When compared to the exciting and timely stories generated from the front lines of global conflicts, beauty stories can seem tedious and not newsworthy. How can a writer take a story about makeup and make it compelling, engaging, and captivating?
10,000 Words vs. 500 words
One beauty writer found incredible struggle trying to write a simple story on mascara. Her husband, also a journalist, reports from the front lines of conflicts around the globe. While he is off doing exciting things, she is struggling to make mascara interesting. “I was working on a mascara story,” the writer says, “And I had to find a way into this story that was interesting. I had to find a way to make mascara compelling and captivating, and I had to raise the stakes. And I sat there with these tubes of mascara at my desk trying to think, like, how can I make this interesting?”
When her husband returned from the war, they had an ongoing debate about which was harder to write. Is it harder to write 10,000 words about a conflict in the Middle East or 500 words about a tube of mascara, which nobody really wants to read about? They just want to wear it, and they want to feel good. And this debate has gone on for ten years. Even her husband eventually agreed that beauty writing is hard. A man who goes to the front lines of war and writes 10,000 words describing it, could not get five words out about why mascara was interesting or exciting.
Bottom Line: Beauty Writing is No Small Feat
Writers who are looking to pursue or upskill their career in the Beauty industry, take note. Beauty writing is one of the most challenging fields.

The biggest mistake new writers make in the world of beauty is sounding like they’re writing an ad.

Say you’re given one shampoo and you have to write about this shampoo. How are you going to make that different from the advertisement for that shampoo?

You’re not paid by this company. You are paid by your readership.

Your job is to be an editor. It’s the single biggest edit you’ll make in your career as a beauty writer.

If it’s a product that you absolutely hate but you have to write about it for the story, you have to acknowledge that maybe you hate it, but maybe there’s somebody who doesn’t. Maybe you have fine hair and somebody has long, thick, coarse hair. There’s always a way to let the reader know that an editor had her hands on this—that it didn’t come out of a factory; that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.

“You have to speak truth to power,” says Danielle Pergament, “and the power, in this case, would be Procter and Gamble or Estée Lauder. You have to say, ‘This is the most amazing eye cream I’ve used all week, but at the same time, this one thing happened.’ Or, ‘I didn’t love the smell.’”

You have to be honest. It’s the most important thing you can be as a beauty writer.

“Inspiration can stem from so many different places” explains Juliet Falchi, Director of Global Product Innovation for Mac Cosmetic. As an art history major, Juliet was encouraged to stay in touch with what’s trending in the world of art, design, and technology. Given that she works in the beauty industry currently, staying in touch with the competitive landscape and beauty trends is absolutely crucial.

While working at La Mer, Juliet did exploratory research for a lifting and firming serum by attending a 3D printing fair. “[We] spoke to people there and came up with this whole new angle of how to talk about shapeshifting,” she exclaims. “Some of the best ideas come from things that are completely unrelated to exactly what you’re working on.”

Out of the box thinking can play a key role in branding and growth. Strategizing new ways to tackle the same market can become mundane if you are brainstorming in the same environment. Getting out of your office and finding inspiration on the streets, at the movies, in museums, events, moreover through other brands–within and outside your market–can really pay off.

It also pays off to have a mentor. Mentorship can contribute to the creation process in ways you never thought possible, as it offers the opportunity to connect with someone who has a diverse perspective and can give constructive feedback. Juliet suggests that a mentor “doesn’t necessarily have to be your direct boss or someone you currently work with.” Working with people from different departments can offer a mutually beneficial relationship where collaboration becomes more unique due to your different backgrounds. Unparalleled ideas will flourish organically.

Juliet’s mentor, Jennifer Balbier, is Senior Vice President in Product Development and Artistry Brands. According to Juliet, Jennifer is “well-known in our company as being someone who really loves to take on young talent and foster them.” It’s important to shop around to make sure whoever ends up being your mentor is in it for the long haul; they should want to help you succeed.

Furthermore, it’s never too late to find a mentor. If you are looking to expand your horizons and take your career up a notch, start reaching out to former employers or other people in your network at different companies. Find people that are willing to keep the door open for you (and help you open doors). It can make all the difference in your career.

How does a color consultant find the best colors for a client? First, you look for relationships, colors that relate favorably to your client’s skin tone, hair, and eye color.

You’ll go through a series of comparisons using drapes, makeup, or other diagnostic tools. To get the best results, your client usually is wearing no makeup and is under daylight balanced conditions.

You’re looking at the value and the brightness level of the coloring, the undertone of warm or cool, and the contrast level between hair and skin. The goal is to select colors that favorably enhance your client.

Colors in skin tones can be described as warm or cool. Warm colors are those with yellow in them and cool colors have blue in them. A person’s skin has a yellow undertone or a blue undertone, a cool or warm temperature – they’re interchangeable.

You’ll look at how light or dark your client’s skin tone and hair value are. People with lighter coloring look better in lighter colors, and those with deeper tones favor deeper shades. Also, consider if they have brighter or more muted coloring.

The result – your client knows which color palette is best for them and can use that palette to guide them. Everything will mix and match easily because it has natural harmony. This palette also applies to makeup and hair color.

In summary, you observe the value level – the degree of light or darkness in the skin/hair; the undertone – how warm or cool the skin/hair is; the chroma level – how bright or soft the person is; and the contrast level – the degree of contrast between hair and skin.

Like enhances like. People with warm skin tone and hair wear best warm colors, and those with cooler undertones will look better in colors that have more blues, lilacs, or rose in them. Most color consultants are entrepreneurs. If you want your own business, many people could benefit from a color analysis.

In the beauty business, it’s important to find a way to differentiate yourself. At some point you will get recognized and move up the ladder in your beauty career. Try to learn and listen as much the beauty professionals around you and really observe.

At some point in your career, you’ll get to a place where it’s not only about what you do but also the other people around you. Once you start managing people, it can be a very difficult transition. When you go from producing things yourself to having to step back and kind of set the stage of what needs to happen, but not do it yourself, it’s a challenge.

Empower other people to do the work and educate them on how to do it. Try to expose your teams to as much online beauty education and information as possible. Great companies have to set a culture and then attract people who are fully engaged and comfortable with that culture. This culture then nurtures the employees and is so symbiotic with their own personal beliefs that they feel fully realized in their roles.

Having enough industry information and beauty education to be empowered to make your own informed decisions is key. If you don’t have full information, it thwarts you from being able to think fully about a situation. Try and make sure your beauty team has exposure to as many things as possible in the company. Full view of what the financials are, full understanding of who the retail partners are, and an understanding of what the three-year vision is for the company. Make sure people have the ability to see all of this information to make the best decisions for the company, team, and themselves with that context in mind.

I worked for L’Oreal, where I began my career, and Estee Lauder, where I completed my “big company” phase. Working at a large corporation is, in my opinion, priceless. For me, it was like getting a second MBA. It was in an MBA program tailored to working in the beauty industry.

I was also gaining exposure to global markets and working with some of the best tangential organizations in the industry. I worked with the best:
* Manufacturers
* Fragrance houses
* Consulting organizations
* Digital agencies
* Strategy agencies

These opportunities provide a well-established framework for considering everything from business planning to management. How do you get a product to market, and how do you get the most out of your partners, whether they’re PR firms or creative firms?

Then there’s the strategy aspect, which involves exposing yourself to the industry’s best and brightest minds, both within your own organization and with your strategic partners.

I can’t emphasize enough how much I believe that background prepared me to work in smaller organizations later on. Discipline and strategic thinking are two things I attempt to impart to smaller businesses.

Take the best of what you’ve learned in larger companies and apply it to a smaller setting. Flex the structure as needed, but also be adaptable where necessary. You’ll need to consider the limited resources in a smaller workplace, the potential need to react quickly or function without comprehensive knowledge. I’d argue that all of my big-company experience prepared me for working in a smaller company.

Beauty companies have a choice when it comes to formulating. Here’s an inside look on the different processes beauty companies can take in the beauty business.
The formulation can be a stressful journey for a founder because there are so many different logical paths that you can take to get there. You can be as extreme as doing it completely in-house, purchasing a lab, hiring a chemist, purchasing all the material, doing it yourself, or self-production.

The other extreme is white labeling something that exists. Which for some brands that work, for other brands it doesn’t. You’re pre-purchasing a formula that already exists, slapping your logo onto it and then you are bringing it into your distribution channel. FACULTY is in the middle.

What we do at FACULTY is work with some of the best suppliers and formulators in the industry to put together custom formulas. Have them tailored to how we want them in a way that we believe is going to add value to the customer.

Now, what does that mean?

That means working with our advisors who have spent almost 30 years at some of the biggest makeup brands, who have created some of the makeup brands and skincare brands you probably use today, and determining what makes sense for the skin type we’re going after.

When we think about the differences, the male skin type is much more porous, which means that grime, dirt, dust, debris get into your pores, clog them, and give you acne and all other skin problems that come from that. What we’ve realized is that the makeup products that exist on the market, do the same thing because they’re made with comedogenic ingredients and comedogenic ingredients clogs your pores.

What we’ve said at FACULTY is whenever we get the chance, we will always make it with non-comedogenic ingredients. This means the products are better for your skin chemically, and leave you feeling good about what’s on your face and not worried about getting acne or any other skincare, irritations, and problems.

We take all these design principles from trying to build a premium formula to thinking about the skin type we’re going after to the experience of pumping a product into your hand or taking it out of a bottle.

We triangulate all of those together to come to a formula that we believe works for the market and our customers.

At Givaudan, we work with several different clients, including fashion brands, celebrities, and haircare brands that want to create a fragrance or fragrance that goes into a shampoo. For example, a celebrity asked for a fragrance that smelled like her baby.
The Brief of a Celebrity Baby
We agreed and set up a brief to understand what her baby smells like. When we asked what her baby smelled like, she replied, “Well, my baby smells like my baby.” The brief is used to obtain the specs for the fragrance.
However, it was tough to obtain the specs because we had no idea what her baby smelled like, nor would we likely meet her baby. We began pulling information from a client that wants a brief that smells like a baby.
How does the celebrity want to use this? Is this fragrance in a bottle? Or a lotion?
The Process of Cruelty-Free Beauty
How our perfumer builds that product will depend if the product is going to be a body lotion, which requires less amount of fragrance that must be mixed differently than a product in a bottle.
Typically, products in a bottle have an alcohol base, which requires a different concentration and different amounts of ingredients. She wanted the fragrance inside of a bottle, but she wants it to be very safe and very soft, stating, “You know, I want it to be cruelty-free.”
We went back and we pow-wowed. We figured what the baby smelled like by the only evidence she provided: it’s how it comes out of the bath. We made sure the norms or regulations went through the regulatory department that tells us what ingredients we can use to make the product cruelty-free.
By the way, all our ingredients are cruelty-free. Just to put that out there.
We considered that she may want it made vegan. Most ingredients in fragrance are vegan, but there are a couple that isn’t because, believe it or not, you can’t use beeswax. Beeswax isn’t vegan, right?
For example, many people say, “I want a honey fragrance, but I want it to be vegan.” To honor their requests—we use our pow-wow. For our celebrity, we found the regulatory pieces we want to hit, the ingredients that smelled like a baby coming out of the bathtub.
We also had to ask ourselves how much did she want to spend? How much fragrance do they want to put into the product and all the other regulator pieces? From there, our evaluator and our perfumer get together and talk about how they are going to build the fragrance. It is usually made through the computer.

When it comes time to formulate products, you can certainly hire someone to come up with your product concepts and a general ingredient brief to pass off to a chemist to formulate, but you don’t have to go that route.

To find a lab, you can Google contract manufacturers and cold call them to set up intro calls.

“We found the lab we launched our first four products with through an ingredient supplier who supplies some of the best natural and organic oils and extracts to labs around the world,” says one beauty product producer. “We said, ‘Listen, you work with all these labs. If you were creating your own product line, which lab would you partner with?’”

“I wasn’t looking to go to a big box lab that everybody uses, because then I was going to get formulas that everyone else has,” adds the producer.

Each lab has its own product brief form that includes the ingredients you want to use, the ingredients you don’t want to use, specifics about the percentages you want in your formula, marketing ingredient callouts, and the viscosity—whether you want it thin, like a serum, or whether you want it thick. The lab asks about the packaging components you’re going to be using for that formula because they can’t create a dense cream if it’s going to need to come out of a pump.

You’ll send the completed product brief to your chemist. Then, you’ll have a call with your chemist and you’ll pay a fee for the product development.

The fee is usually quite small. Labs aren’t charging $50,000 to formulate a product. They’re charging more like $1,500.

Where labs make their money is when you place your order for 10,000 units or 100,000 units or a million units, explains the producer.

“The one thing I found to be extremely helpful was having a contract right out of the gate with the lab that specifies formula ownership,” says the producer. “You want to own your formulas. Most brands don’t know this, so they launch their brand without owning their formulas. And if you don’t own your formula, the labs don’t ever give you the recipe.”

A lot of people have this idea that fashion, beauty and editorial is this hyper competitive industry, where stepping on people is the most strategic move to propel your career. When in actuality, that is one of the most detrimental things you can do to your career.

Sam Escobar, Digital Deputy Editor of Allure, says about workplace relationships, “People who are your interns, if you’re not very nice to them and you don’t facilitate them to learn more, they’re not going to like you later on. And maybe they won’t be your boss, but they might know somebody who might hire you and they might say something.”

That’s obviously not the only reason that you should be kind. In general, it’s bad for your career to think of everything as this huge competition. In business there is sometimes a belief that if someone else fails, you win. That’s not the case. Escobar explains, “If your team is winning, you are also winning. And that’s amazing.”

Escobar believes the key to success is being reliable, consistent and hardworking. “I think if you are very capable of being communicative and working on a team well, those are all things that are going to work so much better than if you gossip about people or devalue other people’s work. Because that’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to your team no matter what the ranking is seniority wise.”

Escobar advises everyone to develop relationships. Whether it’s in a workplace, internship, or even school, get to know the people you’re working with. “That way you can actually feel a connection to those people. And they will blossom into natural friendships, which is also wonderful. Because who doesn’t want to be able to commiserate at the end of a really long day with somebody who actually understands it?”