Sephora Review Intelligence Pipeline
A complete system that transforms millions of beauty product reviews into actionable product intelligence — identifying which products are genuinely loved by real customers.
What Is This?
This pipeline collects, cleans, and analyzes 4.4 million Sephora reviews to answer one question:
Which products do people genuinely love — not just which ones have high ratings?
The problem with raw ratings is simple: they're easily manipulated. A product might have 1,000 five-star reviews, but if half came from paid reviewers, that's not genuine love. Our pipeline sees through this.
Find the best products, understand WHY they're loved, and eventually identify which ingredients actually work — not just what marketing claims.
The Pipeline at a Glance
Click any stage to learn more →
How It Works
Stage 1: Collection
We tap into Sephora's review API (powered by BazaarVoice) to collect every review, including ratings, text, photos, helpful votes, and reviewer demographics like skin type and skin tone.
Stage 2: Cleaning
Raw data is messy. We deduplicate, normalize, and organize everything into 6 clean tables — a "star schema" where reviews sit at the center, connected to user profiles, engagement metrics, and photos.
Stage 3: Intelligence
Three AI models add smart signals to every review:
- Quality Scoring — Is this a thoughtful review or just "Great product!"?
- Fake Detection — 68+ signals to identify suspicious reviews
- Sentiment Analysis — What's the emotional tone beyond the star rating?
Stage 4: Ranking
The Love Score combines all signals into one number that captures genuine product love. It rewards authentic enthusiasm and penalizes manipulation.
What Makes This Different?
| Traditional Approach | Our Approach |
|---|---|
| Sort by average rating | Separate organic from incentivized ratings |
| Count total reviews | Weight by review quality and authenticity |
| Ignore reviewer history | Track power users vs. one-timers |
| Trust all 5-stars equally | Detect suspiciously positive patterns |
A ranked list of products that real people genuinely love — with full transparency about why each product scored the way it did.
Ready to Dive In?
Use the sidebar to explore each stage in detail, or continue to The Big Picture →