Beauty Blogger Bloom

The 21st century has seen the rise of a new type of celebrity, and I’m not talking about  reality ‘stars’, I’m talking about the online celebrity. Consumers now trust beauty bloggers and their recommendations far more than they trust traditional media (i.e. Magazines) and other celebrities, but why?

YouTube has created most of these online stars. From Justin Bieber to Michelle Phan, YouTube makes unknown people into stars and leading influencers and brands are starting to prick their ears up to these game changers. Many YouTube Vloggers have millions of subscribers. Their content has proven to be more effective in reaching their target audience than the biggest magazines. Beauty related content on YouTube alone racked up 700 millions views in 2013.

I’m a massive YouTube fan. I know how marketers use it to convince us to buy their products – and it really works!  If a beauty guru uses an Urban Decay Naked palette to do her ‘smoky eye tutorial’, we’re all online straight away to buy it (links are also provided in the video description). Learning how to do the ‘perfect brow’ or ‘Kim Kardashian contouring’ is just a click away. As you start learning these makeup tricks that weren’t accessible only a few years ago, you learn to love the people who teach you and want to know more and more about their lives, what they’re wearing and what’s in their handbag (yes – they even do videos about that!) We trust them because we’ve seen them grow online, they’ve shared intimate secrets with us, and they act like our best friend, which is so much more convincing than a celebrity we know will never have the time of day for us.

UK based beauty guru, FleurDeforce has 1,140,445 subscribers and is definitely a force to be reckoned with.  She has a fantastic online following which exploded when she announced she was getting married.  Her ‘Our Wedding Day’ Vlog has almost 1.5 millions views to date. From showing girls how to curl their hair to broadcasting her wedding, this girl is the perfect ‘online celebrity’ for brands. As our ‘friend’ we trust her advice far more than some impersonal article in a magazine we pick up, or those glossy adverts that feature an impossibly glamorous and remote model.

What can we expect in 2015? Beauty bloggers are here to stay and they will become more powerful and influential as more brands realise that they should be using them. But will brands overuse them? Will the obsession die out? And the biggest question of them all – how many smoky eye tutorials is too many

Thank you beauty bloggers. We salute you!