Did you know that on average, a woman spends almost two years of her life sitting in front of a mirror applying make-up, and almost one hour daily on her overall appearance? I don’t agree, it must definitely be more! ☺ Especially for beauty vloggers these days.
With their online personas, they’re now the young power propelling the beauty industry.
But not so long ago, it wasn’t like this. Luxury make-up brands used to predominately choose movie stars, singers and other celebrities to become the face of their new products. Their undeniably photoshopped physical appearance and strong public influence would incredibly boost product sales. And so the new era of TV adverts with Hollywood actors spraying new luxury perfumes on their half-naked bodies began.
In order to attract their target consumers and find out what their best-selling products are, beauty companies run numerous studies every changing season. So the types of people they choose to represent their products are also, by nature, seasonal.
With the growing popularity of social media, the scenario started to shift even more rapidly. Consumers started to look to more popular, accessible, relateable sources of information. People started to read reviews on products on the Internet before they decided to actually buy them.
Suddenly, bloggers came into the limelight and people started to rely on their opinion. Their blog posts on what they think about the newest eye cream or miracle foundation strongly influenced what people were buying. Their popularity grew rapidly, which made beauty companies rethink their sale strategies.
The most recent sensation, however, is a species of bloggers known as “vloggers” (video-bloggers). They make a decent living on creating and posting videos about their hobbies and lives on a regular basis.
As their audience of millions of subscribers keeps on growing, vloggers become an increasingly popular source of information (and opinion-making) on an international level.
Famous examples include Zoella or Tanya Burr in the United Kingdom, or Ingrid Nilsen and Tyler Oakley in the United States. (Note that they all have their own Wikipedia articles.)
The most famous beauty vloggers come mostly from English-speaking countries, as their audience reaches far more than just their home country. For most of them, sharing opinions with the rest of the world began as a hobby only, and by chance grew into a full-time job. They began recording videos that concentrated mostly on their favourite beauty products, fashion trends and topics including skincare, hairstyle, fashion and lifestyle in general.
The favourite known as “beauty haul” became the most-viewed type of such videos posted on social media. In them, vloggers simply show a bunch of products they recently bought and share their personal opinion on whether they work like they are supposed to, and if they are worth spending money on.
However, relying on these “hauls” today does not have to be 100% trustworthy. The newest strategy of beauty companies is to pay beauty vloggers for talking about their newest products in their video posts. So when your favourite vloggers speak to you through the screen of your laptop and convincingly try to tell you that this new liquid lipstick is the best one you will ever try because it has great pigmentation and does not look like you’ve just had your lips done, it is not necessarily true.
The vlogger may be well paid to tell you so.
Because their numbers of followers and views are growing every day, some of the beauty vloggers are brave enough to start their own brands and make-up lines. Or they even get to work with the biggest and most luxurious beauty labels to create new perfumes, cosmetic or clothing lines with their names on it.
Some of them are able to go even further, being hired as faces or spokesmodels for famous cosmetics companies – which makes their fans scream with joy, run to the nearest beauty store and spend a fortune there to have something created by their favourite beauty stars.
Just like political situations or celebrity scandals, beauty is a topic that appears in the news every day. Blown by the wind are those times when high-profile celebrities were the only way to sell that expensive perfume or the new-formula mascara. With the rise in the popularity of social media, actresses and singers are pushed to the back seat and a new type of celebrity arises: the one whose success and fame is dependent on likes, views and follows.
So what about you, dear reader? Have you already jumped on the bandwagon?
