In the Beauty Disruptors series, BeautyMatter speaks to those breaking the mold of the traditional beauty industry, from shining a light on controversial issues to paving an alternative discourse of its themes.

Ellen Atlanta knows firsthand the power of beauty, be it as a cultural phenomenon, a platform for brand identity, or a tool that, depending on usage, can either connect or disconnect (be it to ourselves or others).

As a brand consultant and writer specializing in Gen Z and millennial culture, she has worked with companies like WAH Nails, Beautystack, and Flannels on digital and print campaigns. Her consulting clients include Estée Lauder, The Unseen Beauty, and Milk Makeup. She helped rebrand Beautycon with creative agency WeThemUs, and worked on the brand launch for CBD wellness brand POLLEN. As a beauty journalist, she’s written about subject matter ranging from Black masculinity to sci-fi feminism, as well as being founding Social Media Editor at Dazed Beauty.

Atlanta’s work also extends to female empowerment, being a founding member of Restless Network and The Stack World, which prioritize a reimagining of digital spaces for increased opportunities and upliftment. She was headhunted by UN Women UK to help create safer public spaces for women and marginalized genders nationwide.

Her latest writing Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women, described as “The Beauty Myth meets Black Mirror,” is a page-turning exploration of beauty standards, tracing back to ancient times all the way through to premonitions of a dystopian future. From Cleopatra to Kylie Jenner, from Foucault to OnlyFans, Atlanta delves into the origins and impacts of beauty culture in an incredibly multifaceted deep dive that leaves the reader feeling a wide range of emotions, from amusement to rage to sadness. Rather than being a purely academic study of the subject, Atlanta brings the vulnerability of her own and many other female experiences—be they cis or trans women, Black or biracial, young or old, medical experts or everyday acquaintances—into the experience. It’s engaging, but above all, it’s truly human.

The statistics that accompany its publication show the need for a conversation around beauty standards now more than ever: 28% of 18-to 34-year-old UK women have had a form of cosmetic treatment, while the UK is the world’s fastest growing market for facial filler with a 70% increase in consultation requests over 2020. Online media, with its selfies and filters, is pushing us into a new realm of beauty culture.

Unpacking and dissecting the larger currents that drive our behavior, even if subconsciously, Atlanta manages to both be simultaneously critical and compassionate about the impact of our internal and external dialogues, our more overt and our more subtle behaviors around beauty. Atlanta sat down with BeautyMatter to discuss beauty-led community and self-expression, curating digital platforms to our benefit, and daily acts of defiance.

I wanted to kick off by going right back to the beginning of your life and where your original interest in beauty began.

It's always a funny one because I feel like I got into beauty accidentally. It was never a “this is going to be my career” kind of intentional decision-making. I grew up in a small village called Leicestershire right in the middle of the UK. I always knew I wanted to be in something fairly creative. My mom was in fashion, so I was always making magazines. I found a beauty blogger on YouTube by accident and realized you can have a whole magazine for yourself. 

I convinced some of my friends to do one with me because I was too scared at the time to do it by myself and have everyone in school find out and think it wasn't very cool. Then after a couple years of doing that, we went and did our own ones. Then I was doing my nails a different design every day; crazy nail art or sticking beads to my nails. Not much has changed.

I started posting my outfits on Instagram as well, to no followers. I was not famous, I was not getting stuff out of this at all. Sharmadean Reid, who was based in London and owned a salon called WAH Nails, at the time had three books about nail art but also platformed loads of different girls. I had her books, and one day I woke up to this email that said, “Next time you're in London, come and get a free nail appointment.” I went to London after my exams at school and drew out my nail set. I put glitter glue on it, I colored them all in, and the nails then got recreated in a photo shoot for Wonderland magazine. I remember seeing that and putting that on my Instagram. It was mind blowing. 

When I was in my first year of university, we had to profile somebody and I emailed Sharmadean. I went to the salon and interviewed her for 20 minutes. Then she asked if I wanted a job on the spot. I ended up doing newsletter interviews, and then I started to do social media [content]. Then she asked if I would come and join the team full time and pause my degree to launch Wah Soho, which was this very tech forward salon space next to Supreme in central London. We had VR headsets where you could have digital nail art. We had a nail art printer. Everything was designed from scratch to center beauty, technology, and community. I worked with Sha for a year and a half to build that space and the community there. It became this community hub. 

Through that, I got this reputation as being someone who could build brands, who knew community, who knew what young girls wanted. I was very good at the psychology side of it, identifying different types of customers, what they were into, and what kind of nail art they would get. You could often guess when people would come in what they were going to ask for. We could be on the forefront of trends as well. I feel like these salon spaces are often where trends originate from.

I started consulting. I then got headhunted by Dazed to be one of the founding editors of Dazed Beauty when they launched, because they'd seen what I did at WAH. It built and built, and I grew this career in beauty completely unintentionally. Beauty, for me, was always rooted in this space of connection, care, and self expression. I was never really in the product side. I was always about how can we use this as a vehicle to bring women into a space and to do fun stuff? One of the best things about WAH was that we would get asked in a lot interviews what's important about having your nails done? We'd answer, nothing. Nothing is important about having your nails done. What's important is having a safe space. It's about being able to come, to design something for yourself, having someone hold your hand. It's about having that discussion with a beauty therapist that you've had in your life longer than your boyfriend. It's about having that connection that was important to us. 

WAH Nails was such an integral part of the idea of nail art or manicures as this extensional accessory we know today. They were early with that.

They very much pioneered nail art as a trend and an accessible thing for people to do; for nails to be a point of conversation, an extension of self and of self-expression. We had a menu of set designs, but then people would come in and ask for every member of One Direction on each nail. We did some crazy stuff, but it was always really fun and it always felt expressive. One thing I like about nails and nail salons is that they're not in any way constricted or limited: any gender, any size, it doesn't matter what length your nails are. You can do what you want and get what you want. There's no real prescription to it either. There is quite a lot of freedom inherent in nail art as a form of self expression.

At what point in your career trajectory did the idea for the book come about? 

I ended up working at a beauty tech company about six or seven years into my career. It was about booking beauty through images. While we were building that, the industry felt like it had almost shifted overnight. It was around the time of Kylie Jenner and Instagram blowing up. 

All of a sudden, beauty in our space became not just about nails and hair; it became about injectables, filler, and Botox. We started to have images like that on the platform of lips, a nose, and a chin that you could buy. We were having a lot of discussions about that as a company and how to navigate that. I just couldn't reconcile it anymore. At the time, I was having these thoughts about how I didn't get into beauty to be in a product space, in an injectable space, or in a space that's telling women to change their faces or that they're born wrong in some way. 

I came into beauty as a space of community, expression, and it's an add on. It's not a need, a must, or a prescriptive, homogeneous look. I was writing a lot—I had a little pink pocket notebook at the time that I used to carry around—and I was having this exploration of what do I want to do and how did I get here? My career had just spiraled in an amazing way. But I've got to this point where I hadn’t consciously thought about the trajectory I want to be on. I started making notes about writing short stories about beauty and women. 

Then, I started writing questions down about how I wanted to navigate this industry. There was a lot of discourse at the time about empowerment, girlboss, feminism, and beauty as an empowerment tool, [with] injectables all wrapped up in this empowerment rhetoric. I was very much a part of marketing, and at the time was asking myself, how am I actually empowering women? Yes, of course beauty work and beauty empowers women in one way. But I also feel like now, because of this new wave of treatments, I'm harming so many more. How can I market these procedures and still feel okay with myself? It was a lot of self-questioning. Is this feminist? Is it not?

I just couldn't reconcile it, so I left that job with no job to go to, just before Covid, which I didn't know was coming. I applied for a master's degree in creative writing and started exploring some of these ideas there. I realized I had so much to say. Now I wasn't invested in the beauty industry in any particular way, but I'd worked in almost every aspect. I consulted. I'd done editorial, product, treatments, salon work. I'd written about beauty. I'd help make beauty products. I felt like I had a good 360-degree view of what it looked like, but I wasn't in it anymore and so I could reflect on what that had been like. 

Over a year or two, the ideation bubbled away. It's one of those things that when you look back, you realize you probably did start it way before you had the conscious thought of “I'm going to write a book called this, about this.” I found one of these little notes from just before I quit my job that read “Write a book that's like Black Mirror stories, but about beauty,” which is kind of weird, because that is exactly what I went on to do. But I never readdressed that note; it gradually built up. 

What have been the biggest surprises or revelations of writing the book?

There's so many moments of revelation for me. What I tried to do with the book is hold the reader's hand through a journey that starts with me saying, “These are all ugly things I feel and think.” I very much lay my heart and soul out. I'm saying I'm not perfect. I've been complicit in this. I also am asking all these questions; I don't quite know the answers. There were times throughout the book where I speak to a psychologist, an influencer, an expert, or an economist, and I have these moments of realization where I've been thinking about this wrong, or people are teaching me stuff along the way.

But the most shocking thing and the thing I always come back to is the work I've done with very young girls, aged between eight and thirteen/fourteen and just how much they're affected by this constant monitoring of self. Constantly taking pictures of themselves and looking at themselves as this augmented or augmentable being. This idea that they're flawed, as defective by default, was quite common. They're always being watched. That came across in the data and the researchers I spoke to, but also working, one-on-one with girls [who were] saying, “I don't go outside after school anymore if I don't have to, because I don't want people to see my real face any more than they already have to.”

As if to be subjected to a teenage girl's natural face is to be subjected to some kind of horror. When I flounder on the debate sometimes about whether or not I should get this work done and whether or not I feel okay with that, I always go back to those young girls. I don't want to be another noise that's very loud that tells them they have to inject themselves or have surgery or use a filter in order to be acceptable or beautiful. Another surprising thing I found was that a lot of people have thought I would get a lot of pushback from the industry, whether that's influencers or estheticians. Actually, it was the complete opposite. So many people were so open to talk. Once you create that safe space to have these conversations, and you're saying “We're both going to explore this together. This is what I've been thinking and feeling, this is how I think and feel about my body. I'm trying to tell the truth about how we all think and feel.” It was almost like the floodgates opened. A lot of the women I spoke to were just relieved to be like, “Oh thank God, I don't have to pretend I'm really empowered and glossy and perfect anymore. Actually, I do feel like this, and I've been struggling with this.” 

I've had a lot of people message me, some very influential people, and say, “I read the book. I've been going through this and I'm really struggling with it. That's really helping me,” or girls messaging me, saying, “This book is saving me right now and I didn't realize why I felt the way I felt. I wasn't able to articulate why I felt so uneasy and so anxious. But this is exactly how I'm feeling.” And a lot of people in the industry saying, “We want it to be better.” A lot of estheticians saying, “We want this to be an ethical practice, and a lot of the work we end up doing is corrective because so many young girls are going to get budget stuff on Groupon.” The industry very much welcomed the conversation in a way that I think people didn't expect.

You opened the book being so personal about how you've dealt with beauty standards in your own life. I'm curious if now, having written the book and having done all the research, that has impacted in any way how you relate to beauty standards yourself?

It's very weird because I think a lot of people have thought I'd write the book and then be cured. That's not what happened. Being absorbed in the book and in the industry for that amount of time and in that depth almost made it worse. You speak to a load of people who are getting surgery on things you haven't even thought about or that are fixating on parts of their face that you think “Oh my God, is that something that I need to think about?” I never thought about wrinkles or anti-aging on myself until I started researching that chapter and realized “Oh wait, my forehead does crease when it moves and is that bad?”

There's a certain point where awareness isn't good. Not sound like a martyr, but it was like I needed to sacrifice that time and do that amount of research so that everyone else didn't have to. I condense it and package it up so that you don't have to go down those rabbit holes. It's hard. Talking to the young girls has definitely hardened my view and made me more resolute in how I think and feel. 

That's while being able to hold and appreciate the nuance that it's such a complex matrix of safety. Especially for trans women, for women who are further removed from the beauty standard because of race or disability, the freedom and opportunity that they're afforded; it’s wildly different cases. Class has a huge impact on it. Taking into account and being able to hold all those nuances while also coming to some sort of conclusion, was really important to me. I'm not going to lie, I struggle with complicity myself. I struggle with how to be visible now, especially because you spend however long writing this book, and then six weeks later, you're then a product that you have to  sell. 

It was such a weird headspace to be in. How do I become visible to sell this book when there's press asking for photo shoots and people asking for headshots and images of me? How do I be visible in a way that is not terrifying to me but also makes people want to read my book and is also beneficial to the marketing campaign? That I find quite difficult. I still don't think I've fully come to a conclusion about what that looks like for me yet. It's been a complex journey, for sure. I definitely learned a huge amount. I think people have been quite surprised at how much research is in the book.

The women I spoke to were such light beacons throughout it. Every time I was getting a bit stressed or, this is such a huge thing to tackle as one individual person, I would get on another call and someone would share something or reaffirm why they thought it was important or why they were taking part. Half an hour Zoom calls would turn into four hour chats. One thing I learned more than anything is that we're all struggling in very similar ways, and that was quite liberating.

For me the hardest part about removing myself from beauty standards is the fact that you do have certain privileges that are awarded for participating in it. It’s such a—I don't want to say sad cycle because that sounds so negative—but even in a feminist context, the idea of having choice and agency over your own body, but then how much are the changes that we are making under the perceived notion of independent thought and choice, really actually driven by messaging that we're receiving from outside of ourselves?

It's really hard to hold those two notions at once. The idea that women have autonomy, agency, ability, and competence, and also there are these huge matrixes and structures that have been around for centuries that stand to profit immensely from you feeling a certain kind of way about yourself and investing in specific procedures or products in order to feel better. To admit that we aren't cured of that conditioning isn't to admit to being flawed in some way. It's a way of assigning accountability to the right structures, while also acknowledging that we do have some individual accountability when it comes to the way we present and talk about our bodies and about other women's bodies. The way we perpetuate the ideals that harm us a lot of the time. For me, it was about balancing that empathy with the accountability all the time. It was about understanding the nuance and the complexities, systems, and structures and also saying, “But it's not overly helpful to just go, it's bigger than me so I can't do anything.” We actually can. We can all do things and we're not going to get anywhere if we all just resign ourselves to this fate.

We are more powerful than we are led to believe, especially in our circles and the women closest to us. But it is tricky. I make no qualms about that in the book. There's no attempt to tell these noble lies about where we are. I knew I didn't want to write a book about beauty that was rainbows, butterflies, like “You do you, babe and as long as you're happy, everything's fine.” That wasn't the conclusion I want. That was very much where I felt the conversation was, and I wanted to take it forward, even if it meant not always having a clear-cut answer.

What do you think is the key to minimizing the damage in the digital spaces?

There are a few things. One is acknowledging that these platforms weren't built with our interests at heart. I don't think telling women to just log off is good. I don't think you should throw your phone in the fountain like Andy in The Devil Wears Prada. As much as I think we all wish we could at some point. Scheduling in breaks is really important. There are studies that show three days away from social media can actually boost a woman's self-esteem. Making sure you're curating. I know it's more labor, which is annoying. The algorithms now often push content regardless of whether you'd ask to see it or not, but taking some time to curate spaces online that feel healthy and for you, whether that's following people with a body shape similar to yours or that aren't focused on purely embodied content. Maybe it's more related to interests of yours or passions of yours that are outside of the way your body looks and not following people that make you feel like you're drawing attention to that and just being very critical of how you're feeling when you're on these apps and platforms. As cheesy as it sounds, being the woman that you needed as a young girl, being the woman that you want young girls around you to feel safe to look up to.

I tell the story in the book, but when I first went to work with the young girls in the book, when I left, I asked: what should we do next time? Should we paint? Should we make a zine? Shall we do an art class? They answered, “Oh, can we learn how to do makeup like you?” I was like, I'm part of the problem, aren't I? I've come here glammed up, not thinking about it. I spoke to the woman who owns the charity, and she was like, “You know, that's a learning curve a lot of us go through, is modeling comfort for them.”

Sometimes showing up without makeup on and with your hair scraped back, just showing that you can be comfortable in a range of settings and types of self-expression so that options are being modeled to them. Not that there's just one way to beautiful or one way to be. Along those lines, I think it's about being honest with yourself about where that area of discomfort is for you. For everyone, it's different. Some people, it's not wearing makeup, or for some people, it's wearing eyeliner or not straightening their hair. It's trying to challenge yourself to do one less thing or do one thing every day that scares you.

Put yourself in that area of discomfort for a little bit and see how you feel. Maybe delay the Botox appointment for a few months. Let a line form, see if it actually bothers you, because it might not. Don't cover a blemish and see how you feel. Go makeup-free for a week—whatever feels to you like it would be a bit of a challenge. I think just trying it and seeing how you feel and taking account of the time or the money you saved, redirecting some of that energy is important. That comes with a sense of acknowledging accountability while also being nonjudgmental about what it might be for you.

When I was pitching the book, a different publisher was like, “I walk past this bakery every day on the way to work. I always have thought about how amazing their pastries look, and I never let myself have one because [of the] calories. I told myself every day when I walked past this bakery that I'm not allowed it. Every day I'll think about it and go, ‘No, too many calories. You need to lose weight. You're not having it.’” She said “I read your book proposal, and I went back the next morning and I had it. It was amazing.” Another one of my editors was like, “I had the Zoom filter on, and I had no idea. I had it on for two years and hadn't even thought about it, so I took it off.” Now the girls I used to work with at the charity don't post with filters anymore. 

If we can all do one thing and then see how you feel and then maybe try doing another thing … I'm not here saying get rid of social media and take all your makeup off and just go completely natural and expect you to be completely fine about that. But I think just challenging ourselves and modeling comfort for each other is so important. 

I feel some of my most beautiful and comfortable when I'm around other women, and they're sitting there with their belly rolls and not putting a cushion over their tummy when they sit down. Just existing as they always should and always have done.

In terms of the platforms themselves, because filters exist as part of the interactive face of them, what can they do, or is that just a utopian dream to think they would remodel?

I tried to contact some of them. They weren't interested in talking. They were interested in saying, this is really important to us, but then doing nothing about it. We need to look at age limits and actual safeguarding. Often you just have to tick a box. I know girls who are eight who are on these platforms and absorbing content that they shouldn't be. I don’t think there's any need for kids to have access to this stuff. A lot of filters, even the really fun ones that I would use with my little brothers, have beautification built-in and that's, again, completely unnecessary.

We have a lot of issues with the whole business model of these platforms being centered on advertising. Even pre social media, we had huge issues with advertising harming young women and girls in views of their bodies. Now we've just amplified that. As long as these feeds and algorithms exist that prioritize ads and a capitalistic view, it's hard to escape. I spoke to a lot of people throughout the book who were saying, “I've tried to block certain people or tried to not see certain images, but because of the algorithm being the way it is, I'm still getting shown it through ads or in other ways.”

It's becoming harder to create these safer spaces, which is what I mean about acknowledging that these platforms don't necessarily have your best interest at heart and going in knowing that. The thing is that we've grown up with some awareness of that. We got to establish a sense of self before an algorithm told us who we were and what we should be interested in and filtered us into a funnel, whereas kids now aren't getting that necessarily. Delaying exposure for as long as possible for young people is really important; allowing them to cultivate a sense of self outside of the digital, outside of the aesthetic, is really powerful and potent. Trying to find communities online that may be smaller, female-founded social platforms or platforms that are doing things a bit differently.

Just being conscious of how much time they're spending in these places. Facebook was built on a way to denigrate and rate women's bodies. We know they don't come from a space of feminism and respect. It's important that we know that and we go in with an understanding of that. As such, we are very intentional about how we use these spaces while also seeking out communities that are doing things well and trying to support them.

I wanted to shift to a wider lens on your work. Having had these positions at really innovative UK beauty companies, how would you define the country's unique approach and mindset to beauty?

UK beauty culture is so interesting, and I think it's because we have that regional aspect to the country. One thing that was really fun when I was at Dazed is we looked at beauty as a document. Beauty culture is like a documentary, as much as it is about product and makeovers and all these things. There are very distinct beauty aesthetics in Liverpool, for example, and up north versus in London.

We have so many kinds of subcultures that have emerged in the UK and that continue to emerge. We have a very interesting kind of class. I don't know what you'd call it. It's not a divide, but a class approach to beauty that I also find really interesting. Beauty in the UK does feel cultural. It can signify class, it can signify culture. Take those pictures of Kim Kardashian in a UK pub. It was so funny to see her in that context because the looks are so similar, but the UK has a really interesting approach to beauty and self-expression in that way. There's such a range.

I am curious to hear about who are the future innovators in beauty.

Ssome of the people I found most innovative in the talking for the book weren't necessarily in beauty. They were cultural figures who were obviously thinking this through a lot. Like, Venus X, who's a DJ in New York. Incredibly fascinating interview. Her perspective on beauty and visibility, as a woman of color who's in music and entertainment and creative industries, the way she explained how she negotiates beauty and power and being in these spaces. It's similar to how I feel at the minute; how you're behest to these platforms to promote your work and you know that you have to play a game of sorts and going into that with a level of awareness.

She just blew my mind with the way she spoke about beauty. Her approach to beauty is always very rooted in self-expression and DIY. When I first met her, she had bright red roots and then black hair, way before Billie Eilish did. She was wearing contacts and has these very cool tattoos. She always just struck me as someone who was world building for herself. That really excites me about beauty as creators who are very much building these worlds. That, for me, is what the utopia of beauty culture looks like. 

It looks like people asking for a hooked nose as much as they're asking for a small button nose. It's some people drawing on stretch marks because they don't have them. All of these things happen and their opposites are happening simultaneously depending on what you like and what you think and how you want to express yourself, instead of us all being funneled into this one homogenous look. There are a lot of creators championing that. People often ask, are you hopeful about the future? One, I have to be—we all have to be—and I do think there is power. We have power. We forget influences online.

We are hugely influential in each other's lives, and I think we forget that. There are pockets of communities emerging that are really challenging things and doing things differently. It's one, incredibly brave, and two, just fun. I wrote a piece for Dazed on Chapell Roan, speaking to all of her makeup team because she has a collective of beauty artists working with her. This fearlessness that she has as an artist to create a character and be “ugly” or to challenge this idea of what a female pop star should look s really playful and interesting. I'm excited for brands to follow that route a little bit more: beauty as play, beauty as world building, instead of beauty as concealment and prescription and a set of rigid rules and tutorials.

Speaking of articles, which ones that you've written to date would you say have had the most impact and meaning to you and why?

The one I wrote for Dazed on class years ago, that was probably my favorite, because I felt like it was a conversation that wasn't really happening. It went semi-viral at the time and caused a lot of discussion. Obviously, there's only so much you can say in an 800 word article. I expand on the idea in the book, but the complexities around beauty work and this tightrope that we're forced to walk between beauty as a negotiation of power and opportunity, it's a privilege, but it also generates privilege. The closer you are to the beauty standard, the closer you can get. Those furthest removed, no amount of work is going to get them as to the standard, but they're being told they can always invest more and more. 

The idea that beauty can be something that can be bought and cultivated. Ultimately, we could end up with a class of people that can afford not to age and can afford to benefit from all of the rewards that beauty brings in a very digital, visual world. You'll end up with a population of people who can't afford to participate and who are going to age and who are going to get wrinkles and who are stuck with being, “ugly.” Then what happens? What happens to those people? How do we treat those people? 

Looking at beauty as a class signifier as well, whether it's this tightrope again that women are often on, where now it's like we have to have lip filler in order to beautiful or attractive. But if you get too much, it's then automatically a signifier of low class or a signifier associated with words like fake or dishonest. It implies this immorality. The same is for a lot of women's beauty work. A lot of the time, you're on this tightrope of doing just enough to be presentable and respected, but not too much to be cast out as being fake. The class discussion was really interesting. 

Teeth is another one. Turkey teeth are a thing here. People getting too obvious veneers, then it's a signifier of low class and not of high class. People investing in order to better themselves and it not translating in the way that they want it to, which feels really unfair. The class piece adds another layer of complexity to the wider discussion of beauty work and beauty culture. 

It’s a super fascinating conversation and insight. I don't think the class element gets spoken about quite enough. 

Especially when we've got people getting into debt to afford these things. I work with charities where they're telling me that they're working with some of the most vulnerable women in the country, but they still have their nails, hair, or teeth done. They feel they need to do that in order to be treated like a human being, so they're doing that over buying what we would deem other essential purchases. Because they'd rather be treated with dignity and respect than maybe eat three meals a day. It's really against the idea that beauty is this trivial, irrational, or frivolous pursuit and it's something that stupid girls do because they're silly and irresponsible. 

I try and make a point in the book that, no, this is hugely impactful in people's lives. This forms how you're seen, how you're treated, how you're respected, the opportunities available to you. To pretend otherwise is to feed into this patriarchal system that tells us,  “Oh, don't worry about that, being critiqued at all.”

Shifting to your work in advising brands, what do you think are the keys to differentiating yourself given how oversaturated the beauty market is? 

It's really hard. Have a think if you actually need to make a product in a world that needs to be more sustainable and is already oversaturated. Do we need more product? Are you bringing anything new to the market or to the table, or are you just jumping on a hype for the sake of it? One thing that I'm always really excited about and that I often get approached to add on to brands—and it doesn't work as an add on—is coming from an authentic community space, coming from a genuine need. Identifying I'm part of this group; they're all doing this particular look and how can we serve them? 

Real community need, play, or expression and serving that is really fun. When it feels authentic, it works really well. Finding a way to cultivate community and some kind of angle before you kind of go straight into we need to make another red lipstick. Having a point of view is really interesting when that's rooted in something very tangible. I often get brands coming to me and saying, we need community building for this. It shouldn't work like that. It should become a community first and then product. That authenticity is something we're really lacking.

On the Chapell Roan point, I'm only really interested in beauty that doesn't take itself hyper-seriously and that focuses on play, self- expression, and world building. I’m not into brands that are too prescriptive or that use messaging that feels in any way toxic or harmful or is telling, especially young girls, that they need to spend a load of money to beautiful. That they need to cover things up or conceal or adapt themselves beyond recognition into this one specific look. That’s what excites me at the minute. 

There are some interesting refillable brands coming out of South Korea and where they're making little keychains and the products can be switched out of. It's trinkets. Now I'm looking at more special items that feel innovative, whether that's in packaging or in formula, and then authentic community-building products that come from real community desire. Do you actually need to make more product?

Then the tricky thing becomes who is the determining force of whether something is actually an innovative product, adding something new or not.

Oftentimes it's people not coming from the beauty space who are making these decisions. They're just like, “Oh, well, this is making money, so let's do more of it.”

You specialize a lot of your work in Gen Z as well. What advice would you give to brands that are looking to cater to that audience? 

For me it's about looking at who's resonating with Gen Z. It's people like Chapell Roan and the approach they're taking, which is boundary-less, genderless. It's playful, it's character filled, it's ever changing and evolving. Taking that approach, allowing for a more customizable experience, encouraging play, that would kind of be my overall recommendation. Casting from interesting communities, people who have things to say and are doing something already integrated in Gen Z communities and mean something within that community, as opposed to using models or celebrity talent that might not actually be adding a point of view to what you're doing.

I'm always going to be rooted in community stuff, as well, using budget if you have it; something I always did and didn't think about it at the time. If you have a space, budget, and can fund young people's creativity, can bring them into the projects. If you can open up your space so you can host their art shows or zine launches or launch their fashion line. Not just adding on communities as bolt-on when you need them for marketing purposes, but making sure that's a two-way engagement.

I think that's missing in almost every brand at the minute. It's these fairly inauthentic partnerships that just will pay you to put this lipstick on instead of let's host you and your friends at this event. Let's host movie screenings or poetry nights. There's so much you can do when you have a space or if you have budget. Allocating some of that budget back into your community to fund creativity is so important and it's not hard to do.

It doesn't need to be complicated. Young people now more than ever need opportunity, funding, support, and the belief that they can do creative things, and they will pay off. Brands often talk down to them as opposed to talking with them. Bringing your audience and community in from the beginning on product, packaging, on their ideas; having them as active consultants, paying them, funding programs, having fellowships or funds that creatives can apply for, grants—things like that. It doesn't have to be that expensive either.