![]() ![]() Bathed in the glow of ring lights, they presented tutorials on elaborate techniques: contouring cheekbones, creating smoky eyes, effecting dramatic transformations. Meanwhile, on YouTube, amateur makeup artists were becoming celebrities. Celebrities (Rihanna, Kylie Jenner) started going beyond ordinary endorsement deals and launching makeup lines of their own. Beauty, in the twenty-tens, became pop culture. Weiss spent time in low-level magazine roles before spotting her opening: alongside all the blogs dedicated to personal style, why not one about beauty? With sponsored posts and affiliate links, bloggers quickly began to demonstrate their promotional might, silencing whatever gripes had greeted their arrival in runway front rows. “Fashion was one of the first industries to recognize the usefulness of bloggers and social media power users,” Taylor Lorenz, a reporter at the Washington Post, notes in “ Extremely Online” (Simon & Schuster), a book about the business of Internet fame. Style bloggers were already unsettling fashion-world hierarchies. What she really wanted, she said at the time, was to become an editor-in-chief-an ambition just beginning to sound slightly old-fashioned. But, rather than pursue reality stardom, Weiss returned to New York to work in fashion and magazines. She appeared in three episodes in 2007, and, Meltzer writes, carried herself “like some kind of insanely confident apparition who has come to show the laconic and provincial stars of the show what working at a magazine really takes.” She could have been a villain but instead became a fan favorite. Her boss at Ralph Lauren put her up for an internship at Teen Vogue her boss at Teen Vogue put her up for a role on “The Hills,” a reality show whose heroines held dubious internships at the magazine’s West Coast office. As a teen-ager, she talked her way into an internship at Ralph Lauren after babysitting for a neighbor who worked at the company. In her senior yearbook, she was, Meltzer notes, voted not “Best Dressed” but, rather, “Most Likely to Be Famous.” Two qualities that worked in her favor were her beauty (she was an occasional model for Seventeen) and her self-possessed ambition. Weiss grew up amid the bland affluence of Connecticut, where a precocious interest in fashion set her apart from the mall-prep aesthetic that prevailed locally. “I would be at the Valentino dinner right now,” Weiss says when Meltzer mentions the idea, then laughs-in relief, Meltzer thinks. ![]() “There is a sort of parallel universe where Weiss became an influencer instead of a CEO,” Meltzer recalls thinking during one of their interviews. She operated in the realm of the startup others’ ambitions played out amid the “creator economy”-land of Instagram influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and more. ![]() But Weiss is also just one of many young people to seek a fortune on the basis of personality, social-media savvy, and the promise of authenticity. Weiss is an exceptional success-“the last girlboss standing,” as Marisa Meltzer writes in “ Glossy” (One Signal), a new book on Weiss and her company. Within five years, Into the Gloss had given rise to a beauty brand, Glossier within a decade, Glossier was a billion-dollar business. Not long after the Miami photo shoot, Weiss started her own beauty Web site, Into the Gloss. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. An apparently heartfelt recommendation could inspire not just a purchase but some pro-bono promotional work, too. Kroes was a L’Oréal “Ambassador” getting people to buy such products as Sublime Bronze ProPerfect Salon Airbrush Self-Tanning Mist was her job. There was the value of personal recommendations, which held up even when the person doing the recommending was perhaps not unbiased. There was the fast, casual intimacy of talking about beauty products-the conversations about lip gloss or deodorant that could make a bar bathroom (or a photo-shoot trailer) feel like a slumber party. The episode contained, in miniature, the forces Weiss would harness in her career. She pitched a Vogue beauty editor and wrote up the recommendation, in what became her first byline for the magazine. Weiss picked up a bottle at the drugstore and was converted. This one, Kroes insisted, was different-she said it didn’t even smell. “She was like, ‘All the other ones are crazy,’ ” Weiss later recalled. ![]() Kroes was among the highest-paid models in the world, and (it emerged) a big fan of L’Oréal Sublime Bronze ProPerfect Salon Airbrush Self-Tanning Mist. Weiss was, at the time, an assistant to a freelance stylist. In 2010, Emily Weiss was working on a Vogue photo shoot in Miami when she and Doutzen Kroes got to talking about self-tanner. ![]()
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