The beauty blogger angst
When intelligent people blog about makeup, they tend to be confused after a while. Some of it has to do with the identity they worked for so many years to create. The idea is that talking about lipstick is as shallow as it gets, perhaps, even shallower than shoes or disposable clothes. So why would yourself, being such a smart, well-read and perhaps well-traveled girl, keep on writing about makeup? It all sounds vacuous after a while.
Beauty blogging also takes up a tremendous amount of time to do properly. Looking for new products, photographing them, testing them, and then finally writing about the experience takes a good many hours. If you feel compelled to do it everyday, you would imagine all that time going down the drain, time that can be spent doing something else more meaningful and rewarding.
And so it all comes down to this: what is the point? I'd be lying if I said that I never once felt like throwing this away, after nine years of blogging. I would also be lying if I said that passion is the only thing that pushes me on. I've been doing this for a while so I'm at a point where it's financially rewarding - I can't just cut off a source of income because lord knows I'm not in the mood to write yet another post on foundation. I'm not the sort of person who refuses to do things because I'm not in the mood. Nothing would move forward!
That's what it came down to, I think, all this angst I had about beauty blogging recently. It's a mood, something intense yet temporary. If I stopped to look, really look, inside my self, I'd know that I still feel excited about a new tube of lipstick. Yeah, even if I have maybe 260 of them at the moment.
I'd still go to a store and swatch up a storm because I'm curious if there's anything new or just different.
I also know that while makeup might sound like such a shallow subject, it changes the way women see themselves, usually for the better. I'd never forget that one time I had dinner with new acquaintances. I had this new red lipstick that I just had to show off, but three women at the table told me that they've never worn red on their lips EVER. They don't even wear makeup because they feel it's "too much". But I got to work. I applied the red on them and they couldn't believe how nice they looked with it! I think they felt sexier and prettier and at the very least more interesting.
How amazing is that? I've come to realize that small transformations, ignited by discovering new options, encourage us to do bigger things.
It is the primary reason I go on. I do these reviews and features not because I want you to buy everything I write about mindlessly. They exist to give you options you may not have known about. Maybe right now you don't care about buying a new blush, but in three, six months, you can go back and see all the blush reviews and choose your new one based on them.
Maybe you think, like those three ladies did, that this stuff would never look good on you or is just plain beyond your skills. But if I can get a foot in and make you try out something new, perhaps you will feel more confident about yourself - as I discovered on my own, many years ago.
I won't stop blogging as long as I can do that for you.
PS This is related. Something I wrote two years ago: WHAT BEAUTY BLOGGING BURNOUT?
