Authenticity Formats After BeReal: What Survived the Hype Cycle

The authenticity-format wave of 2021-2022 produced one clear outcome: the mechanics survived and the dedicated apps mostly did not. BeReal, the French app built on simultaneous once-a-day unfiltered photos, topped download charts in 2022 and then saw engagement collapse through 2023-2024, but its design ideas, dual-camera shots, casual imperfection and time-cued posting, were copied into Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat while lo-fi candid presentation became a durable creative norm. For marketers, the lasting lesson is that audiences rejected production polish, not the platforms that hosted it.

What happened to BeReal and its imitators?

BeReal's arc is documented in app-analytics reporting: explosive growth in 2022, including download leadership in several markets and a reported user base in the tens of millions, followed by steep retention decline once novelty faded. Snapchat launched its dual-camera mode in August 2022, Instagram tested a comparable candid feature the same year, and TikTok added TikTok Now, a near-direct BeReal clone, before discontinuing it in 2023 as part of its own retrenchment. VSCO, Locket and Poparazzi, adjacent experiments in the same genre, similarly failed to convert viral moments into durable habits. The pattern is the classic feature-versus-product outcome: a mechanic strong enough to borrow is rarely strong enough to sustain an app.

The causes of decay were structural. A once-daily notification loses its meaning when users feel obligated rather than surprised; the content ceiling, a photo of whatever room the user happens to be in, limits entertainment value; and the social graph problem, friends are spread across apps, undercut the intimacy premise. None of that falsified the underlying demand signal, which the incumbent platforms validated by shipping the features and keeping them.

What did survive, and where?

Three durable survivors are visible in product and creator behavior as of 2025. First, dual-camera and candid formats exist as options across major apps, used opportunistically rather than ritually. Second, the aesthetic migrated: deliberately unpolished framing, real voices, natural light and on-the-fly presentation became the default register of short-form video, to the point that over-produced brand content measurably underperforms creator-made equivalents in the same feed. Third, authenticity signals became performance features, IG's Close Friends circles, TikTok's private sharing patterns and the general shift of casual conversation to group chats and DMs, which is where the behavior BeReal targeted actually lives.

What does this mean for brands?

The practical evidence supports a specific creative direction, not an authenticity campaign. Audiences reward lower production friction: creator-style framing, natural audio, imperfect first takes and honest on-camera voices consistently perform comparably or better than polished brand assets in the same placements, a finding platform ad products have encoded by pushing brands toward creator-made and remixable assets. What audiences punish is performed casualness, staged candor that reads as an advertisement wearing street clothes, a failure mode visible in every backlash against brands attempting BeReal-style posts during the 2022 window.

There is also a measurement caution. Authenticity as a term has drifted from a describable format property, unfiltered, simultaneous, unstaged, into a vague value claim, and vendor studies claiming that some large majority of consumers demand authenticity from brands should be read as preference-survey results rather than behavior. The behavioral evidence is narrower and more useful: in feed environments where polished and candid content compete directly, the candid register wins attention, particularly with under-30 audiences.

What does the episode teach about reading format trends?

The BeReal cycle is a clean case study in trend evaluation because each stage is dated and documented. Downloads spiked in 2022, retention broke in 2023, features were absorbed by 2023-2024, and the aesthetic outlived all of it. Three transferable rules emerge. Distinguish demand signals from product signals: audiences wanted casual sharing, but only inside graphs they already inhabited. Expect absorption: mechanics that encode real behavior get copied by incumbents within one to two product cycles, so advantage comes from learning the behavior, not betting on the app. And distrust authenticity framing as a purchase driver: candor affects creative performance, which is measurable, rather than brand perception, which preference surveys overstate. Marketers applying those rules to each subsequent format wave, from candid photos to AI avatars, will discount most hype at the correct stage.

How should marketers operationalize the survivors?

Treat the surviving mechanics as a creative toolkit with rules. Use dual-camera and candid modes for behind-the-scenes and product-in-the-world moments rather than campaign centerpieces. Brief creators with constraints, not scripts, because the format's value is specificity and imperfection, which scripts erase. Keep a brand's polished assets for surfaces where they still outperform, retail pages, out-of-home, and high-consideration product detail. And measure creative register deliberately, running polished versus candid variants in the same placement, because the effect is category-dependent and durable only where it is verified rather than assumed.

The episode also updated audience research. Studies of teen sharing behavior from 2022 onward, including Pew Research Center's teen surveys documenting heavy daily use of short-form platforms, made clear that the candor demand coexists with performance elsewhere: the same users who embraced unfiltered snaps also drive the most produced content format in media history. Authenticity is therefore a register audiences switch into, not a permanent preference, and the brands that read it as such kept both toolkits available.