Last updated August 13, 2026
nextbest is community-sourced skincare product rankings. We aggregate real discussions from Reddit skincare communities to show you what people actually use and recommend. No influencers, no paid placements — just real people sharing what works for them.
We scan thousands of Reddit threads from skincare communities. AI reads through them and picks out product mentions, noting what people recommend and why. On concern pages, products are ranked by a community score — how often the community mentions them, weighted by how recent each mention is, how upvoted it was, and which subreddit it came from. Everywhere else — and on the handful of concerns with too few products to rank meaningfully — it's simple mention volume: more mentions means a higher ranking. No secret sauce, no complicated algorithm.
nextscore is a single 0–100 number for how well a product has been received. It is calculated from verdicts — mentions where someone came down clearly on one side, saying a product worked for them or that it didn't. Across the sources nextbest tracks, nextscore is based on the share of a product's verdicts that are positive, adjusted for how much evidence sits behind it. Today that means community discussion on Reddit: the nine subreddits listed below. Clinical and dermatological evidence is planned as a second source, and the number is defined over verdicts rather than over any one source, so it will mean the same thing when that lands.
Not every mention is a verdict. Mentions that are neutral or mixed — “it's fine, I guess”, “lovely texture, but it broke me out” — are counted as discussion, not as verdicts, and are excluded from the score. They tell you a product is being talked about; they don't tell you whether it worked. Scoring them somewhere in the middle would invent an opinion nobody expressed — a passing mention is not a review.
A product with few verdicts is pulled toward the catalog-wide average, and only earns a distinctive score once it has enough evidence behind it to pull away. That pull is worth 10 verdicts, which is why five positive verdicts out of five reads as well-liked but thinly evidenced, rather than as a perfect 100. The pull works the same way in the other direction: five negative verdicts out of five land in the mid-50s rather than near zero. A middling score usually means there isn't much evidence behind it yet — not that a product is mediocre — so read it alongside the verdict count. Below 5 verdicts we show no score at all — just “not enough verdicts yet”.
Every score is shown with the number of verdicts behind it, because the count is what tells you how much to trust the number. Scores update as new discussion is ingested; the pipeline runs daily, so a score moves as the conversation does. It is a read on reported experience, not a lab test or a verified-purchase review.
The nine communities we source are chosen for experience-based discussion — people reporting what a product did on their own skin over weeks and months — not for volume. A bigger, more general forum would produce more mentions and fewer verdicts worth counting. The full list is below.
We pull from nine subreddits, chosen for their high-quality, experience-based discussions:
Rankings are based on genuine community signal — a recency- and upvote-weighted community score on concern pages, mention volume elsewhere — never on paid placements. We don't accept money from brands to boost rankings. Affiliate links, where present, don't influence which products appear or where they rank. The methodology is transparent: you can see which threads informed each product's ranking, so you can verify it yourself.
Questions? Reach out to kayleigh@nextbest.one.
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