Dr. Squatch has 12 and Every Man Jack has 3. Between them the last four hold about one percent of every deal here.

Where that leaves you

You have 133 creators and 408 videos, and 57% were booked again. That is the fourth best repeat rate here, behind Hers, Tiege Hanley and Hims. Your mix is lifestyle, entertainment and media, which is the middle of the road every brand is already standing in.

In numbers, lifestyle is 109 deals and 27 percent of your buying, entertainment 101 and 25 percent, media 60 and 15 percent, on 7.5 percent of the shelf. Media is your one lean, at 2.5 times the shelf average, with lifestyle at 2.1 times.

The repeat rate is the good news. 57 percent is well ahead of Manscaped at 40 and Keeps at 30, with 25 creators booked five times or more and 9 booked ten or more. What it is not is a position, because lifestyle, entertainment and media are the three biggest rooms on the shelf, so the same 57 percent buys far less separation here than it would anywhere else.

Across the 1,546 creators on this shelf, Manscaped alone has paid 776 of them, and booked 40 percent of those a second time.

There is a second thing hiding inside Manscaped's 776. Several hundred of those creators made exactly one grooming video, learned how to talk about the product, and never heard from anybody again. Tiege Hanley at 71 percent and Hers at 72 percent have rosters that are genuinely spoken for. Manscaped's is not, and it is the biggest pool of warm and unattached creators in the category.

The creators everyone already shares

Overlap on this shelf is almost nothing. 1,317 of the 1,546 creators have taken money from exactly one of the 13 brands. Another 185 have worked with two, 40 have worked with three, and just 4 have worked with four.

Two entertainment channels and two car channels sit at the very top, which is a fair summary of where this category's money has gone. With 1,317 single brand relationships underneath them, exclusivity is cheap to ask for on this shelf and rarely already spoken for.

The expensive thing here is not the fee. Hims, Hers, Keeps and Roman all sell prescription treatment, and Hers alone has 690 recorded deals in podcast style categories where the host improvises. One loose sentence about results in a read like that is the brand's problem and never the creator's. What the rules actually ask for is in what the FTC expects from a telehealth creator read, and the wider picture of how these brands buy is in how telehealth companies run creator programmes. Writing a brief that survives an unscripted host is a separate job from finding the host, and it is the part clients hand to us most often.

Over-sponsored

Entertainment is the worst. 370 creators, 1,273 deals, and all 13 brands are already there. Nearly a quarter of every deal in the category.

Lifestyle is next, 206 creators and 700 deals, and it is your own biggest category at 27%.

Here is the caveat, and it is worth as much as the finding. Crowded on this shelf means busy, not worn out. We rank every category by how hard the average creator in it has been worked, and grooming comes back with nothing formally over sponsored, which has not happened on any other shelf we have measured. Entertainment carries almost a quarter of the deals and every brand is in it, and the average creator there has still taken only 3.4 grooming deals in nine years.

The two pockets genuinely worked hard are much smaller. Media creators average 6.4 deals each off only 49 channels, and society creators average 33.2 across 5 channels, so a handful of brands found those rooms and then stayed in them.

The cost of the crowding does not show up as a bigger invoice. It shows up as a placement that plays like a reminder instead of a discovery, in front of people who have heard the pitch already.

Under-sponsored

Gaming, 168 creators but only 2.6 deals each. A big room that almost nobody re-books in.

Travel, 47 creators, 2.3 deals each, the least saturated creators on the map.

Technology, 33 creators, 6 brands.

Beauty is the odd one. These are beauty products and beauty channels carry 45 deals in total, under 1% of the category, off 17 creators.

Two of those four come back under sponsored on our own test, travel and technology, and the other two are on the list for a different reason. Gaming is large and shallow, 168 creators taking 2.6 deals each, so it is a full room nobody went back into. Beauty is simply close to empty.

The honest part is that these pockets are small because they are small. Beauty's 45 deals are a rounding error against entertainment's 1,273, so none of this is a market sitting there waiting to be harvested. What it is worth is the price, and who is already listening.

The cheapest entries are travel, gaming and beauty. Beauty is the one worth staring at, because it is the audience most likely to already care about hair, and the category has left it almost empty.

Nine of the 13 brands have put a video on a beauty channel at some point, so nobody ruled the room out. They tried it, it never became a habit, and your own beauty buying is 11 deals out of 408. Seventeen creators is everything the whole category has ever used there, so one serious test would be the largest beauty buy anybody on this shelf has made.

If you want the list built

Let us know if you would like an influencer analysis of which ones would work well in this niche...

That is the work we do. We pull the rival history on every name, cut the ones a competitor has already booked ten times, price the pocket nobody is bidding in, negotiate the placements, and write the briefs so a claim about results never leaves the studio by accident. Tell us which shelf you are on and we will show you your own version of the picture above.