Since I write about products for a living, it’s safe to assume I own a lot of them. After all, I’m a consumer first and a writer second.
I like to find products that make me feel my best, so if enough people are claiming that a certain makeup brush changed their life, I will be trying it. I try to stay ahead of trends and weed out the ones that’ll last. Finding the top influencer rated products that actually work is my hobby.
I’ve been influenced by both brands that are actually worth it like Skims and Beis, and brands that actually aren’t worth it like Drunk Elephant and Tarte. It’s all a part of the process. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.
And because I’m under the firm belief that if you love something, buy two of it, you can imagine my room is a shopper’s paradise for my friends. You need perfume, makeup, clothes, bags? Come to me.
This is a long-winded way of saying my friends often steal my stuff. But that means these products are so worth it that they can’t help but take it from me. Here are my most “borrowed” items:
We entered 2023 fully under the grip of influencers. Names like Alix Earle and Monet McMichael perch in front of their ring lights and we eat up every bit of info about each and every product they use in their makeup routine. In fact, not only are people in love with these influencers, but every product they mention typically leads to nationwide sellouts.
The power of the influencer is not by accident. While social media apps like the ever-powerful titan TikTok are known for their algorithm that show you specific posts based on your interests, this also means a lot of advertising goes on behind the scenes. You may be watching a full minute long video that is essentially a paid-for ad by a brand.
And brands will spare no expense to convince you their product does the impossible. Whether that be longer lashes (more on that later) or a golden bronze sunless tan, there’s a constant stream of videos with an overjoyed, overpaid influencer who “has stumbled across the product to change your life.” And we all believe it.
But as time goes on and TikTok influences us to the extreme, people have begun to find flaws in influencer marketing.
The glass has shattered on the influencer mirage. Consumers have seen them using hair extensions when promoting hairspray, false lashes to accompany a miracle mascara, or using a completely different product and acting like it was another.
Let’s just say there’s been some drama within the beauty industry – so much so that Jeffree Star has risen from YouTube’s ashes and come back to honestly review makeup. Again, not on my 2023 bingo card.
So, if you’ve missed the drama, or want to know who you can trust, trust me - a random girl on the internet who has too much time on her hands and no beauty endorsements to date!
The Tarte Dubai Trip
In January,
Tarte organized a trip for 29 influencers and their plus ones to travel to Dubai and use/post about their products. And I mean, who would say no to this? You and your favorite person get to go to DUBAI and mess around for free? Sign me up.
But the cracks eventually started to show which was all displayed in a TikTok by Barstool’s Jack McGuire. For one, Tarte sent every influencer to Dubai first class on Emirates Airline, where one ticket alone costs around $22,000 (multiply that by two for their plus ones). So $255,000 alone on plane tickets.
And then there’s the stay in villas at the Ritz Carlton Dubai. Which are so expensive you can’t even find pricing online. Not to mention the money they had to pay each influencer to
post their products and show up – Alix Earle charges $70,000 per post alone.
So how can a brand built “on credit cards and a dream” afford such a luxury marketing ploy? It’s suspicious and tone deaf in a world where people can barely afford the rising cost of $7 eggs. When the influencers were barely posting about Tarte products themselves, the jokes began to write themselves.
The whole event showed how out of touch Tarte may be with their consumers. While the company refutes all allegations and “conspiracy theories,” I’m not sold. And besides the viral Juicy Lip Balm, I rarely see any of their products in anyone’s daily routine anymore.
The Mikayla-L'Oréal Drama
So things were touchy with the influencer world in the wake of the Tarte Dubai trip. But beauty guru Mikayla Nogueria, known for her bubbly makeup reviews and selling out products, reviewed L'Oreal's new Telescopic mascara. She was seemingly baffled by the amazing results, and so were viewers…for different reasons.
Quicker than you can say “Dubai,” fans took notice of how it appears Mikayla put extensions on midway through the video to make her lashes look fuller.
There have been witch hunts accusing brands like Makeup By Mario of using the beauty filter when debuting his foundation. No one knows who to trust anymore.
As previously mentioned, Jeffree Star has come back out of beauty review retirement to restore the public’s faith in beauty guru humanity. Times have gotten so dark that we’re actually unaware of what works and what’s a paid advertisement.
Which Brands Aren't Scams?
While things may look bleak, luckily I’ve tried just about every brand of makeup under the influencer sun. Give these influencers their Oscar because I truly believe that they love these products every time. But things aren’t always as they seem.
I’ve gotten patchy foundations, terrible formulas, and cute packaging over quality products. I know a thing or two about being scorned. However, there are a few brands that I will trust every single time, with or without the influencer stamp of approval.
Right now, the trend is “de-influencing” products that garnered hype on TikTok for no reason. To save you the blood, sweat, and tears, here are some makeup brands that influencers actually got right:
Over the summer, I was traveling around from place to place, lugging around hoards of makeup products in a huge bag. It was disorganized. It was chaotic. And tragically, it ended with exploded products and, often, tears.
Throughout my travels, I found it very difficult to fit my full-sized makeup, skincare, and brushes into a tiny travel bag. When I attended Coachella, TSA threw out half of my makeup and an expensive Olaplex set because they were too large. I’m still traumatized.
As a solution, I had the grand idea to curate a travel size makeup bag filled with all of the essentials that would pass through airport security with flying colors. Groundbreaking.
The skincare is even worse. The Magic Cream and Magic Serum minis retail for around $30 each, all for 0.5 ounces of product. You can get around five
full-sized The Ordinary serums for the price of one mini Charlotte Tilbury. Make it make sense.
While Charlotte’s full-sized products are well worth your dollar, their minis are an instant skip. An abomination to the mini makeup community. A laughable joke, if you will.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I opened my Sephora bag, so to save you this heartbreak, I compiled a list of the best minis for your travel bag. May your makeup bag be locked and loaded at all times.
Like many beauty enthusiasts, 23-year-old beauty influencer Eleanor Barnes (widely known as Snitchery) found her love for make-up in middle school— "maybe a little too early," she joked.
She continued to foster her interest and skills over the years, though in private. During her suburban North Virginia upbringing, she wasn't focused on building follower counts, not even on MySpace. It wasn't until she attended Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts in 2014 that she innocently discovered social media and its ability to create connections and friendships.
She said, "Okay, if I want to make friends in college...this is the way to do it—I'm going to do the social media route." As a make-up lover and early selfie queen, Eleanor began posting aesthetically-pleasing looks on her Instagram, with perfect lighting and solid background color tones.
"Because I didn't grow up with social media, I didn't know being an influencer was a thing; I didn't know [this] job existed," she said. "I kind of thought people on Instagram who had a lot of followers were just really popular. I didn't realize they were actually making money."
Understandably, this was the thought process of many early users on the Internet. Social media marketing really got started in 2010 when Amazon partnered with Facebook and began using algorithms to suggest products and services to "friends."
During the summer of her sophomore year at Emerson (majoring in Media Studies and Art History), while working in the crafty aisles of Michael's, Eleanor first realized her influencer aspirations and decided to turn a passing hobby into a full-time career. She quickly began making more money than any average 20-year-old college student.
By 2017, she was completely financially independent, creating make-up looks, tutorials, and eventually (as a self-proclaimed "nerd at heart") leaning into cosplay.
Dating back to the beginnings of her well-curated Instagram, Eleanor posted make-up looks that were heavily inspired by brightly-colored animated characters.
Eleanor's early talent for dramatic make-up routines naturally collided with her other loves: anime and Disney. She grew interested in cosplay as an outsider, not actually wearing full-blown outfits or going to conventions. However, she took the spark of her small interest and ignited it into a unique make-up style.
Her shift to cosplay was "natural progression," she said. She began stepping into more outfits (including props) in her photos, while still keeping her approach make-up focused. In October 2018, she began doing costume make-up, and her followers' positive reactions were more than what Eleanor expected. Thus, she became an active part of the cosplay subculture of the beauty industry.
She channeled her inner anime enthusiast into creating characters from Studio Ghibli and classic Disney princesses with a modern twist. Her passion and love for anime can easily be seen through her tutorials and detailed looks. When we spoke about what anime means to her, she reflected that many beloved series (HunterxHunter being a fave) returned adults to near forgotten lessons we learned from fables and even religion, like "friendship is important" and "don't underestimate yourself."
"I kind of treat [anime] as modern-day fairy tales, in a way," she said. This love translated to another business venture. Eleanor created her first merchandise collection of hoodies, sweatpants, beanies, and dad hats inspired by Japanese lettering and designs.
Eleanor's follower count jumped from thousands to tens of thousands in just a couple of years, helping her solidify fan bases in both the beauty and cosplay communities. But, as the old Hip-Hop adage goes, "mo' money, mo' problems." During her rise, Internet scrutiny rose and an infestation of self-appointed cancel culture police searched for names and profiles to include in popularized buzzwords, and all this eventually caught up with Eleanor.
"Blackfishing" accusations quickly circulated around late 2018, pinning white beauty influencers as perpetrators of using deeper-toned foundations or tanning for longer than necessary, leading them to be regularly mistaken for ethnic women. If this phrase is new to you, look at any Kardashian sisters' early social media photos compared to those of today. More recently, Kim has reawakened the blackfishing conversation with her unveiling of her controversial skincare routine.
Eleanor soon received her own mix of accusations. Given her sudden growth and notoriety and the public's very limited knowledge of her personal and family life, beauty enthusiasts accused the biracial influencer of blackfishing.
"It was weird," she remembered, not understanding the initial accusations. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb of Northern Virginia with her white mother and Black father, Eleanor's experience as "the Black family on the block" was profound.
"I was always the token Black girl," she confessed. Reminiscing about her childhood as a darker-skinned, curly-haired kid, she remembers being asked by a soccer teammate if she was adopted when she was picked up by her white mother. These moments gave context to her experiences of being racially ambiguous in white spaces.
"I was obviously read as Black for 18 years and [realized in college] for the first time I was going to be read as completely white," she said.
In college, Eleanor surrounded herself with Black people and those who looked like her by joining select clubs geared towards Black students and Black women specifically. "For the first time, I felt I was having the culturally Black experience just because I hadn't had the opportunity to have Black friends before," she said. She joined Black and brown organizations on her school campus and attended many protests and rallies surrounding Ferguson and the unjust gunning down of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
"I was approaching these issues as a Black woman because that's how other people saw me and that's how I saw myself," she said.
The accusations of blackfishing eventually prompted the YouTuber to take to her visual platforms to discuss the conversation around her Blackness, and also to open up about her biological background.
As a racially ambiguous woman of color, Eleanor makes it apparent that she understands the nuance of identifying as a Black woman, while acknowledging that her Black experience is a story that thousands of other mixed people identify with.
"I never want to take more up space than I feel is appropriate and I never want to talk over people, but there is a lack of biracial stories in the media," she shared. After sharing her background, she received literally thousands of direct messages from biracial fans who also felt displaced from their communities - not being Black enough for the Black spaces and being too Black for white spaces.
As part of an industry that favors racially ambiguity, fuller lips, and deeper tanned skin, Eleanor is not ignorant about her position in beauty and makeup spheres.
"I own up to every way that I move through life so privileged in a lot of ways to be read as racially ambiguous and white, but that doesn't change the fact that I wasn't read that way for 18 years," she said. Opening up these conversations, helping some find comfort, and educating others about the nuanced experience of ambiguous Black bodies was not an intentional move for Snitchery, but it was a necessary dialogue that received overall positive reception.
The IG Baddie
The beauty industry is a $600 billion machine that feeds on physical insecurities. Beauty influencers are glittery cogs in this massive system, and they do their part accordingly without deviating too far from the demands of advertising agencies and corporations. While many influencers are choosing to take the "safe" path, participating in dramatic disputes ("We're talking about makeup and [the industry] is 80% drama and 20% tutorials," Eleanor points out) while being coy with their followers about their beauty additives, Eleanor has attempted to be completely transparent with fans about what she does and does not do to enhance her looks.
"Everybody's face is starting to look the same, which is a little scary," she said. "For the average person who is interested in beauty, [there] probably is something damaging about having all of your influences having a very, very similar face, that they've all built and that they all paint on everyday. I don't know if that's the healthiest thing in the world."
While the "IG Baddie look" looks great on camera and video, at one point, Eleanor noticed that the look that she'd been doing for years was no longer fitting her face. The almost plastic-looking aesthetic of being flawless no longer served her.
So she began diving into styles from other time periods and from other countries. On her YouTube channel, which has over 300,000 subscribers, Eleanor began experimenting with what worked best for her face terms of eye shape, cheekbone contouring, and highlighter.
"I think it's silly to think one particular makeup style can be universally flattering on everybody. And we've gotten to a point in Western make-up where only really one style is being presented to us," she said. Through her personal expansion beyond Western beauty norms, Eleanor was able to find more of what works for her; she's dropped almost 50% of her "IG baddie" makeup routines.
"I'm never going to knock anyone's makeup style, but I just realized wearing that much makeup [daily] was not for me," she said. By teaching herself how to do her makeup intuitively, instead of checking Instagram to see what's trending amongst the beauty girls, Eleanor found new looks and trends that fit her face and daily routine more organically and fluidly.
The Future
Eleanor and her Snitchery brand have come a long way from simply using social media as a way to find friends. At only 23-years-old, she is financially independent, an entrepreneur, a caring and compassionate human being and, above all else, a self-aware adult using her platform to spread awareness of mental healthcare, climate change, the importance of voting, human rights and much more.
While there seems to be a standard, popular look that's generally considered normal in the industry, Snitchery is working her way to changing this for the better, allowing everyone to live their truth. More influencers are moving away from fully-covered, face-tuned selfies and are getting back to loving their natural faces (or at least something close).
Thanks to all this, Eleanor has a major future in the beauty industry. With aspirations of reaching the million follower mark on Instagram (which is only months away); she's also in the early stages of development for her own product line.
"[There are] a lot of big holes in the makeup industry that product is not necessarily filling, and I'm going to be the one to do it!" she said.
We can only hope that popular influencers in all industries, from make-up artists to our favorite gamers, can understand and respect their position like Snitchery does, making transparency a requirement instead of an option.
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