I don’t know if any other bloggers sometimes feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of beauty information out there in the etherverse. At the moment, I get around 500 emails a week on the subject of beauty in one guise or another and I have to admit, I’m losing track. Because I work as a beauty writer (and fashion, sometimes) it isn’t just blog emails I get; it’s across the board. I’m starting to feel a little (okay, a lot) weighed down on the amount of information I need to digest to make any decisions about what products to feature or write about.
I have never known a time when there were so many new products flooding onto the market or new launches, beauty presentations or ‘scientific findings’. When I first started writing about beauty, there were at least half the products there are now and it was entirely more manageable. I really did have a very comprehensive product list in my head that I could just call upon to put any beauty features together, as well as a list of tried and trusted experts who were guaranteed to give good beauty advice. Now I do a mental search and I barely know which drawer in my head to open because everyone’s an expert. All brands have their experts to give quotes and opinions and trying to get an impartial one to give a general view about, say, winter skin care, is nigh on impossible because they all want to sell the brand they are allied to into the feature. It’s what they are paid to do. So all the experts have a range or a contract which makes it difficult to get any real advice that isn’t biased to their own findings or products.
When it comes to make-up – my real passion – ranges come out so quickly now that today’s blue is yesterday’s news. Where one new palette or product comes to market, there are 100 behind it edging for editorial space or competing for attention. The difficulty smaller brands have is that unless they are key advertisers it is even more difficult to get any space or mentions in magazines, so they turn to blogs as the next best thing. Which then means being overwhelmed in yet another arena. What started as a struggle to get brands to notice bloggers has turned into a struggle to keep up with events, information and products. Never let it be said that I am ungrateful to be included – I really am enormously grateful. But I really don’t think that within the beauty industry brands and agencies really have any clue to the amount of info and products we are asked to digest. How can one know what the other is doing? It’s impossible.
I’m fairly consistently playing catch-up these days and my head is full. I’m quite often asked what drives me to feature a product and it’s almost impossible to say. It used to be amazing packaging, innovative concepts, value for money and beautiful colours. Now, I’m surrounded by all of things all of the time. Background research on skin care is so technical it is very difficult to divide one from another; to find a really amazing product that goes above and beyond, because they pretty well all promise to do that. Clinical trials are usual now, rather than being the exception, and new ingredients.. my head could literally explode at the thought of yet another shiny-haired tribe being discovered somewhere in the world or an even more incredible plant extract from the middle of nowhere that is the ‘key’ to preventing skin ageing. I know I’m not the only one struggling to keep up, but sometimes it feels like it.
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