‘Instagram Face’: Is It the End of Good Makeup?
The
day before the Rebecca Minkoff fashion show in September, the makeup
artist Gato Zamora and the 17-year-old YouTube blogger Amanda Steele sat
side by side examining Mr. Zamora’s work. He had transformed a model’s
fair-with-some-redness complexion into glowing and even. The foundation
was imperceptible. He applied a pinkish nude lipstick. Ms. Steele and
Mr. Zamora leaned in, heads nearly touching. They agreed: A balm would
be better. “Maybe she’ll look more like a teenager,” he said.
Ms. Steele started her YouTube channel when she was 10. She has since amassed nearly three million subscribers and 2.7 million Instagram followers
with a mix of engaging beauty tutorials and lifestyle updates. Her
style is relaxed and genuine, and she is undeniably talented at
connecting with an audience by doing her own makeup.
“Maybelline
asked if I’d be interested in working with them on some shows,” she
said. “It’s exciting that they value my opinion.”
Mr.
Zamora began his career in his early 20s, right around the time Ms.
Steele was born. Maybelline thrust the two together to lead the makeup
team for Rebecca Minkoff. The pairing was a first. Makeup at fashion
shows is always a team sport, but never one with two head coaches.
The
Maybelline experiment comes at a time of tension in the makeup
business. Some professionals who have followed a traditional path of
assisting senior artists and building their portfolios over years,
sometimes decades, are bristling at bloggers, YouTube stars and
Instagram gurus who have unconventional and more visible roads to
success. But this shake-up in makeup goes beyond issues of taste and
tenure. It’s about an industry being forced by technology to mature, one
that is experiencing the frustration, fear and introspection
characteristic of a major transition.
The
first area of criticism is the prevalence of “Instagram makeup.” The
aesthetic is familiar: eyebrows constructed by powder, pencil and
concealer; faces heavily contoured and highlighted. Social media makeup
enthusiasts become facsimiles of one another — all some version of Kim
Kardashian West.
Social
media “absolutely perpetuates one aesthetic,” said Kevin James Bennett,
a longtime makeup artist and advocate for his professional peers. “It’s
like looking at a bunch of clones. They’re Botoxed, filled and
surgeried to look like Kim. I love how they all say, ‘Just be you,’ when
they all look the same. And they have legions of fans who follow them
like Stepford wives but who cannot afford to alter themselves the way
these people do.”
Certainly
there are talented self-taught artists on social media. And trends
change. Ms. Kardashian West has moved toward a more natural makeup look.
Nonetheless, “Instagram face” is representative of a bigger creative
threat: waning individuality.
“It’s so rare in fashion today that people are eccentric,” said the makeup artist Nick Barose, whose social media feeds
are a mix of posts showing his work on celebrity clients (Lupita
Nyong’o, Alicia Vikander, Jane Fonda) and tongue-in-cheek commentary on
the industry. His outspoken online persona works; it’s helped him get
big jobs. But, he added, “Social media can kill authenticity, especially
the more followers you have.”
Nika
Kislak, a professional makeup artist based in Moscow, is known for work
that is both imaginative and elegant. She was the chief makeup artist
for L’Oréal Paris, Russia for three years but came to international
attention last spring when her work was reposted on Instagram by Pat McGrath, the doyenne of runway makeup artists. Her career marries old and new traditions.
“Instagram
provides the opportunity to make your dreams come true faster and make
money faster,” Ms. Kislak said. “I dreamt of this kind of freedom as a
child. But as we know, freedom is not free.” She was referring to the
toll that social media can take on creativity. “It was much easier for
me as a beginning makeup artist 14 years ago, without Instagram, because
no one influenced my sense of beauty,” she said.
In September, an E! News story
deepened the fissure between the old and new schools when it reported
that in the new world of celebrity hair and makeup, success is measured
in selfies. The article placed tangible value on behind-the-scenes snaps
that makeup artists take with their clients, alleging that some artists
are accepting social media posts from models and actresses (either with
the artist or tagging the artist) as payment for their glam-squad
services.
“You
have these new Insta-artists who are being picked up by publicists and
agencies to work on their celebrities,” Mr. Bennett said. “So now that
other artist who would have charged a fee for that job, his agent isn’t
getting called. Some makeup artists have also lowered their rates to
contend with the change in demand.”
Patrick Ta, an artist in Los Angeles with over 570,000 Instagram followers,
has been doing makeup for three years and works with models and
actresses, including Gigi Hadid, Olivia Munn and Joan Smalls. He was
called out by other makeup artists in the E! News story as being a
selfies-for-pay artist.
“It’s
definitely not true,” he said. “When I first moved to L.A., I would do
makeup on my friends who were bigger on Instagram. If they wanted their
makeup done, I would do it. That was my way of creating photos for my
digital portfolio. What’s the difference between that and an older
artist doing test shoots for free for their portfolio?”
Another area of complaint is the lack of transparency in paid social media posts.
YouTube and Instagram influencers — bloggers who are typically not
professional artists — may share paid posts with their audiences with
little or no notice that the content is sponsored.
“It
has to be clear to the reasonable consumer that the content they’re
viewing is an advertisement,” said Bonnie Patten, executive director of Truth in Advertising,
a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “It’s not enough to hide that info
in the fine print.” In August, the organization filed a complaint with
the Kardashian-Jenners for social media ads that looked like
testimonials.
“Most
of these companies are very sophisticated,” said Ms. Patten, who added
that bloggers needed to be educated and required “to disclose the
material connection.” The Federal Trade Commission has cracked down on
sponsored posts in fashion, filing suit against Lord & Taylor for a
2015 campaign in which it paid 50 influencers to post about a sundress.
So far, no complaints have been filed against beauty brands or makeup
social media stars.
Beauty
brands may soon look to a different type of influencer, one with a
smaller, more dedicated following. “My team is paying attention to those
people who have 10 to 100,000 followers,” said Robert DeBaker, the
chief executive of Becca Cosmetics. “I’m interested in this person who
has a point of view, and that’s probably not a point of view she’s being
paid to have.”
“How
I see this rolling is that the brands that will be successful and the
influencers who will be successful are those who keep the idea of
authenticity,” Mr. DeBaker said. “That will be defined by being very
transparent.” Explicit partnerships, like Maybelline’s fashion week
collaboration with Amanda Steele, may be the future.
Backstage
at the Rebecca Minkoff show, Ms. Steele was pressed by reporters. She
discussed how the smoky shadow-liner look is perfect for her YouTube
audience. In its undone sexiness, the makeup embodied the young girl on
the go.
“I
find it extremely normal that these worlds would be brought together,”
Mr. Zamora said of the collaboration. “Makeup has never been so famous
as it is now, and it’s because of these boys and girls, blogging in
their houses. People love this, and the business has reacted.”
“Sometimes,”
he added, “we think that just because you are not famous with social
media, you aren’t succeeding. But this is just one tool. On social media
you build your followers, but to build a career you must work.”
