The G Team
Graphic by Nicole Whitted for Jr Hi the Magazine
⤏ WHY I FINALLY UNFOLLOWED GLOSSIER AND HOW POST-NORMCORE CULTURE MADE EMILY WEISS RICH
⤏ BY CIANA ALESSI
⤏ PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2020
When I moved to Los Angeles last summer, I got to the second round of interviews to work at Glossier’s Los Angeles store. I was quite literally stoked AF, imagining myself flourishing into an IG chick with my perfectly coordinated blush pink jumpsuit and (required) Air Force Ones, taking post-work selfies in the beloved Glossier canyon. To make a long story short, I did not get the job. I was crushed for about two full days, lying in bed imagining all that could have been and wondering how and why I wasn’t proficient enough for this coveted Sales Associate position. Being jobless, I moved onto other applications and other interviews, realizing slowly but surely that nearly every other job I applied for was a way more appropriate fit for my skill set, my life perspective, and my location. For starters, I had worked exclusively customer service gigs while in high school and college, and I swore to myself never again. And, furthermore, a storefront in West Hollywood next to Outdoor Voices is like the whitest place one can ever imagine to work besides a Cracker Barrel in Michigan. So why the hell was I so willing to put myself through white hot hell for a cheap jumpsuit and social media validation?
Cue, the Glossier Instagram. The perfectly curated, sans-serif laden, puffy-millennial-pink dreamscape subsumes an IRL environment just as polished, inclusive, and casually luxurious. Filled to the brim with relevant meme content, quick tutorial videos made by folks just like you, and IGTV episodes with some of the best MUAs in the celebrity game teaching you their tips and tricks (hint: they use lots of Glossier). The allure of Glossier’s Instagram is extremely difficult to resist. Even the strongest of us can joyously scroll through this masterful collection of images and videos and conclude that working for this company would be kind of dope.
“So why the hell was I so willing to put myself through white hot hell for a cheap jumpsuit and social media validation?”
In their Instagram bio, Glossier calls their company a “People-powered beauty ecosystem,” and this seemingly innocent statement is aggressively true. The power of glossier truly lies in the utilization of their most naturally beautiful customers as non-marketing-marketing. You see someone looking unseasonably dewy and clear-skinned and you yearn to purchase whatever made them that way. But Glossier, took an impressive second step early in their company’s lifespan, unearthing an opportunity that many companies before them had not quite seized: creating necessity through post-normcore culture.
To explain what post-normcore is, and why it’s relevant to the Glossier monolith, we first have to define its predecessor “norm-core.” Think: the Obama-era, 2010 Twitter, and when Instagram wasn’t owned by Facebook. Normcore reigned in the neon freedom of the late 2000s and brought us back to practicality — we began adorning ourselves with New Balance dad sneakers, high waisted Levi’s, and neutrals galore. Normcore showed the world that being branded from head-to-toe was no longer necessary to be fashionable. In the normcore world, it became inauthentic to tout your favorite brands all over your body, and fashion folks everywhere began dressing sensibly by comparison. This translated into all cultural realms — including the beauty industry. The beloved no-makeup-makeup look began its rule across our social feeds. Norm-core culture told us that our selves were defining enough, making it exceedingly unnecessary to self- brand with “luxury” products. We were beginning to understand authenticity as something outside of our consumer behaviors, and then Donald Trump became president.
We are now begrudgingly in the post-normcore, Trump presidency age. While DT didn’t technically usher in this next wave of cultural progression, the post-normcore wave ties in perfectly with the ethos of this raging capitalistic megalomaniac. Of course! Post-normcore, as defined by freelance writer Darcie Wilder on The Outline, “Tells us that our branding defines us, but it also doesn’t, but it also does,” and it’s efficacy lies in how companies sell us their products. This is where Glossier’s digital presence shines as bright as their Future Dew highlighting serum.
“Normcore reigned in the neon freedom of the late 2000s and brought us back to practicality.”
Glossier has utilized the post-normcore age to its wit’s end. Their trendy marketing efforts — tied tightly to their loyal bands of followers — spreading boundlessly since the company’s creation in 2010. Glossier has successfully cultivated a digital community that functions as a conglomerate mass of fresh-faced, unpaid brand ambassadors posting their hearts out while Emily Weiss gets married at some country mansion in the WASP-y Northeast (only an assumption).
Focusing only on Instagram, this mass of which I speak consists mainly of the main Glossier page (@glossier) as well as its beloved auxiliary pages — most notably, Boyfriends of Glossier (@glossierboyfriends) and Dogs of Glossier (@dogsofglossier). It’s important to note that these accounts, while tied to Glossier, are not technically created by or directly affiliated with the company. And there are, of course, other spin-off accounts like @glossierbrown, who posts pictures of POC wearing Glossier products, and @glossiercats, a counterpart to the Dogs of Glossier.
The following on these pages, combined with the original Into The Gloss blog which lead to the brand itself, comes to a whopping 3.7 million — that is, at least 3 million users feel they are part of the Glossier experience. That number is obviously not counting the regular customers posting in favor (or against) the company of their own fruition, or the surges of customers who shop at any given Glossier pop-up shop.
The millennial mammoth beauty company receives constant exposure through this omnipotent social media presence, largely upheld by the unpaid labor of devout Glossier customers. Glossier appears from the outside to be a flourishing digital community of online users and IRL workers who simply want to enhance their natural beauty: this is not exactly the full story.
You might be asking yourself, what constitutes a digital community? Well, it’s quite hard to draw the lines, but I will say this: a digital community is an organism. It ebbs and flows with the needs and desires of those it sustains; it gives while it takes. This is not to discredit those who love being a part of a brand experience like the one Glossier has surely succeeded in creating, or the sense of community some may feel when they can gather virtually, or otherwise, to dish about the latest beauty release, playing the adult equivalent to dress-up. The latter, to me, is actually a wonderful example of a digital community. The difference between this aforementioned example and the Glossier world is simply intention. The ever-present G Team cleverly cloaks their consumer-driven motives in an ethos of earnest togetherness, saying “You look good” when they really mean “You look good in Glossier.”
“The G team cleverly cloaks their consumer-driven motives in an ethos of earnest togetherness, saying “you look good” when they really mean “you look good in Glossier.”
Where do the acne-prone, t-zone blotting, hormonal breakout folks fit into this equation of perfection? It seems to me that a space for them has yet to be created, with Glossier and similar beauty brands like Milk Makeup and Farmacy marketing themselves with the poster children for glass skin, pretending that in this millennial utopia, no one actually has hyperpigmentation or a cystic pimple that refuses treatment.
These brands professionally ignore reality by propping up skinny — and/or acceptably curvy — models that adhere to mainstream beauty standards. These companies then beckon customers en masse by shouting from their socials and websites, “These girls are just like you, so you can be just like them!
I am nothing like these girls. And I’m so sorry to tell you this sweaty, but you aren’t either. Hell, I’m sure even the quasi-woke, effortlessly cool team of diverse upper management womxn working at Glossier HQ aren’t like them either. We are all trying to have this unachievable poreless skin, dewy cheek, just-took-a-run-in-a-Nike-commercial appearance that no one outside a studio actually has. These people we see on our screens every fucking day are a marketing ploy from the heights of normalization. They are not us, do not believe their earnest cries of togetherness.
“I am nothing like these girls. And I’m so sorry to tell you this sweaty, but you aren’t either.”
I’ve probably had 3-5 days in my entire life where I’ve felt like my skin looked good enough to get a potential repost from the Glossier Instagram. Even on those days, my eyebrows aren’t bushy enough or my outfits aren’t expensive enough. In short, I’m never good enough for Glossier. And not to give myself too much credit but, I’m pretty all right looking! Most days, without comparison culture crushing my soul after too much scrolling, I feel pretty good about my appearance. But this feeling of inadequacy I speak of is the same one I remember so vividly after receiving my rejection email for that coveted sales associate position. It’s the same feeling I get when I see every fucking person on Glossier’s Instagram that looks meticulously model-off-duty; the feeling far too many of us have had almost every day of our lives because companies like Glossier are telling us we can be so much better than we are now.
The magic and malice of Glossier’s powerhouse digital existence is this pretense of effortless community and effortless appearance. Everything is perfect: perfect hair, perfect skin, and perfectly in sync with one another. There is this constant air of effortless and natural beauty that permeates the Glossier aesthetic. And while a comparatively low amount of people actually work for them, everyone seems to work with them — rallying for their products, posting teasers about new releases. It all seems to come from the sincere desire to work with a company in which they have faith. But when we realize our present cultural zeitgeist is one being sold to us, we must ask, is this a healthy digital community?
If one at all?
⤏ BUY THE PRINT EDITION OF JR HI THE MAGAZINE | ISSUE 010 HERE.
⤏ CIANA ALESSI (SHE/HER) IS A LOS ANGELES-BASED WRITER, SCHEANA SHAY IMPERSONATOR, AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR FOR JR HI THE MAGAZINE. ORIGINALLY FROM BUFFALO, NY, CIANA LOVES WATCHING SHREK, LISTENING TO ABBA, AND PRETENDING SHE’S NOT VERY CONCERNED ABOUT THE O.C. GETTING TAKEN OFF HULU. HER WORK CENTERS ON CONTEMPLATING THE NUANCES OF MISCELLANEOUS POP CULTURE AND PROVIDING INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUES OF CONSUMERISM. EVEN THOUGH FAYE HATES TO SEE IT, SHE’S A LIBRA. IN HER FREE TIME, SHE FILLS HER IPHONE MEMORY WITH PICTURES OF HER PUG, DUCK, AND IS GENERALLY INDECISIVE.