After the launch of digital beauty empire Into the Gloss, the sites founder, Emily Weiss, has done nothing but remarkable things to empower women in arguably the most vacuous industry there is: beauty. This is impressive for many reasons. Take, for example, the sites most popular feature—The Top Shelf—that showcases women’s beauty collections photographed (often by Weiss herself) in their respective homes with detailed information on a) what products they love and b) why they love them. But the feature is sprinkled with random anecdotes, life advice, and personal stories by the interviewee—most of which leave you with an overwhelming sense of emotion post-read. Keeping in theme with women-empowerment, Weiss has just launched a sister-company to Into the Gloss called Glossier, a risky dive into the cosmetics industry with the debut of a skin-focused set of products.
“Glossier is a response to real life and how girls who I’ve been learning about for the past four years—be it through interviewing them or through reading comments on Into the Gloss—where beauty is at in 2014,” Weiss gushes to me. “So Glossier came about because there wasn’t a brand that I related to and made me think, ‘Oh, I really want to be apart of that community.’ Into the Gloss came about from lack of communication in a sense, and I really wanted to have context around beauty products. I wanted beauty products to be contextualized for me by like-minded people, and I think Glossier came about from a lack of brand identity in terms of a modern beauty brand. And the name Glossier is a reference to dossier. So it’s really building into this kind of new collection of like-minded objects and hopefully collecting everything we’re putting out. We’re building out a collection of new essentials.”
The first essential being dubbed “Phase 1”, a 4-piece skincare set that consists of the Moisturizing Primer, Soothing Face Mist, Perfecting Skin Tint, and—my personal favorite—Balm Dotcom, a universal skin salve. I ask Weiss why she decided to start with skincare. “We started with skin because we really wanted to encourage people to really show their skin, even if their skin isn’t that great. But the idea is that that’s fine; it’s okay if your skin isn’t great, you don’t necessarily have to cover everything up and hide. It’s fine to just take good care of your skin, and let your skin be, rather than putting a focus on having your skin look spotless. Why not focus on your skin being glowy, fresh, and healthy looking? That’s really what these four products do. The idea was really to create a really great foundation—kind of like redefine foundation for girls as being not something you use to pancake your face, but rather your foundation is actually your skin, what you’re born with.”
But obviously this is just the beginning for Weiss and Glossier. For the holiday season, Glossier is launching two limited edition liquid liners—gold and silver—designed to mimic foil. “I think it looks really cool to have really fresh skin and just do some insane eyeliner that’s not black, but actually more metallic; and you can do such cool drawings, whether it’s a classic cat eye shape, or if you’re only drawing on the inner corner, or only underneath. It’s such an easy, amazing way to really differentiate you from everyone else. I was really inspired by Romeo and Juliet, with Leo and Claire, and those kinds of neon colors with the fish tank and angel wings used in the movie. Just looking really young and angelic, but then having this kind of accent that can make you look like Grimes, too.” Come early next year, however, Glossier will be launching even more skincare and cosmetics. Weiss reveals to me “In January we’re going to be having a really cool homage to starting the 2015 year fresh by refreshing yourself. You know, you start thinking about the year and who you want to be and what you’re leaving behind. And in February we’re going to start talking about makeup, our version of makeup.” Needless to say, we can’t wait to see.
