Trust me, I’m a beauty

Phoebe* laughs. She has just told me something that’s blown my mind, but I reassure her the secret is safe with me. As our interview was coming to a close, I finished with: “What’s the question you wish I’d asked?” I was nervous about her response – this is basically a journalist’s shorthand for “tell me a secret, I dare you”. And it doesn’t help that my interviewee knows every trick in my book. She’s a PR, after all. Her role, in beauty public relations, is to make sure the brands she represents end up in your make-up bag, by spreading the word via journalists and influencers. That new highlighter you’re suddenly desperate for? She probably had something to do with it.

“I wish you’d asked me about the strangest thing I’ve seen when working with influencers,” she replied.“I’ve seen a rate card from an influencer that included rates for a negative review of a competitor brand.” Phoebe swears me to secrecy when I ask who it was – and then she tells me, off the record, and my heart sinks. A household name. “Slating a competitor?” she continues.“It’s more common than you think.” Phoebe had every right to keep her mouth shut in our interview. So why did she open it?

PEAK CRITIQUE

The beauty review as we once knew it has evolved into something unrecognisable. Back in the late ’00s, before monetization and #sponcon (sponsored content), beauty influencing was most often a hobby – influencers reviewed products they’d bought themselves. PR didn’t usually come into it, save for a few brands who blazed an otherwise untrodden trail, sending free products to influencers and hoping to be featured.

Then content creators began, quite rightly, leveraging their power to earn money, taking fees from beauty brands for mentions and adverts. Their work started to generate huge pay-offs for brands – so it was only right that they got a cut. Plus, as hobbies transformed into careers, overheads started to spiral, from shooting equipment to computer software, not to mention the labour of maintaining a consistent social-media presence across multiple platforms with ever-changing algorithms. The “beauty influencer” became a fulltime job, albeit a modern one. At the same time, consumer thirst for newness meant brands began to launch products every few weeks. Any influencer worth their salt was added to PR lists to receive those launches for free, before anyone else.

Because of that trajectory, these days, it’s in the influencer’s interest to review new products as quickly as possible. There’s no time for ordering on launch day and waiting for shipping confirmations – miss the boat and you’ll miss out on thousands of views, retweets, likes or follows. Samantha Ravndahl, a beauty content creator and host of the Approachable podcast, gained a titanic following in part due to her honesty when it comes to the “touchy subject” of PR. An influencer veteran, she’s spotted the growing “immediacy” problem too. “In the beauty reviews I grew up watching, people would use the same product for months,” she says.“Now, as soon as that PR package lands on your doorstep, you want to be filming a video and have it up as soon as possible, because that’s how you guarantee you’re going to continue to grow your channel.”

Spots on PR lists have become furiously competitive, especially for audience-favoured brands like Kylie Cosmetics, Jeffree Star Cosmetics, Glossier and Fenty. Now, it’s a badge of honour to receive PR parcels and pre-release information. The hashtag “#gifted” holds so much clout some influencers have been known to buy products themselves, then thank the brands publicly, in a bid to fake brand deals and position themselves as PR-worthy.

But most worrying of all? With the ever-present risk across the industry of being dropped from PR lists, the temptation now exists to be glowingly positive about every launch, and to

If you throw me under the bus, I’ll kill y o u. “The experience ruined who I thought were my beauty idols forever”

keep useful criticism under wraps. “We’ve done it to ourselves,” says Katie Braden, founder of Katie Braden PR, social-media expert and brand consultant.“There are influencers who think positive reviews are the way to stay in favour with that brand – and to be honest, they’re not wrong. If I send someone a product and they do a beautiful video? Obviously I’m going to send them more stuff.”

BUYING BIAS?

Thanks to his biting opinions and whistleblowing efforts, make-up artist, brand consultant and beauty-industry figure Kevin James Bennett says he’s been removed from “dozens” of PR lists.“We don’t mince words. I do my homework before saying something… are you mad at me because I told the truth?” he giggles over Zoom, an assemblage of awards and trophies behind him. In 2018, KJB attempted to expose what he calls “hideous” failures to disclose sponsored content in influencing. His biggest scoop? KJB witnessed an influencer’s management quoting a brand for the service of bashing a competitor, identifying rates between £55k and over £60k. The influencer in question is a famous and trusted beauty YouTuber. After sharing his revelation, KJB became embroiled in a digital war with James Charles and other influencers such as RawBeautyKristi (KJB confirms neither Charles nor Kristi were the influencer he was accusing of taking undisclosed payments or competitorbashing), who claimed he was misguided or lying. “It was sort of like Joan of Arc. Here we go, into battle!” he says.“And tonnes of top influencers were doing it. That’s why they all freaked out when it was exposed.”

But where once, the world was divided into a binary – influencer or mortal, right or wrong, sponsored or not – these days, it’s a lot more complex. And there’s far more to the story than meets the eye…

PR HUNGER GAMES

Though PR strategies vary hugely, a new wave of competitions and publicfacing “PR searches” are also, arguably, dismantling what was once a fruitful relationship between content creators and PRs. Brands and retailers, from Kylie Cosmetics to Beauty Bay, have held social-media competitions for slots on their esteemed lists, encouraging followers to share images of their artistry (along with desperate pleas and an approved hashtag) for the chance to be considered. It has turned what was once a private business negotiation into a marketing circus, fuelled by the attention economy. And while winning slots has gilded many influencers’ futures, the experience for some – with reports that certain other, unnamed brands are providing unclear terms and a lack of communication behind the scenes – has also broken many.

Ex-beauty influencer Candice is too traumatised by her experiences with one such PR search to go back into cosmetics blogging. Her dream of being added to her favourite brands’ lists became what she calls an “ordeal” just months after winning her place. One influencer-favoured brand,

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which she tells me committed to a relationship with her for a year, dropped her after four or five months, “out of nowhere”.“They did that to a lot of us small artists who got on the list after their PR search,” Candice explains. She was also later dropped by a YouTuber-founded beauty brand, again without explanation. Candice was left devastated, quizzing herself about what she may have done wrong.

It was influencer and beauty blogger Lea’s* birthday when she received the first PR-list “welcome package” from a dream beauty company – a backbreaking box containing “everything on the website – lipsticks, lipglosses, all the palettes, brushes galore”. “I was not expecting to be picked,” she recalls over Zoom, blinking her heavy lashes. She tells me she currently receives PR mailers and information from 42 different brands, but that “it’s difficult to be taken seriously as a woman of colour… we have a very hard time being added to bigger PR lists”. After being welcomed to the company in question, she tells me there was an absence of guidance accompanying the bounty of beauty being sent her way.

So why, within eight months, did Lea also find herself taken off the list? “I don’t have any clarity,” she answers. “But like me, most of the people who were taken off the PR list at that time were women of colour.” For Candice, it was necessary to take a step away from the industry to rehabilitate her mental health.“The whole experience ruined who I thought were my beauty idols forever,” she recalls. Lea is pushing for change, armed with knowledge from past disappointments. “I don’t let that stop me,” she grins.

When I ask PR Phoebe for her thoughts on searches, she emphasises the importance of brands sharing terms and conditions with winners, her opinion being that “running a giveaway without this in place is misconduct”. Her choice of the word “giveaway” sticks with me. It begs the question: are PR-list competitions just marketing stunts packaged up as PR? And if so, what does that mean for the influencers caught up in them?

After all, the buzzword “PR” has become a particularly lucrative way to shift product. Take Kylie Jenner’s signed PR box, released to the public as part of her Kylie x The Grinch Christmas collection, which sold out in a matter of minutes, despite costing £280. At the time of writing, it’s available on Ebay for over £3,300. The prestige of PR is sky-high.

Candice and Lea tell me they feel they were used as part of a marketing strategy, and they’re both in the dark as to how they could have avoided this. “I feel it was all strictly to get them more business,” Candice adds. But who’s responsible for dwindling transparency in the industry? Is it the brands muddying the waters of PR and offering ill-outlined deals?

The influencers taking them up on it? Or is it, in fact, the audiences with an insatiable appetite for immediate product reviews?

KNEE-JERK REVIEWS

One thing’s for sure: legitimate beauty reviews still serve an important purpose, especially as beauty shopping moves online. Their diminishing credibility holds hazards beyond online drama. After all, pandemic isolation has squashed consumer interest in lipstick and palettes, replacing it with a hunger for active serums, moisturisers, intensive beauty tools and other cosmetic routes to self-care. And as KJB points out, while a knee-jerk review of a lipstick collection might be enough information to decide whether it’s right for a customer, the same can’t be said for reviews of intensive acids, retinols and devices. At best, the latter could lead to wasted money. At worst? Serious dermatological dangers.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to play detective in working out when an influencer post is advertising,” a spokesperson from the Advertising Standards Authority tells me when I reach out to confirm the scale of the problem. The rep tells me the organisation is “harnessing new technology” to assist in the problem of misleading reviews, and undertaking “monitoring sweeps online” to identify and tackle the issue at scale and speed. And it looks like the Federal Trade Commission, which deals with advertising standards in the USA, is in agreement. It’s conducting a “scheduled periodic review” of endorsement guidelines, and Cosmopolitan learned that the topic of paid-for competitor-bashing posts was indeed raised in the comments the FTC received.“We take this issue seriously and have committed substantial resources to addressing misleading reviews and other endorsement,” it said.

But for all the efforts of the authorities, it’s arguable that the problem could be solved closer to home. Samantha feels that creating a greater distinction between “first impressions” and reviews might begin to solve the problem for influencers, balancing traffic and networking with credibility. And among all of the experts I consulted, there was a consensus that we need influencers to make consistent, responsible use of hashtags like “#gifted” and “#ad”.

But before pointing the finger, it may be useful to check our own behaviour as consumers. After all, Samantha explains that influencers like herself who are transparent about brand deals usually feel as though they’re in a double-bind.“I’ve noticed nobody questions the people that don’t disclose ads, because they don’t think they’re doing them,” she says.“But influencers that do disclose them? People are like,‘Oh, you’re a sellout, you’re constantly posting ads.’ But I’m posting the same amount as Person X – you just know that mine are paid for.”

In a world where more young people aspire to be YouTubers than astronauts,† where COVID has obliterated many people’s career paths, and where “fake it till you make it” reaches the realms of Forbes magazine’s “Billionaire” covers and USA presidencies, one question remains. Can you blame influencers for accepting deals, flattering brands and doing all they can to maintain contacts? That doesn’t mean we can’t fight for authenticity. As consumers, we should applaud influencers who commit to transparency by supporting their incomes through membership platforms such as Patreon and other fundraisers.

Samantha’s comments left me thinking. How many times have I rolled my eyes at an influencer’s paid partnerships, forgetting that content creators need to pay their bills? How many times might my favourite influencers have duped me into supporting an undisclosed brand deal? And how many less wealthy influencers, dependent on receiving PR, are being screwed over as we prioritise the voices of wellconnected content creators who can afford their own samples? Holding brands and influencers to account is one thing, but it goes hand-in-hand with applauding ad disclosure, supporting Patreons, buying merch and discarding the idea that we’re entitled to influencer creativity for free – something we’d never expect from any other industry.

After all, lies no longer shock us. The truth can be twisted, loopholes unearthed, sponsorships swept under the rug. Never before have we had such power to demand transparency, so never before has transparency been such prime real estate. But, as is the case with all real estate, someone’s got to pay for it. And when it comes to beauty reviews, perhaps it’s our turn to pick up the cheque.

“I’ve noticed nobody questions the people that don’t disclose ads”