lipsticks at dawn

I don’t want to dwell on a post about blogging, it’s all a little too Black Mirror for my liking, but… in the wake of a passive-aggressive rant from a beauty journalist I’m following on twitter, I feel compelled to throw in my tuppence worth. Beauty ‘blaggaz’ (her term, not mine) are giving the original, free-thinking beauty blogger a bad name and upsetting the upper echelons of editorial (stamps feet in Sloaney strop) in the process. Blaggaz, you see, have no advertising clients to butter up, no editorial guidelines to adhere to and in some cases, granted, limited talent. So they can, essentially, do whatever the hell they want. And sometimes that means rubbishing brands, leaking exclusives pics or flogging their samples on eBay. Whatchagonnado?

But, however much you try, you can’t deny that decent beauty blogging is changing the game for the better and I suspect this is the true cause of more twitter tirades than you’d imagine. A certain, cliquey snobbery is intrinsic in publishing and you’d be surprised how still, in this day and age, if your face doesn’t fit, you don’t get the gig. So, it figures that an 18 year-old blogging about nail polishes from her bedroom in South Sheilds, who’s never breakfasted at Cecconis in her life, is kind of messing up the hierarchy. I’ll admit it. It is a little bit galling when you’ve worked hard for over a decade just to graduate off your knees in the cupboard to an actual real desk where people actually read your copy while DIY bloggers, some with very little experience, now command their very own press events, advertising deals and VIP treatment from brands tripping over themselves for a slice of the free digital advertising. It’s like Xfactor for journalists….Still. If you can’t beat them, join them, right? Even the most stubborn and technically-bereft of editors has been forced to pack away the Smythson (gifted & mongrammed, natch) and embrace new technology to stay in the game. If they hadn’t, we’d never be party to such entertaining twitter hissy fits again, would we?