Photo Gallery: Stories Behind The Beauty Bloggers

Often times, Internet influencers with millions of followers who focus on beauty products and makeup 101 videos give their followers the impression that they only have to use cosmetics from different brands, make random makeup videos, and livestream beauty product launch events to make tons of money. However, that is only one side of their stories.

In this issue of TMTPost Photo Gallery, we capture the stories of two beauty bloggers and get a glimpse of their everyday life. Besides being glamorous under the spotlight and in front of the camera, they also face numerous assessments, deadline pressures, creativity block, and constant makeup sessions, and controversies.

January 30th 2018, Wangjing, Beijing. Beauty blogger Wei Mosi set up the camera and the lighting equipment in her apartment in preparation of shooting a new makeup video for her Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to Twitter. Wei has 1.7 million followers on her Weibo and post one or two posts on beauty product reviews or makeup tips on a daily basis.

In the new video, she planned to teach her audience how to do the makeup style of Kim Hyun-a. Besides teaching makeup styles of celebrities, she would also make videos based on her own ideas taking into the consideration of recent trends and fashion.

Wei Mosi started to learn about beauty products and became very interested in this particular field in the beginning of 2016. She would often come up with weird makeup techniques, surprising people around her. That’s why her friends suggested that she could try to become a beauty blogger. At that time, Mo was a station director of the city metro. After having deeper understanding of the beauty blogging industry and acquiring more makeup technique and followers on social media, she quit her job and joined an Internet influencer incubating organization named Wangxing Dream Factory, becoming a full-time beauty blogger. In contrast to most people’s perception, shooting beauty video blogs is not an easy task. Wei would often make special effect makeups, which requires her to put on and remove her makeup constantly. To shoot a video that’s only a few minutes long, it would often cost her half day.

Wei was sorting out the present she had prepared for her followers, most of whom are women interested into beauty products and makeup tips. Wei had been giving out cosmetics from big brands to her fans as gifts on Weibo.