When you think of the beauty industry, you may cast your mind to immaculately made-up counter ladies who are all toothy smiles and commission induced chatter, or even a beauty blogger showing us the tricks of the trade but secretly getting paid thousands to tell us what we think are genuine thoughts.
Despite what many people may assume, it’s not all about meeting skincare gurus, boxes of free treats and endless, glamorous events with makeovers and champagne. Sure, there are some perks, but in the long run you’ve got to be pretty committed to get there.
Before this, I’d only worked in retail, mainly in fashion, womenswear and accessories, so I thought it would be a nice, easy transition into beauty because they’re so similar, right? Women wear dresses and shoes, but they also wear foundation and moisturizer.
1. It’s huge.
I mean big. According to The Economist, the global beauty industry—consisting of skin care worth $294 billion; make-up, $28 billion; $48 billion of hair-care products; and $18 billion of perfumes—is growing at up to 7% a year more than twice the rate of the developed world’s GDP. To put it bluntly, this is insane. From rubber, cotton, silks and over a thousand dyes and materials, the fashion industry is a huge consumer of the world’s resources. The amount of brands that I work with is overwhelming and there are new ones cropping up every day, with new-fangled tricks and treatments to wonder and amaze us. For more on the beauty industry, click here.
2. It’s an unending world of stress.
The lead times for products are much quicker, which means product launches don’t happen twice a year, like the fashion industry, which is constant. The gifts with purchases, the events, the offers, there’s so much going on all the time that you can sometimes feel like you’re running on a treadmill and once you’re glad that one mile is done, you have to do another straight away.
3. The brands are a bit precious.
I can’t tell you exactly who, but the most luxury brands are the real nitpickers, which makes my job just so much easier. But because they’re our brand partners we have to keep up good relationships. In other words, if they want us to do something, we have to bow down and do it for them. Each brand has its own way of working, its own rules, its visions and values to uphold – it pulses through everything they do, and it doesn’t mess up making sure we know all about it. More on brands.
4. There’s a lot to learn.
Before I started, I didn’t know my Trichotherapy from my Tri-Enzyme (and I’m not sure if I still do), it was like going back to science lessons all over again. There are thousands of obscure products with wonderfully weird ingredients, and each brand has their own patented formulas all claiming to do magical things to your skin, hair and body. New trends and discoveries mean that not only will you have to revise the history of all of these pretty much. but learn all about the new ones too. After a while, you start to feel a bit like a pharmaceutical master.
5. It’s multi-cultural.
What’s great about beauty is that it is seen differently in every culture. Each country has its own tricks for looking younger and having better skin and different ideals of beauty. When working in beauty, you will have the knowledge of each culture at your fingertips to immerse yourself in and learn from. Beauty trends.
6. Much of a beauty brand’s popularity is based on word of mouth alone.
I am a copywriter for a beauty company, and what makes my job quite tricky is convincing first-time consumers to buy products they may not have purchased before. But think about it, when you buy a new product, what is one of the major factors in your decision-making? Your best mate’s sister swears by it, right? So you thought you’d try it too? Thought so, hence the rise in beauty bloggers. Real girls are telling other real girls how real these products are.
7. There are occasionally free things.
This is a perk. Of course, it does depend on which position you’re working in, but usually, when I used to go to brand meetings to talk through launches, etc, or if a brand was particularly impressed with our services, a goodie bag would be handed out. This was to ensure we could try out the new products and then market them to the best of our ability and keep us sweet. But don’t be fooled; it comes at a price – the bigger the bag, the harder you’ll work.
8. We are not all beauty experts.
If we’re not beauty queens, then we must at least know all the ins and outs and the secrets of the industry then, right? Wrong. Although I do come across hundreds of experts in my job, I am not one of them. I may sit and write about the perfect moisturizer for your skin type, or the best new lipstick on the market that will blow your socks off, but truthfully I barely have a beauty regime myself and have no clue what I’m writing half the time.
9. A lot of it is made up.
Have you ever listened to the weird-sounding scientific facts in those beauty adverts and thought I’d give that a Google? Well, if you were to, you’d find that a lot of the names in the beauty industry are pretty much hoo-ha.
Yes, the industry is worth billions, so there must be some truth in it, but unfortunately, the market is now so saturated that the brands need to start pushing the boat out on the science front to a) make it believable and b) keep the customers interested and wanting more.