glossier founder + ceo emily weiss is profiled in vanity fair
Once upon a time, Emily Weiss worked for the Condé Nast media empire. Twelve years and a $1.2 billion company later, the founder and CEO of Glossier, the millennial beauty brand that has stormed social media and gained a cult-like following, appeared in Vanity Fair. The article begins with an homage to Emily’s 2007 debut in MTV’s The Hills, as a New York magazine intern in Los Angeles. It’s a fitting lede, a way to re-introduce the world to Emily Weiss.
From there, journalist Marisa Meltzer launches into the pieces nut graf: “Twelve years later, Weiss is the CEO of Glossier, the paradigm-shifting beauty brand she founded in 2014, and she still has the same command, as seen on an early summer morning in Manhattan.” Meltzer continues into what is certainly a literary piece, describing Glossier’s sheer matte lipstick Generation G as “the kind you can swipe on in the back of a Lyft or midway through a Hinge date.” When Weiss invites her over to make a frittata, Meltzer arrives a few minutes early, and the doorman “waits until the precise time to let [her] onto the elevator.” Upstairs, she is greeted by Weiss, whose assistant sits “answering email at a long table festooned with the same sculptural floral arrangements found at the company headquarters.” And when the line to get into the Glossier flagship store is halfway down the block, the store’s editors (employees) “mill about on the sidewalk, dressed in light pink jumpsuits with stickers that declare their preferred pronouns… offering hits of Invisible Shield SPF 35 and Soothing Face Mist to help ease the wait.”
Meltzer makes appearances in Weiss’s SoHo apartment for frittata-making and notes how Weiss cringes when she brings up The Hills. And though the piece is framed around Emily Weiss, the character seems to be Glossier itself — the brand valued at $1.2 billion that found its origins in Into the Gloss, an online blog that profiles the beauty routines of high-powered women. Meltzer supplements her own research with quotes from Eva Chen, former Teen Vogue beauty and health director, who Weiss worked under at Teen Vogue. Chen, now the director of fashion partnerships at Instagram, speaks to who Weiss was at Teen Vogue — “She was a college student that had a plan, so pulled together and focused” — and the moment Weiss came to Chen with the idea for Into the Gloss — “She closed the door, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is serious.’”
But it might be this bit that best represents Glossier, and the article’s point at large: “Despite heading a beauty company, Weiss, 34, appears practically barefaced… But making things look convincingly effortless, in business or in makeup, is a special feat. Weiss’s brushed-up arches are no doubt held in place by the cult pomade Boy Brow. (The $16 product debuted in 2016 with a 10,000-person wait list.) Her skin’s fresh-from-the-sauna glow suggests a cocktail of the vitamin-boosted Super Pack Serums, a trio priced at the relative bargain of $65. And her cheeks — dabbed with rosy Cloud Paint, perhaps — telegraph the kind of flush that follows a light jog. Or a $1.2 billion valuation.”
written for literary journalism at loyola marymount university
