As the US Supreme Court mulled a legal ban on TikTok in January, the effects on social media platforms were profound. Even before the judges ruled in favor of the ban—prompting the app to temporarily go dark in the US—an estimated 2 million TikTok users jumped ship to Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. For a number of beauty-conscious users, what they discovered was a revelation.
“I realised that RedNote had a lot of beauty secrets the United States wasn’t using,” says…