Yes, influencers can write off makeup on their taxes, but only when the products are bought and used for content creation rather than for everyday personal grooming. The IRS lets self-employed people deduct “ordinary and necessary” business expenses, and cosmetics purchased specifically for on-camera work, reviews, or tutorials can meet that standard. The hard part is proving the purchase was a business cost and not something you would have bought anyway. That distinction is where most beauty creators get into trouble.
The Rule That Governs the Deduction
Every business deduction runs through the same test under federal tax law: the expense has to be both ordinary (common in your line of work) and necessary (helpful and appropriate for earning income).1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 162 – Trade or Business Expenses Foundation, eyeshadow palettes, and setting spray are obviously ordinary tools for someone making beauty content. If a product appears in a video that earns ad revenue or fulfills a brand deal, it also meets the necessary side of the test.
What the rule excludes is just as important. Personal expenses, meaning things you would spend money on even without the business, don’t qualify no matter how useful they feel to your work. The IRS is explicit that personal, living, and family expenses are not deductible as business costs.2Internal Revenue Service. Income and Expenses That single line is the reason makeup deductions get complicated.
When Makeup Qualifies and When It Doesn’t
The core question is whether a product was used exclusively for business. Buy a lipstick for a review, film the video, never wear it again — that’s a clean deduction. The same is true for products destroyed during testing, given away in audience giveaways, or archived as inventory for future content. Theatrical and stage-specific makeup from brands like Ben Nye, Kryolan, or Mehron is even easier to justify because it has no plausible personal use.
The deduction falls apart the moment the product moves into your everyday routine. If you buy a foundation for a tutorial and then wear it as your daily base, the IRS treats that as a personal expense. Same logic for the skincare in a “get ready with me” video that also happens to be what you actually use each morning. When an expense serves both business and personal purposes, the IRS requires you to divide the cost between the two uses.2Internal Revenue Service. Income and Expenses
Products That Almost Always Qualify
- Review and unboxing inventory: products bought specifically for on-camera evaluation, especially when they’re opened, swatched, and set aside afterward rather than used personally.
- Professional-grade stage makeup: HD formulations, special effects products, body paints, and theatrical brands not designed for daily wear.
- Samples destroyed in testing: products consumed during durability tests, wear tests, or comparison videos.
- Giveaway products: items bought to send to subscribers or use in contests, which are never available for your own use.
Mixed-Use Products
Makeup purchases don’t have to be all-or-nothing. When a product serves both purposes, you can deduct the business portion. The IRS accepts this proportional approach for other mixed-use expenses like vehicles, where costs are divided based on the percentage of business versus personal use.3Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses The same logic applies to cosmetics: if a palette appeared in ten videos and you also used it personally, the business share is deductible.
In practice, partial deductions on individual products are hard to defend. Tracking the “business percentage” of a tube of concealer is inherently messy, and most tax professionals recommend keeping business and personal makeup completely separate instead. Products that appear in content should sit in a distinct inventory from what lives in your bathroom drawer. That separation makes the deduction hold up in a way percentage estimates never will.
What About Clothing?
Beauty creators often assume wardrobe follows the same rules as makeup. It doesn’t, and it’s stricter. The IRS generally does not allow deductions for clothing that can be worn in everyday life, even when you bought it solely for a video. A blazer worn in a fashion haul is still a blazer you could wear to dinner. Buying it for content doesn’t change the analysis.
Clothing deductions do hold up when the items genuinely can’t function as regular clothes: costumes, special effects outfits, branded uniforms with your channel logo that would never be worn off-camera, or garments intentionally altered or destroyed during content. If it would look normal on the street, assume the IRS will reject the deduction.
Records That Make the Deduction Hold Up
Good records are what separate a defensible deduction from a rejected one. For every makeup purchase you plan to deduct, keep the receipt showing the date, amount, vendor, and specific products. Digital receipts and online order confirmations work fine.
The piece most influencers skip is connecting each purchase to specific content. A production log or content calendar that links the product to the video it appeared in — with the title, upload date, and URL — creates the paper trail an auditor would want to see. That’s the difference between “I bought $4,000 of makeup this year for my business,” which is vague and easy to challenge, and a spreadsheet mapping each product to the video it appeared in, which is specific and hard to argue with.
The IRS generally requires you to keep records for at least three years from the date you filed the return.4Internal Revenue Service. How Long Should I Keep Records If you underreport income by more than 25%, that window stretches to six years. Store digital copies of everything. Screenshots of receipts fade; a cloud backup doesn’t.
Where the Deduction Goes on Your Return
Self-employed influencers report all business income and deductions on Schedule C (Form 1040).5Internal Revenue Service. About Schedule C (Form 1040) – Profit or Loss from Business Makeup and other supplies consumed during the year go on Line 22. Costs that don’t fit the pre-printed categories — for example, specific brand collaboration expenses or content-related subscriptions — go on Line 48 under “Other Expenses,” with the total flowing to Line 27b.6Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Schedule C (Form 1040) List each type of expense separately rather than lumping everything into one generic line.
The IRS also allows incidental supplies to be deducted at the time of purchase if you don’t track inventory, rather than waiting until the year they’re used.7Internal Revenue Service. Deducting Business Supply Expenses For most beauty creators buying products on a rolling basis, that’s the simpler path.
One Thing That Can Wipe Out the Deduction
Every deduction discussed here assumes your influencer activity qualifies as a business. If the IRS reclassifies your channel as a hobby, the consequences are severe: your ability to deduct expenses drops dramatically while every dollar of income remains fully taxable.
The agency uses nine factors from Treasury regulations to decide whether you’re genuinely trying to make money, including whether you keep books and a separate bank account, whether you put real time and effort in, whether you rely on the income, whether you’ve built expertise, and whether you’ve shown profit in some years or adjusted methods to improve profitability.8GovInfo. 26 CFR 1.183-2 – Activity Not Engaged in for Profit No single factor decides it. The IRS looks at the overall picture.
There’s also a shortcut: if your activity shows a profit in at least three of five consecutive tax years, the IRS presumes it’s a business.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 183 – Activities Not Engaged in for Profit Failing it doesn’t automatically make you a hobby, but it shifts the burden to you.
Under Section 183, hobby expenses can only be deducted up to the amount of hobby income, so a loss is never allowed. From 2018 through 2025, hobby expenses were effectively non-deductible under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s suspension of miscellaneous itemized deductions. For 2026, recent federal legislation introduced new limitations on hobby expense deductions, and the exact treatment may depend on guidance the IRS is still finalizing. Getting hobby classification wrong can also trigger a 20% accuracy-related penalty on any underpaid taxes.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 6662 – Imposition of Accuracy-Related Penalty on Underpayments The safe move is to operate like a business from day one: separate accounts, organized records, a clear plan for profit.