Why Is the Beauty Industry So Obsessed With "Influencers" Right Now?

And why can someone with no experience in the business cross into beauty so easily, and so widely?

Not long ago you probably heard that Kanye West—a man who already holds more titles than anyone can count—had filed paperwork for another product line, this one in beauty. If the application goes through, you'll soon see Kanye West-branded makeup, skincare and fragrance.

There is plenty to say in this field about Kylie Jenner, younger sister of Kanye's wife Kim Kardashian and follower of 88 million people on Instagram. Her beauty brand, Kylie Cosmetics, was born on social media and sells out minutes after every launch; the queues at its pop-up shops rival the ones for Kanye's sneaker drops, and resale prices on eBay can run 10 times the retail price.

When it comes to working with "influencers" today, no industry is as alive as beauty.

Last year L'Oréal signed up 15 fashion bloggers and KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) in one go for a year-long marketing program called the "L'Oréal Alliance." These "influencers" don't just push the brand on their own social media—they turn up at events on the brand's behalf, and even front product ads. For the digital ad for its latest Big Shot mascara, L'Oréal's Maybelline brought in Manny Gutierrez, a male beauty blogger with 3 million Instagram followers.

According to a report from the market research firm NPD, collaboration products accounted for 2% of beauty launches in the first half of 2015; by the first half of 2016 the figure was 8%. Plenty of people are still hunting for the secret formula behind celebrity tie-ins, but in beauty, the products "influencers" design themselves are now more visible than the "celebrity collaborations."

If you doubt it, click into the YouTube or Instagram page of any popular beauty blogger and you will always find a collaboration product. The eyeshadow palette Maybelline's male ambassador Manny Gutierrez made with Makeup Geek sold out in 20 minutes. The collection YouTube beauty blogger Jaclyn Hill made with Becca broke Becca's sales record at Sephora. Last month MAC rolled out a collection made with 10 beauty bloggers at once, and before it even went on sale plenty of followers were itching to buy……

Why is the beauty industry so obsessed with "influencers" right now? And why can someone with no experience in the business cross into beauty so easily, and so widely, that brands you have never heard of are turning out new products and taking market share at speed?

Today, Beauty Bloggers Set the Terms in This Industry

In the general drift toward democratized channels of information, beauty is one of the industries that has changed most completely. According to NPD, 92% of beauty consumers in the US and Europe take their inspiration from the demonstration videos opinion leaders post on YouTube.

"Social media's influence is hugely overrated for many product categories, but cosmetics is not one of them," says Dr. Kurt Jetta, chief executive of the consumer analytics firm TABS. "Almost half of the consumers who want to buy beauty products are following trends on social media. That's remarkable." In other words, the power to set the terms in beauty no longer belongs to the big companies. It belongs to the "influencers" on social media.

"Opinion leader" may be the better word here. Most of them are beauty enthusiasts, and some are working beauty professionals or beauty editors, with views of their own on the subject.

Catherine Bomboy Dougherty, MAC's senior vice president of global communications, praised the bloggers in this collaboration for their talent, their point of view, and their habit of drawing on their followers to develop products. Many of these bloggers, she noted, had been MAC fans for years—longer than some members of the current product development team have worked there. "In some ways they actually know more than we do," Bomboy Dougherty said.

And expertise in beauty is exactly one of the reasons people click "follow."

Opinion leaders also don't strike their followers as remote celebrities. They play something closer to a "real, intimate companion" or a "companion who solves your problems." That hands brands a shortcut to a real, useful conversation with the consumers they want—and saves them the cost of market research.

For this collaboration series, MAC had every blogger tease the news on their own Instagram three months ahead. How many people liked it, how many would buy—it was all there to be read in the comments and the likes. The demand, in other words, was already sitting in plain sight.

Looked at another way: because beauty bloggers have built up trust and know what their fans want, the products they put out land squarely on their followers' desires. MAC's lipstick collection, Catherine Bomboy Dougherty said, was so popular that the brand "had to keep reminding people it was a limited edition."

"That's credibility in one particular area—everyone chases after the same product……[as if] you get that lip set, bam, you have it all." Karen Grant, global beauty industry analyst at NPD Group, named the truth of it.

For Beauty Opinion Leaders, Influence and Salesmanship Feed Each Other

Watch the videos of the early beauty bloggers and the content is usually nothing but the makeup process, beauty tips or a hairstyle tutorial—no carefully arranged lighting, no funny set-ups. What beauty bloggers mostly showed was the process itself: how to get beautiful, step by step. Neither the products nor their own personalities stood out.

In Forbes' 2015 list of the 10 highest-earning YouTube stars, Michelle Phan was the only beauty blogger. She moved from written blog posts to YouTube videos in 2007, and now has 8.8 million subscribers, a billion video views and a startup valued at more than $100 million.

Besides founding her own beauty brand, Michelle Phan set up the ICON network with the American digital network company Endemol Beyond USA, a platform to help new bloggers realize their own ideas. Another beauty box platform, Ipsy, is built around a monthly subscription box of sample-size beauty products and encourages beauty enthusiasts to upload and watch videos and compare notes on new products, which has produced a lively community. It turned a profit in its second year.

Her videos let you watch the beauty video grow up. Michelle Phan's early ones were shot at home on her laptop's built-in camera, and the production ran to a plain makeup routine narrated with rather rough audio. Neither the products nor the blogger's own way of living registered at all, and the technique was beginner stuff.

Videos like that travelled only so far. The 2008 video has more than 8,000 comments, but most of them are "nostalgia" left in the past few years by fans who found Michelle Phan only after she became famous.

Michelle Phan's early video

Around 2010, beauty companies did not believe videos like this had any influence on consumers; their marketing still revolved around fashion magazine ads. Media Radar added up the beauty advertising among members of MPA (The Association of Magazine Media, whose membership runs from the world's biggest magazine groups to small independent titles, more than 100 groups in all) and found that beauty ads in magazines came to 6,143.56 pages from January to April 2013, up 10.3% on the same period the year before. In that window 138 beauty brands bought more magazine pages, and 349 brands that had run no ads between January and April 2012 placed ads in fashion magazines over the same months of 2013.

Push the timeline forward to around 2013, though, and Michelle Phan's videos plainly start to get slicker.

Think of Michelle Phan as a brand and you can see her grow from a small business selling "how to do your makeup" into a Michelle Phan lifestyle brand. Her videos took in more of her private life and more talked-about subjects (not always related to makeup), while the beauty content itself got more expert and more specific: "DIY rice mask," "Game of Thrones Khaleesi makeup," "5 ways to plump up your lips," "My boyfriend does my makeup," "My new chapter"……

That approach spread her name further by word of mouth, and made partnerships with brands easier to build. She understood not only what would make her viewers gasp, but also how to set off the next beauty trend. Without content cut into ever finer niches, she could never have got there.

"My boyfriend does my makeup"

Why Do Beauty Bloggers' Own Lines Always Start With Lipstick?

NPD looked at the well-regarded beauty products launched in 2016 and found that in their first month on sale, the beauty bloggers' "collaboration" products earned on average twice what the traditional celebrity tie-ins did. The difference between a "celebrity tie-in" and a "blogger collaboration" is this: the celebrity tie-in is usually just a name used as a hook, while the beauty blogger actually contributes to the product.

And making cosmetics is not hard for a beauty blogger. We have written before about how thoroughly industrialized the beauty business is—nearly all product development and manufacturing can be outsourced to ODM contract factories. Geoffrey Jones once told QDaily: "A company like L'Oréal basically relies on ODM. Which shows that the whole cosmetics industry isn't about product development at all. It's about a brand's ability to do marketing."

So a beauty blogger only needs to know what kind of product his or her fans want. And knowing the market is precisely what they are good at.

According to the "2017 China Beauty and Personal Care Consumption Trends Report," published jointly by CBNData (China Business Network Data) and Tmall Beauty, online sales of lip products grew five times as fast as color cosmetics as a whole in 2016. Women were not the only ones driving that figure; men were too. Lip products are now among the top three cosmetics categories bought by men aged 18 to 22—gifts being the most reasonable explanation we can think of.

People's love of buying lipstick and companies' love of building marketing hooks out of lipstick cause each other. If social media and the influencer economy are an expression of our appetite to feel the newest thing, lipstick is the cosmetics category in which that feeling of newness is easiest to manufacture.

No other kind of cosmetics carries as much social meaning as lipstick. Take red alone: it can be an intensely sexy red, or an independent, confident red full of character. Shiseido's Rouge Rouge line launched 16 different reds—change the pigment slightly and you have 16 different shades of meaning. These barely distinguishable reds, along with a great many equally subtle other colors, are all priced around 200 yuan; a step up the ladder only reaches 400 to 600 yuan. Most people feel a lipstick doesn't cost much, and buying one carries none of the "guilt" of a big impulsive splurge.

So beauty bloggers usually start with lipstick: cheap to make, easy to build a marketing hook around.

Take the purple lipstick launched by "thegabrielzamora," the beauty blogger seen collaborating with MAC in the picture above, which he calls the color that represents him. Hardly anyone says "I need this." What most people are saying is "I like you"—and spending two or three hundred yuan to support someone you like is no great stretch.

The Incubators Behind Beauty Bloggers' Own Makeup Lines

Manny uploaded a makeup video using the Jeffree Star Cosmetics Androgyny eyeshadow palette, and posted photos on Instagram of the palette and of the looks he did with it. His fans' reactions showed up straight away in the comments: some said it "clashed" or "looks terrible," others said "this is exactly the palette I wanted."

That instant feedback is the commercial value prized by the makers behind the many "fast fashion"-style independent "influencer" beauty brands now appearing.

The maker behind Kylie Cosmetics is Seed Beauty, which you can think of as an influencer beauty incubator. If a beauty blogger has an idea for something to sell to his fans and Seed Beauty judges it workable, the company enters a partnership or signs a licensing agreement with the blogger, walking them through the whole process and giving them commercial help. According to Seed's founder, Nelson, they generally prefer partnerships that involve some form of equity and profit sharing over one-off deals.

And those "star influencers," circulated and consumed, draw more young people with dreams of going from nobody to star into the camp. It has become a "profession" with companies producing it at scale behind the scenes—rewardStyle, the influencer incubator moving into China that we have reported on before, is doing something similar.

Companies holding large rosters of "influencers" keep appearing: Hatch Beauty, Maesa Group, Kendo Brands and others. Every "influencer" stands for a niche market and a retail channel. When one "influencer" is gradually forgotten, the next one to take his place turns up soon enough. As long as this "industry" exists, the long-tail effect will exist with it.

In a sense, beauty brands working with these bloggers are doing the same thing.

Beauty Brands Are Marketing the "Influencer" Way, Too

It isn't only about partnering with beauty bloggers. Beauty brands are now copying the "beauty blogger" video format and writing it into their own DNA. "[Making videos that travel easily on social media] has become the center of our social media strategy," Claudia Allwood, Benefit's senior director of creative and content strategy, told Racked. Benefit was among the first beauty brands to make videos like this.

They know the glossy, polished beauty videos of traditional advertising have lost all power to persuade; a video has to feel real and alive before you want to buy. The CEO of the visual marketing platform Curalate summed up the advice this way: it is best to be "original, short, vertical, sharp and intimate."

Glossier, a beauty startup born on the internet, posts a regular video series on YouTube—#getReadywithme—inviting people from the company, friends or beauty bloggers to record, video-diary style, what they do between getting out of bed and walking out the door with their makeup on.

Glossier copied the format almost exactly from the YouTube "influencer" Rachel Nguyen, though Rachel Nguyen told her fans not to mind—she and Glossier are partners now.

Glossier beauty video

Right now the ratio of beauty bloggers to beauty brands on YouTube has reached 14 to 1. On WeChat and Weibo you can feel the same rush of "opinion leaders," from big accounts with millions of followers down to "18th-tier influencers" with tens or hundreds of thousands. Every move they make travels across the social network. Most people never climb out of this "web"; some never even climb out of their own "fan circle."

All of it makes for a lively scene, but it has also, without anyone intending it, left the landscape extremely fragmented. Brand or individual, anyone after a bigger share of attention has to either get there first or produce an idea nobody else has. For the first time in history, beauty has not only trends but something like the timeliness of news: an American TV show, a red carpet or a celebrity music video drops, and the makeup look everybody envies follows right behind.

Does this put celebrity endorsements and star collaborations at a disadvantage? One example may show the difference between the two.

Last July MAC launched a Selena collection in memory of the Latin musician Selena Quintanilla, who was shot dead in 1995. It sold out within minutes, and in December, under heavy pressure from fans, it was restocked.

"I wouldn't say one matters more than the other. [Celebrities] speak to a different audience," Bomboy Dougherty told Racked.

Cover image and images in this article: Racked, The Guardian, Instagram,

Kylie Cosmetics