It used to be that if you wanted to know what strangers kept in their bathroom cabinets, you were limited to sneaking a peek during a party. Now, on social media (mostly) young women do their makeup in front of a live audience and celebrities describe their daily routines. The Vogue video interview series In The Bag sees stars dig around their bags to show off their favourite lipstick.
The scale of appetite for this low-level voyeurism is illustrated by the billions of views the #GetReadyWithMe hashtag has generated on TikTok, where online content creators broadcast themselves doing their hair or makeup – #skincareroutine alone has an astonishing 55bn views.
It all arguably began fifteen years ago, with the frank admission of nosiness that was the interview series The Top Shelf – with its polished photography, revealing personal details and tips – wherein a model, stylist or other industry insider talked through the contents of their bathroom cabinet. It was part of the Into The Gloss blog, which was the first venture of the Glossier beauty brand founder and original “girlboss” Emily Weiss, who is now the subject of a new book, Glossy: Ambition, Beauty and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by New York journalist Marisa Meltzer.
“There was a hole in the market for a blog that talked about beauty in a way that’s not just tied to new releases a magazine might have to cover to please advertisers … There was something relatable about it,” Meltzer says. Weiss – as a former intern on Teen Vogue magazine – saw an opportunity to apply the idiosyncratic, “authentic” lens of online street-style blogs on to the beauty world.
With Into The Gloss coinciding with the launch of Instagram in 2010, The Top Shelf popularised “the shelfie”. “Instead of just hiding everything in a medicine cabinet or in a drawer, people were accessorising with products, using them as an extension of their personality.” Diptyque candles, once burnt, were repurposed as holders for makeup brushes. A tube of La Roche-Posay moisturiser, then only available from French pharmacies, marked you out as not only well travelled but well informed. The beauty industry was quick to respond with products tailored for these images, that were not just functional but deserving of display.
By the time Weiss launched Glossier in 2014 – a company that would go on to be a multibillion dollar beauty brand loved with zeal by a certain set of millennials – big names such as models Iman and Karlie Kloss, HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington, and J. Crew founder Jenna Lyons had already taken to the blog to lift the lid on what they put on their face. But, according to Meltzer: “It never felt like a big promotional opportunity.” At the time, celebrities’ candour was refreshing, an “acknowledgment of humanity – that even the people who are the most rich, the most famous have a bathroom, and they’re washing their faces”.
Social media has demystified women’s daily beauty regimens and made a group activity of the rituals of “making yourself up” – transforming the industry and the way that we shop with it. The community-driven approach to beauty pioneered by Into The Gloss, with readers sharing tips and cheaper “dupes” for premium brands, was soon absorbed by the industry. “It was market research that they didn’t have to pay for,” says Meltzer. It sparked a shift away from expert advice and celebrity “ambassadorships” towards crowdsourced knowledge and personal recommendations. “People love feeling like they’ve got a tip from a friend, when it’s actually a celebrity sharing it with everybody,” says Lisa Niven-Phillips, who worked as a beauty editor at Vogue from 2011 to 2019.
She suggests the appeal is in the performance of intimacy. “Especially with skincare, you’re in a vulnerable state, when you’ve either just woken up or are about to go to bed. Even friends don’t really see that – it’s a private ritual.”
But as levelling – not to mention, oddly engrossing – as these insights into people’s private routines may be, they exist largely for one reason: to sell products. Where The Top Shelf seemed to strip away the commercial partnerships and advertorials, similar features today have a commercial imperative. #GetReadyWithMe videos, for instance, can reflect or generate lucrative deals with beauty brands that may not always be easy to spot, or even disclosed.
Jessica DeFino, a beauty journalist with over 80,000 subscribers to her Substack newsletter, says: “Now it’s hard to trust anything, because so much beauty content is gifted or via affiliate links, even if it’s not a straightforward sponsorship deal – and these things aren’t just for celebrities anymore, they’re for the average person with a thousand followers on TikTok.”
The humanising aspect that was so central to its initial appeal has been lost to the big business of beauty. Today, Glossier is trying to hang onto its foothold in the market, following layoffs and Weiss’ resignation as CEO last year. It is facing intense competition from celebrity product lines such as Rare Beauty (Selena Gomez), Rhode (Hailey Bieber) and r.e.m. beauty (Ariana Grande) – while its supposedly effortless “you but better” approach doesn’t, according to Meltzer, “feel so fresh any more”. “I think people want really real: unfiltered, untouched – or they want so fake, it’s like you look in a video game.”
What made The Top Shelf and shelfies stand out were the idiosyncratic personal touches, says DeFino. “Not washing your face, or a weird little decor item, or a beauty trick that you made up backstage one day … It shows that what we want is that weird little human quirk, and how misguided we are in trying to purchase it.”
• This article was amended on 17 October 2023 to clarify Glossier’s current position in the market.
Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Marisa Meltzer is published in the UK on 12 October
