In a similar vein to my previous post, we are going to discuss why beauty journalism has ethical problems that makes them much less trustworthy than you would think!
Magazines used to be the only real source that you could get beauty news, product recommendations, etc. Now that has shifted towards the digital realm, with tutorials and product reviews being everywhere on blogs, YouTube, Instagram, and even snapchat. However, this transition has taken some ethical issues that already existed in the beauty community and made them even more intense.
According to a nice concise history done by Beautyeditor, magazines basically ran off of advertisements like all print media. However, what is different about beauty magazines is that their sponsors are basically all beauty brands. This means that while the job of a beauty journalist should be to critique products and recommend the best possible products to their readers, they cannot critique products of brands that have purchased advertising space in their magazine, and even feel pressure to recommend products from these brands as well, whether they deserve how to make this cut or not.
Beautyeditor noted that the new way that beauty news has gained popularity is through the YouTube and blogging community. This originally started as a more authentic way of beauty/fashion consumers discussing products that they did or did not like. They can still make money from ad revenue on their YouTube or blogging channels. However, they also make money from affiliate links, or links that they get money if you click and make a purchase.
They also do completely sponsored posts, which means that they were paid to give a product a positive review, whether it is accurate or not. Beauty/fashion citizen “journalists” with a large following can even get paid hefty sums of money to post a picture with a positive caption on Instagram, Snapchat or other social media. Very popular bloggers can make $5,000-15,000 for a sponsored post.
In order to regulate this, there is a Federal Trade Commission guideline to disclose sponsorships. However, there are ways to avoid this and it is debatable whether this regulation is actually enforced.
While bloggers/YouTube creators do not technically fall under the same ethical needs as journalists, as they are providing recommendations they do have a duty to consumers to provide transparent, accurate content for their readers. Similar to my paparazzi post, perhaps they can come up with a code of ethics to follow that would work specifically for their situation that promotes transparency, because sponsored posts are not likely to go away altogether in the near future. Until then, buy with caution.
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