Beauty Bloggers Are The Lowest Form Of Freeloader

A story in the Times today chronicles the "growing power" of beauty bloggers. Hey, how come we never read those?, we wondered, and resolved to end that neglectful habit today and point our clickers to every one of the Top 10 Beauty Blogs as anointed by last week's WWD. Wrote Fabulista over at beautybloggingjunkie (Motto: "Beauty is the promise of happiness"): "Kiehl's in-store customers can also customize lip trios for Valentine's Gifts!" (punctuation hers.) Meanwhile over at Makeupbag, we learn "this limited-edition Clarins Single Eye Colour in Sunny Yellow is making us very happy today." AllAboutThePretty was all about the new "hip" line being marketed to the blog generation by Avon. "How cute is this mark Little Block Box palette by Avon. It contains the cutest baked shimmer cubes." Nice vocab! But all was not well in the beautyblogosphere, as the more introspective Nadine Haobsh (pictured) had actually read the New York Times story:

Oh no! It makes us look like swag whores."

About a year ago this shit would have had my very soul steaming out through my ears. I would have thought it was disgraceful and foul that so many women would be so gaily complicit in the efforts of the large cosmetics companies to ever-fatten the profit margins gleaned by milking the insecurity of women for all its worth. About a year ago I would hear a beauty editor friend tell me about how Herbalessences flew her to the Amazon for a week-long "organic beauty" tour or some shit and I would barely be able to restrain my puke at the perpetuation of so much pointless waste. And to think that independent bloggers — free from the advertising relationships and product pages to fill that prevent magazines from actually explaining what a fucking scam the whole thing is — can be bought with a few boxes of free anti-aging cream? That "retails" for $90, but cost $3 to fucking make?? Who don't write negative reviews under the reasoning that "we don't want to hurt a company"???

Lady, does a "company" bleed?

But yeah, seriously, I don't give a shit anymore. I mean, there's a war in Iraq and a war in Kenya and date rape is still de facto legal and Paris Hilton is still famous and soon enough there will be a huge recession and it will wipe all this bullshit away and we will all stop lining the pockets of LVMH and Dr. Motherfucking Pericone with our ill-advised purchases of $65 tinted moisturizer and $30 lipgloss.

Beauty and Blogs Come Of Age: Swag, Please! [NY Times]

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