Emily Weiss’ Hopes For Glossier Go Far Beyond No-Makeup Makeup

Image of Angela Law
by Angela Law
A portrait of Glossier founder, Emily Weiss

When Glossier launched 10 years ago, it was a brand that brought a playful and youthful voice to the beauty world. Swathed in millennial pink, Glossier told us that adults could still enjoy the fun beauty products from their teen years, no matter how old they became. Scented lip balms, candy pink blushes that could be mixed to custom shades, and barely-there skin tints that made the mousse foundations of our youth look like literal cake icing. In 2024 talk, it captured the joy of girlhood. 

This was always the intention, says Glossier founder Emily Weiss, who sat down with POPSUGAR Australia ahead of its launch into Mecca last week. “Beauty was so rigid, and also, like, I think a little bit prescriptive, and also sometimes a little fear mongery,” Weiss says of when Glossier launched in 2014. She believes there was often an undertone of “you don’t know what you’re doing” in the way brands spoke to the average customer. 

In Glossier’s positive and lighthearted marketing, which includes catch phrases like “you look good” and “you deserve it”, she says she hoped that the Glossier customer would hear, “you know more than you think, this isn’t rocket science, let’s figure this out [together]”. This difference, Weiss explains, is subtle but important, communicating that people don’t need to buy many products to feel their best, and giving them permission to have fun with their beauty routines, too. “I think it was very revolutionary, this idea that, like, you’re enough, and you know enough, and you can do this — I think it continues to be revolutionary,” says Weiss.

The way Weiss describes it makes the inception of Glossier sound obvious, though she admits that like all creative pursuits, it was and continues to be a labour of love. (“It is so hard,” she says.) “Listen, I didn’t go to business school… For me, it was very personal, it was very like, ‘man, I love beauty and I have so much fun with this’,” she explains. “When I was 15, I remember Jeanine Lobell launching Stila and the original lip glaze pens, and the little drawings on the inside of all the packages, you know, and that also is, I think, this very whimsical, fun idea. Or like, Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers.” 

Weiss explains that, with Glossier, she wanted to challenge the idea that when we grow up, we’re expected to suddenly “get serious”, even about something as personal as beauty. “I think, in a way, it was this return to a more easy, joyful time and almost saying, ‘Hey, you can just keep doing that’. Like, we can keep having fun; this can continue to be silly and fun and also chic.”

A big part of Glossier’s youthful approach to beauty can be credited to the minimal makeup look the brand popularised. Glossier wasn’t the first to do ‘no-makeup makeup’, nor did it invent the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, and in fact, Weiss points to Clinique and Bobbi Brown as two standout brands that offered alternatives to full-coverage base products long before Glossier was born. But it’s undeniable that Glossier thrust it to the fore. 

Just like the ‘clean girl’ trend itself, Glossier has attracted both praise and rebuke from the wider industry and beauty lovers around the world since its launch. Despite its almost big sister-like brand of empowerment, there are many people who haven’t always felt welcome at Glossier. 

Take the ultra-sheer Perfecting Skin Tint for example, which launched with just five shades in 2014 and was extended to 12 shades in 2019. This isn’t particularly uncommon in the skin tint world where, frankly, shade ranges simply haven’t caught up. Leading the charge is, of course, Fenty, with 25 shades in its skin tint. Meanwhile, Summer Fridays offers 12 (like Glossier), Kosas offers 24, and Nars has 16 — meaning that most are in the realm of 20 “stretchable” shades. This falls short of what is deemed acceptable of a shade range in 2024, with many brands offering between 30 and 50 shades of their more traditional, heavier coverage foundation products. Glossier’s own Stretch Fluid Foundation is available in 32 shades.

But the Perfecting Skin Tint, in particular, epitomises the off-duty model look that Glossier embodies and over the years, it’s left many people with skin conditions like acne feeling left out. Personally, having dealt with pretty angry acne flare ups through my teen years and 20s, I’ve always preferred a lighter-coverage skin tint over thicker full coverage formulations that tend to cling to dry patches and acne spots. But the issue isn’t so much with the coverage, and rather, with the lack of skin texture seen in Glossier’s photography — after all, it’s easy to feel confident to embrace your own skin when your skin is crystal clear. 

Regardless, the fact remains that Glossier brought minimal makeup into the mainstream with its “skin first, makeup second” ethos at a time when many of us were baking our under-eyes and painting on our brows before trotting off to work each morning. This minimal approach to makeup is reflected in the products that Weiss herself still considers to be her favourites, which perhaps makes sense as most people have always considered Glossier to be an extension of the woman herself. “I feel like [the clean girl aesthetic] has been my MO since I was 14 years old, buying Bobbi Brown’s books about beauty,” Weiss explains. “And now, you know, I’m in my mommy era, so what’s in my bag has changed a little bit for right now.” 

Weiss is quick to call out the clear Boy Brow gel as a daily go-to, as she wonders whether her brows have started to drop slightly (“I’m like, stand up, look alive!” she laughs.), and credits two lip products as the ones she alternates between day-to-day: G Suit in the shade ‘Curve’ and Ultra Lip in the shade ‘Trench’. “For me, just clean skin, moisturised, and a lip and an eyebrow, and I’m like, good to go through the day,” Weiss says. “If I have to go to a wedding or something, then I’ll do a whole face.”

When asked which products from the tightly edited Glossier range she can’t live without, Weiss’ answer is immediate: “I would say it’s either Balm Dot Com or Glossier You, and I think it’s interesting because they’re our least expensive product and our most expensive product… they’re both so special for different reasons”. 

Weiss explains that she hopes You, the brand’s fragrance (of which she says one sells every 20 seconds), will one day reach a similar icon status to Chanel N°5. As for Balm Dot Com, she certainly isn’t alone in her love for the lip balm, and in fact, customers feel so passionately about the product that Glossier walked back its reformulation earlier this year after outcry from fans. (“You know what? We made a mistake,” she admits.) Specifically, Weiss says she favours the unscented version and slightly shimmery birthday cake flavour, the latter of which was created in collaboration with New York institution, Momofuku Milk Bar, to ensure the vanilla frosting scent was just right. 

Though minimalism is woven through Glossier’s DNA, it perhaps paradoxically remains one of the most visually distinct brands in the world. It’s remarkable, for a brand that is identifiable by its millennial pink packaging and 2010s positivity, to have as much relevance in 2024 as it did in 2014. (Consider the lines outside Mecca’s flagship on George Street in Sydney last week as proof.) 

It’s this enduring relevancy that Weiss points to with pride. “I’ve always thought of this brand, and we’ve always thought of this brand, as a 100 year brand…that means something to people for a really long time.”

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