Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Handout
These days, the casual cosmetics buyer can wander into any Sephora and, somewhere between the Dior lipsticks and Fenty contour palettes, find a display section backlit with a now-ubiquitous shade of light pink: Glossier pink. Or “millennial pink,” in some circles.
Marisa Meltzer, a longtime culture journalist and the author of Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier, out this week, describes the hue popularized by the paradigm-shifting beauty brand as “not quite as dusty a shade as a ballet slipper and more washed-out than a rose… it was a shade engineered to signify femininity with an arched eyebrow—not just feminine but feminist.”
Glossier’s journey from brilliant concept to pop culture phenomenon to faltering tech unicorn is the subject of Glossy, a thoroughly reported, entertaining whirlwind that takes this utterly unique beauty business saga as seriously as it deserves.