Beauty Journalists Everywhere All at Once

Welcome to The Beauty Edit’s new series, The Primer. In this special section, we feature celebrated journalists, creative storytellers, and industry veterans who have significantly influenced and redefined their respective fields. These experts, with their wealth of experience and unique perspectives, provide readers with an insider’s view of their industry—highlighting its defining characteristics, authentic experiences, and the profound lessons learned along the way. This column also serves as a platform for their thoughts, untold stories, and personal reflections, offering a deeper understanding of their respective fields and their dynamic nature.

In this edition, Anna Canlas muses on the role and purpose of a beauty journalist. Canlas is a writer with bylines in Trendland and The New York Observer. She previously edited the websites of Stylebible (now Preview.ph) and CNN Philippines Life.

When my team and I worked on the redesign of Stylebible.ph (today’s Preview.ph), the website had a real Pringles quality to it. We made the homepage look like a feed of the latest stories, that you just wanted to keep snacking on the next and the next and the next, and if you were a regular visitor to the site, you could easily see what was new.

Of course, most people don’t experience websites that way. They discover the articles as individual items reposted on social media. Back then, Facebook was still a major place where people discovered and clicked on our stories, from “10 Cool Girls of ADMU” to “5 Celebrity Makeup Selfies of the Week” and “5 Celebrity OOTDs of the Week.”

These stories, which did the best, were surprisingly simple to produce. The celebrity roundups were the current Preview Editor-in-Chief Marj Ramos’s idea and she produced them like clockwork every week. Ironically, the stories that required more reporting (like one time, where Marj wrote about the value of influencers, and we tried to put a number on it, by researching what everyone got paid) did well, but since it was much easier to read the shorter listicles—again, they were like chips, or candy—we got more hits out of those. And hits were what we were measured by.

Today, it might still be the same, though it’s not just website visits and time spent on the website, but also visits and actions taken around the social media pages of the publications (e.g. likes, comments, shares) that are being measured.

There is a notion: Meet your audience where you are, and these days they are mostly on Instagram and Tiktok. So that’s why the performance on those platforms are important.

At the same time, individual editors, people who work in the field (makeup artists, models, photographers), “regular” people (who could have otherwise been featured on the website or even in the print magazine), and brand owners themselves are all acting like how the websites or magazines used to behave, that the authority is not with the masthead, but with them. This has been the age of the influencers.

I myself follow a lot of influencers in the beauty space, though I’m mostly on YouTube. I follow an L.A.-based makeup artist who is a product junkie—because I think she reminds me the most of a classic beauty editor, pawing through bags of PR or Sephora every week, trying them on herself, and giving a professional opinion. Though in this case, it’s even more professional, because she has the experience of working on many different clients every week, and the makeup has to perform, say, through humidity or long hours. It’s from her that I first heard that the Givenchy Prisme Libre powder was reformulated. Or the Dior Face and Body foundation. 

Of course, I also follow Gucci Westman of luxury beauty brand Westman Atelier, since her YouTube page is pretty regularly updated, with short tutorials and episodes of the brand’s show, Makeup and Friends, where she does the makeup of her celebrity amigas while interviewing them. It seems to be a really difficult format, on the scale of talking while you’re cooking on a cooking show. I also think I’m drawn to Gucci for nostalgia, since she did work on all those important covers like Christy Turlington in a silver gown in a bow pose on Vogue. Then, you watch another episode of Makeup and Friends, and realize, she did that, too??

While chatting about her skincare-in-powder-form, she also starts to talk about phytosphingosine and its benefits, and you realize, she’s deeply reporting on her own products, too.

This can’t be helped, in the time of “clean” beauty marketing. Though Gucci dislikes the term, according to an FT profile on her, where this was part of the lead.

(Of course, the same thing is happening in fashion, in the time of sustainability marketing. Brands are trying to signal their environmentally sound practices and credentials relating to fair treatment of the people involved in every step of making their clothes—at different volumes of saying this message.)

Now that both authority and content creation are more spread out across the chain of owner-brand-media publication-individual, the control over information is like a tug-of-war now. 

I am not trying to say that beauty journalists should take back more of the control. But to imagine that now it’s more of a conversation between different sources of information. 

That said, some things will always be true. Those pursuing careers in beauty journalism should keep in mind that they are engaging in service. Service journalism teaches something, or has a takeaway.

This is still relevant in the current context: high supply of products, a dizzying amount of brands, and even more content around it. The content is important to reflect on, whether from the brands themselves, or the individuals who give their own opinions on their social media channels. The individuals are conditioned by their own backgrounds, and this, together with the brand’s own messages, add layers of marketing that feel like reporting (or gathering first-hand information, rather than picking it up from another source). There’s bias all across the chain: Brands have their own biases. As do influencers that get gifted products. And actually, beauty editors have their own favorites, too!

I could tell you something definitive, like study the science (which is what I do, I try to cross-check product labels as much as possible with known outcomes both in the lab and in humans, and balance it against any health issues I have, and the cosmetic elegance of the product, and decide from there). But beauty is both an art and a science. And there is always subjectivity, or a kind of calculus, or consideration of many small factors, to the practice.

When I am lost on a story, I was taught in journalism school, why this story now? That will help you determine whether the story needs to be written, what format is best for it (whether a piece of writing, or video, or audio), where the information should best be sourced, and the rest is up to your artistry to put it together in a seamless, enticing fashion.

Collage by Dannah Valdezco. Asian Beauty blogger by atstock productions. woman writing on a notepad by khosro. woman taking a selfie by dean drobot. beauty products by dapa images. photographer taking photo by liza summer via canva.com