The relevance of makeup within the world, particularly on the internet has become such a large community of people who follow, create and observe the current trends. Some who aren’t part of this community may think all it is, is a bunch of girls who cake their face and show people how good they look and honestly it’s quite offensive. From someone who has been in the makeup community and following this niche for so many years, I feel confident in saying that there is so much more than what meets the eye from an outsider’s perspective and I will elaborate on that today.
As (Airoldi, 2018) has stated within his article, in order to completely understand this online community “it is important to distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata”. This allows for a more in-depth understanding of the prominent information that is being provided from reliable sources, as opposed to the information that is captured from a disordered metadata base.
To simplify and help you grasp a visual understanding of the field site of makeup, I have created a simple mind map collaborating a large amount of information from the beauty community to provide a general overview.
The beauty community has one of the largest online presence, spread on many platforms including YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. This is where they share pictures, tutorials on certain makeup looks, and overall transformation videos. This gives makeup artists the ability to explore their creative desires and share their talent with others to feel inspired. These makeup artists include Shani Grimmond, Micheal Finch, Nikki Tutorials, James Charles, Lauren Curtis, Bella Fiori, Yuya, Jeffree Star and so many more. They share their content not only as a passion but to build their following base and eventually gain a career.
It is important to have well-known members in not only this community but all communities as it allows for the followers to gain knowledge from the members they trust. For example, in this community we trust that the well-known makeup artists recommend beauty products that perform well, allowing us to know what products to purchase. These brands may be high-end including Benefit Cosmetics, Anastasia Beverly Hills, TooFaced Cosmetics and Charlette Tilbury or they may be drugstore brands including Maybeline, Revlon, Thin Lizzy and Colour Pop.
This community spreads helpful information including recommended products, tutorials to demonstrate how to achieve a certain makeup look, and images/quotes informing the community to feel beautiful, confident, and empowering. This community has recently more than ever allowed for diversity in all forms including skin colour, religion, age, sexual orientation etc. It is a place, experience, and platform where people have the ability to express themselves and share their personal beliefs. However, this is something to further research as there is so much more that can be done to completely include everyone into all aspects of the beauty community. This is just the beginning, if smaller communities like this one spreads the positives of diversity, it will evolve throughout the world and solve a much larger issue.
References
Airoldi, M, 2018, ‘Ethnography and the digital fields of social media’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 21:6, 661-673
Doggo, D, 2019, ‘Most Subscribes Beauty YouTubers 2013-2019’, YouTube, 25 October, Viewed 16 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8SYk-Nzmbo
Krause, M, 2020, ‘Inside the YouTube beauty community that’s turning makeup artists into millionaires’, Insider, weblog post, 22 March, Viewed 16 August 2020, https://www.insider.com/youtube-beauty-everything-you-need-to-know-jeffree-james-nikkietutorials-2020-3
Thorne, L, 2019, ‘Best of Drugstore Dupes 2019’, Lindsay Regan Thorne, Weblog post, 29 August, Viewed 17 August 2020, https://www.lindseyreganthorne.com/2019/08/best-of-drugstore-dupes-2019/
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