Sunday Things: Why A Beauty Blooger's Blood Type is Likely Passion

Have you ever thought about what goes into beauty blogging? Well, let’s begin with the basics and why a beauty blogger’s blood type is likely passion. Beauty blogging is in the passion category and if you were to ask a beauty blogger to rename their official blood type, they’d likely choose to baptise it as such and here are some reasons why:

The joy felt when using beauty products and the compulsion to share that joy with others.
Sharing positive or negative experiences with beauty products or procedures.
Creating a safe space for personal expression.
The ability to work from anywhere and at any time.
Advocacy for consumers and lobbying the beauty industry to keep pace with consumer concerns.
Filling an information gap especially where insufficient information can adversely impact the end user.
Helping to build grass-roots awareness around personal care concerns.
Exchanging ideas.
Using beauty blogging as a way to create new opportunities or collaborating with existing companies to develop products and services with widespread appeal.
Finding innovative ways to help brands enhance existing consumer relationships.

In other words, beauty blogging is often born of a desire to do more than just review a trending serum or the latest incarnation of red lipstick. Oftentimes, what you’ll find behind the manicured, contoured or non-toured (without contour) facade of a beauty blogger is an individual who really wants to use their platform to advocate for others. Beauty bloggers tend to be individuals who want to see fairness become the order of the day especially in an industry that tends to be myopic. Oftentimes, we also have the desire to see industry-specific injustices or shortcomings righted.

Passion has to run through the veins of beauty bloggers because it requires discipline, tenacity, conviction and the ability to remain fortified in the face of rejection and motivated when things become overwhelming or seem pointless. It’s important to know that beauty blogging requires huge demands on one’s time, as it often takes weeks or months of testing products in various scenarios to determine how they perform before ever daring to utter a word in favour of or against a product or even a service.

Also, I increasingly feel there’s a need to clarify the term beauty blogging. Beauty blogging means that one carves out time to test then write about then photograph products, then edit one’s writing and photography. It implies learning, often by fire and frustration about website development and maintenance, SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies, marketing strategies, social media management strategies, photography fundamentals along with writing strategies and that’s just a snippet.

Beauty blogging in its true sense is not simply waking up and gushing about the latest makeup and skincare releases on a whim, although anyone can do that on Instagram or Twitter. Instead, it requires learning about and becoming familiar with product ingredients, basic skin and hair principles or taking time to familiarise oneself with a company’s background. It also means contributing to awareness building about the ways in which experiences with products may differ for various skin tones and skin types, hair types or even sensitivities. It requires seeking knowledge about common skin disorders such as acne or eczema, or learning what may or may not work for a contact lens wearer; or setting out on a mission to find a fragrance that won’t set off migraines on behalf of a reader let’s say.

A beauty blogger’s blood type is likely passion especially because much of what it takes to do this happens behind the scenes, which includes the costs involved. For instance, there are technical costs associated with keeping one’s blog live online and maintaining its functions. Add in the legal aspects of running a blog and you see where one really has to want to do this. It’s quite common to go to bed thinking about one’s blog, then wake up to it being one’s first thought. Toss in the moments laying awake in the middle of the night with blogging on one’s brain, which then leads to throwing off warm covers and exchanging it for the cold blue light coming from one’s computer and you get the idea. So being a beauty blogger draws upon a host of inclinations driven by passion.

History’s roster is peppered with the names of women and men who started cosmetic companies that still exist today. And when one pulls back the curtain, those companies were started because the direction of the tide of the time needed to be changed, or because there was a desperate need for safer alternatives to what existed. In order to pull that off, passion had to be one of the central motivating factors. When we think about women such as Estee Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Madame CJ Walker, Helena Rubenstein, Gabrielle Chanel or Jeanne Gatineau, it is difficult to not be amazed and inspired by their courage, their intention to be self-determining and their recognition of the role that beauty and personal care products play in a person’s life. And so I believe similar compulsions fuel beauty bloggers because there are blanks that need to be filled in that will ultimately help someone, somewhere.

Sometimes I think that passion has become a dirty word or a throw-away word because it’s everywhere. Dare I say that the idea or concept of passion has become a marketing tool to sell books and courses and in some ways, it’s used as a weapon to whip people into a pedestrian or forced kind of passion.

Passion has to happen organically, it should tap one on one’s shoulder, speak to one in quiet moments or whisper in one’s ear in the midst of a crowded life. Passion has to be felt, then welcomed, then acted upon, then shared in some way. And experiencing it should be so liberating, that when the naysayers chime in you feel very comfortable with quietly ignoring their input. So there it is, I’m a beauty blogger and my blood type is passion and I hope this helps you to find yours. Oh, and one last thing, do check out last Wednesday’s post where I detailed the latest batch of goodies I hauled from the French Pharmacy [here].