I remember the launch of the primary ever Glossier products in 2014. I used to be the wonder editor of ASOS Magazine on the time and happened to be in Recent York, so attended the pop-up with my co-workers. Once there, having shelled out the obligatory $80 for a set of 4 products, the sales assistant snapped my picture and, in a surreal moment, Emily Weiss stepped onto the shop floor and photobombed me. Despite having paid through the nose for branded Vaseline and a twig that made my face immediately red – alongside a fairly good moisturiser and tinted moisturiser (unless you had skin any darker than a flippantly tanned Caucasian) – I’d temporarily entered the lauded, aspirational world of Into the Gloss, and now had the Instagram post to prove it.

At its height, Glossier could command a crowd in numbers often reserved for pop stars and cult leaders. Glossier didn’t just create beauty products, it built a way of life around itself and ushered in what we might now call a “vibe shift” in beauty. After years of the full-face YouTube guru make-up look reigning supreme, Glossier harnessed the parable of the ‘cool girl’ to bring us the my-face-but-dewier, no-make-up make-up look packaged in millennial pink pouches that became hot accessories in their very own right.

By 2019, the brand’s NYC flagship store was averaging 50,000 visitors per thirty days with a perpetual queue. A pop-up in Seattle saw people waiting for hours to get in. “It’s a full city block long,” Weiss said to her team in a gathering on the time, showing them pictures on her phone. Marisa Meltzer was in that meeting with Weiss and a number of the brand’s top executives. “A minimum of I feel it was a gathering,” she writes. “I couldn’t shake the sensation it was a pantomime of a gathering for a journalist’s sake.”

In her recent book coming out this October, Meltzer shines a UV flashlight on the brand and its famous girlboss founder. Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier charts the rise of Glossier, following Weiss as she leverages an internship at Teen Vogue into an industry-disrupting blog after which culture-defining beauty brand. After all, after the rise comes a fall and the book also delves into the following backlash against girl bosses and the plateauing of the brand because the industry eventually catches up and trends inevitably move on.

It’s easy to forget now how ground-breaking Into the Gloss and Glossier felt on the time. Into the Gloss shook up beauty writing and its importance – making narratives out of showing people’s habits, so far more intimate and immediate than the boring magazine pages showcasing advertisers’ products. Glossier was the primary start-up beauty brand of the social media age. Its distinctive branding of pastel pink and sans serif fonts ended up defining an era in design. The wonder boom followed Glossier’s success: Net-a-Porter launched beauty in 2013, ASOS magnified its beauty spend in 2017, and celebrity brands followed in what looks like their hundreds of thousands.

On the time of peak Into the Gloss, I used to be reading it each day and would quiz my US hair, make-up and nail contacts on what Weiss was like. The reply was often: “She’s super nice WHEN she desires to be!” – an assessment Meltzer backs up in Glossy. “Weiss was preternaturally good at reading people,” she writes. “She knew when to intimidate and when to wield her big smile.” Weiss was just an assistant when she began approaching celebrities to be on her blog. Flouting the style magazine hierarchy entirely, she would meet them on set after which badger them endlessly until they agreed to be interviewed for her blog. Interns and assistants rarely get more access than fetching a beverage for giant names, and to contact them asking to be a part of your personal project could easily detonate your employment should they tip off your boss but Weiss was fearless.

Weiss approached her beauty brand with the identical determination and persistence, winning over enterprise capitalists to lift enough to get Glossier off the bottom. Over time, she pulled in $266m (£213m) to scale the brand. At times, it felt just like the hype and the approach to life of the brand was overshadowing the products themselves. “Glossier was the last word brand,” a former staffer is quoted within the book saying. “We were selling Vaseline for $12 per half an oz. – so it’s all in regards to the brand. Weiss knew that to a point and thought – I should be inspired by people who find themselves cool and interesting and that’s how I’m going to seek out that sparkly magic dust.”

Throughout the book, Meltzer is hyper-aware of the necessity to reveal a profound truth about Weiss’s character and works hard to tug this off. Concurrently, Weiss herself, who initially agreed to be interviewed for the project, knows this and in an try to shield her private life, becomes increasingly recalcitrant, withdrawing access. Glossy still brings us great snippets. Parts of the book make Weiss sound like an Instagram feed personified: her habit of answering interview questions with inspirational quotes from entrepreneur biographies; that her apartment’s décor mirrors the pink and red themes of Glossier branding and store interiors; her obsession with astrology that led a few of her colleagues to suspect she was making business decisions based on planetary alignments; and a proclivity for blowing the budget on floral arrangements for Glossier’s HQ – which was resented by employees on lower than presidential salaries.

None of that is irreparably damning, and indeed, not even the worst charges against her – most of them to be found on a whistle-blowing Instagram account called @outtathegloss created by disillusioned former staffers – proved to be fatal. Outta the Gloss alleged that retail staff were underpaid and subjected to racial microaggressions from customers and sometimes managers, complaints which the corporate took on board, without 100 per cent fulfilling the collective’s demands.

At the tip of the story, Glossier’s growth has plateaued and Weiss steps down as CEO, though stays on the board and actively involved. In 2022 they laid off a 3rd of their workforce. As a author for an audience of young women, I’d been quite invested within the girl boss movement and the cancellation of so lots of them didn’t necessarily feel progressive to me. Not because they didn’t do anything improper, but because they were held to much higher standards than male business leaders.

We are able to’t ignore that Instagram, the platform that undeniably fuelled Glossier’s meteoric rise, launched, peaked and started to dwindle at almost the precise moments Glossier did. Whether the brand can reinvent itself because the go-to for Gen Z, the TikTok generation, stays to be seen. Its cool factor – the design and packaging – is indelibly linked to Millennials, particularly “Millennial Pink”. It’s not particularly inclusive, and doesn’t even pretend to be sustainable.  

I still miss reading ITG and look back fondly on the times of Instagramming beauty products next to vases of flowers. I enjoyed my Glossier products but never repurchased them. For a nostalgic look presently, or for anyone enthusiastic about fashion, beauty and business culture, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

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