I’ve been thinking a lot about influencers / bloggers recently and I mourn the days where no money was involved (and the fact we will never get this back).
What I want:
I want someone who is independent to any brands, telling me what things are stylish/good value for money/worth buying. When blogging first started, people did exactly this, for no money, just for fun. They enjoyed sharing their thoughts, they were passionate about fashion/makeup, they enjoyed the discussion with other bloggers and followers. The content was less flashy, and perhaps less frequent, but it was genuine, completely un-biased and the blogger themselves likely earned a similar salary to me and perhaps had a similar routine (works 9-5), so I can even take their routine/workout tips seriously, as well as any budgeting advice they may have (if that’s something they were informed on).
Those first few years were great… and now it’s impossible for people like this to exist (unless anyone can tell me otherwise) as now it’s possible to make it their full time job, and make good money from it, they will. And so those who choose to take money from brands will have more uploads and fancier looking content, and we are conditioned to want to watch that higher quality content. However the content is now:
- Biased: obviously during a brand deal, but also they are more likely to suggest a product merely for the affiliate link, to tempt the company to send them freebies, or because the company already has sent them a freebie (and they wouldn’t have spent their own money on the product, but because it’s free they use it)
- Un-relatable: this person’s full time job is now to make their life look desirable. Their whole job is to create an illusion that they’ve figured out the perfect formula to make their life perfectly edited, so that people want to take their advice, but the reality is that they have 8 hours a day to work on making it look like such. They can workout in the middle of the day when the gyms are free. They can get numerous free/cheap procedures to make themselves more beautiful. They have access to the best quality most expensive clothes, and even if they give dupes, the reality is that they didn’t actually buy the dupe, so that isn’t even a proper recommendation (they may not have bought the dupe if they has less money… if that makes sense). They have million pound homes that are easy to make look gorgeous.
I just feel so frustrated that this is all such an illusion that we are all (myself included) being manipulated to see as attainable, and so we take their biased advice and waste our money. I just wish there was a community of people who were passionate about content creation but out of principle never took money from brands to sell an item. I think picking up money through adsense and patreon is fine aswell, and some creators do this, but next to none in the beauty community. Sigh.
, excessive Mark, obscene spending habits, repetitive content, etc) her just dressing like a normal person with a normal healthy body is one of the things I do like about her. Sure it’s not the most ~stylish~ and she’s often trying to pull of the cool girl unbothered look, but I’d rather see her just wearing her normal comfy jeans and a baggy sweater round the house 
Anna has ruined normal phrases