I lean into the bathroom mirror and balance cautiously on my elbow. Squinting a little, I shakily draw the bright red lipstick onto my lips, trying to fill in what I left on my wineglass. “Oh my god,” I hear a shriek beside me. A girl has stumbled out of a toilet cubicle and bounded up beside me at the sink. “WHAT is that COLOUR!” With a shiver of misplaced pride I roll my lips together to smudge the colour in and show her the tube. “MAC Russian Red,” she reads off the tube before handing it back to me with a grin. “I’m going to buy it tomorrow.”
There is no feeling like the transfer of some decent beauty knowledge. In an oversaturated market where everyone is trying to sell you something, information is currency, and a good recommendation is a valuable thing. Beauty products, a huge, sprawling, booming industry that influences the lives of so many women, are sold to us through a combination of clever marketing, cunning and strategy. Mascara ads feature supermodels wearing fake eyelashes. Expensive perfumes can be but an ingredient away from much, much cheaper ones. And beauty editors at mainstream magazines are often going to have to favour the brand who paid for ad pages over the brand that actually works best.
Of course, once women started talking to each other across the internet, the power started to slip away from glossy magazine editors. Rather than relying on a blend of friends’ recommendations, shop assistants, advertising and beauty editorial for advice, we could begin to do our own research on our own terms before shelling out for a new top-dollar foundation. The user-generated review was about to change the way the beauty industry would work forever.
Enter Makeup Alley. The site, abbreviated as MUA, started in 1999 with the intention of being a hub for user-generated product reviews. A new Maybelline foundation made you spotty? Shout it from the rooftops. Found an eyeliner that stays put as long as needed? Share your lucky find. And before you pick a new concealer, see which is getting the highest ratings online. Because makeup is not always pocket-change stuff. For many women, it’s an essential part of their daily routine and a lot of money ends up being invested in the right products for the right face.
The Daily Mail published a survey in 2010 claiming the average woman spends £9,000 on various cosmetics in her lifetime. You would be mad, or richer in cash than in sense, not to research a little and shop around before you start throwing down €40 for a bottle of foundation. And why would you listen to a shop assistant, who in these parts is generally associated with a single brand, for advice when you have thousands of contributors giving ratings out of 5.0 for any given product out there? This was people power at its finest, and it was going to pose a serious challenge for both brands and publications who were used to making sales on the basis of glossy and careful marketing.
Beauty and fragrance are huge earners for fashion houses, too: you can imagine that Chanel and Armani make more off huge numbers of airport perfume sales than on their handful of couture dresses per year. But another thing that the hiveminds of MUA, Temptalia and later, the millions of beauty blogs and YouTube channels who were born in their wake, heralded was the dupe: exactly as it sounds, the dupe is a product that may as well be a duplicate for another, more expensive product. Why buy the BeneFit highlighter when No. 7 do a near-match for half the price? Suddenly high-end beauty companies were shaking in their boots, and, eager not to miss out on the rapidly-growing internet dollar, began to court the bloggers.
Beauty fangirls — and there are a lot of them, more than you would think — have always loved a cult product. Even before the web’s hiveminds sprung up, some products have been treated with reverence, thriving on recommendations from mothers to daughters, makeup artists to lucky amateurs. Some of these are simple: my mother told me to use Pond’s Cold Cream and I consider it a miracle worker. Others are more luxurious. Clarins’ Beauty Flash Balm, for instance, or YSL’s Touche Éclat concealer.
But clever beauty houses capitalised on this phenomenon via the internet, using blog publicity to create a frenzy over limited edition zeitgesty nail polishes or top-dollar Tom Ford lipstick (that will be 460SEK, please, thank you.) In the complex world of beauty blogging, new products are hyped up long before they are released, and if they’re promising enough the hype can cause them to sell out the day they’re launched. Done right, it’s a marketer’s dream. Maybe blogging did put the power into the consumer’s hands, but remember that we are still the ones spending 90,000sek on some coloured goo for our faces.
Words: Ana Kinsella
