Marisa Meltzer on Emily Weiss feeling deceived by her book, and Glossier's quiet Aussie launch

"I don't think anyone really read my emails, or took it all seriously ... So by the time the book actually is for sale, and there's a title and a cover, they acted as if it came out of nowhere.”

Marisa Meltzer is as sure as she can be that Emily Weiss has read her book, Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier. “I think there’s no way in hell she hasn’t read the book.” But she doesn’t know for sure.

Speaking to Bridie Jabour at the recent All About Women festival, Meltzer thinks Weiss agreed to be interviewed for the book because she didn’t take it seriously. When she saw the finished product, Weiss probably did feel deceived, Meltzer acknowledged, but “I think that's just from a lack of really asking any questions or reading emails closely or taking the project seriously.”

“I don't think anyone [at Glossier] really read my emails, or took it all seriously. Everyone was doing what they could at that time [during COVID]. And then all of that interpersonal and sort of business drama is told and unfolds over the course of the book. So by the time the book actually is for sale, and there's a title and a cover, they acted as if it came out of nowhere.”

Weiss’ right to be upset is limited, though, Meltzer argued: “This is a woman with so much agency, more than probably almost anyone else in the world, in that she is rich, she's beautiful, she has a successful company. No one is forcing her to give me an interview or to participate in this book, if it's not something that she thought was advantageous.”

She didn’t start out planning to document Glossier’s entire business journey. “My original idea was to do a book that was a little more broadly about the beauty industry and the ways it was changing aesthetically … its economic power, its way of propelling women into business, all of these new companies that were cropping up.

“But I'm sure you know that as a writer, at a certain point, you have to get out and go away and acknowledge that the story you thought you had might be quite different than the story that's emerging. And so it was really a story about Glossier.”

The book tracks Glossier’s ascension to becoming a global phenomenon, and its struggle to keep up with a beauty market that caught up to it. When it launched, it propelled millennial pink to fame and made fresh-faced, minimal make-up cool. But during COVID, a group of employees created Out of the Gloss to document the disconnect between the brand’s public position on diversity and their experiences.

“They were mostly Black women, Women of Colour, and had sort of started out as a group chat essentially of 200 or so workers just bonding and complaining about some of the issues with the workplace there, whether it was people that were downright racist or insensitive, the ways that they were forced to deal with clients, workplace conditions, all those kinds of things.”

It became much more public in 2020, as ‘girl bosses’ started to topple and the world focused on racial justice in response to George Floyd’s murder. While Out of the Gloss didn’t speak to Meltzer for the book, they’ve since given her an interview for an epilogue about “things like Emily Weiss coming in with investors and throwing her $100,000 Birkin bag on the ground and showing them this great view. And they're like, meanwhile, women are asking to touch my hair, and I'm barely able to pay rent in the city.”

In 2022, Weiss exited the company. Glossier - after making such a name for itself for carving out its own retail experiences, and operating separately from beauty retail giants - started being stocked at Sephora. Just this year, the brand finally rolled out international shipping, including to Australia. But it didn’t create the buzz it would have if it cracked international shipping in 2017, or 2018, or 2019.

As Meltzer said, “it’s just not as original a proposition as they once were,” especially in a minimal make-up market now cluttered with brands like Rare Beauty, Merit (although it’s not available in Australia), Jones Road Beauty, and Westman Atelier (Meltzer claimed the latter brand’s pricy products are worth it).

“I also wonder if Glossier missed an opportunity to have some kind of pop up along with the Australian launch,” Meltzer added, “because I think it's really hard, even if you're able to finally get things shipped, the idea of buying makeup products, particularly colour products, online, just by virtue of recommendation or how they look on a model or whatever is a lot to ask.”

She thinks of Australia as a beauty country: Mecca, Aesop, much better sunscreens than those stocked in the US. And if we remember 2016 as millennial pink and shelfies on Into The Gloss - Weiss’ beauty website founded before she launched Glossier - Meltzer thinks Aussies’ beauty sensibilities will shape how we’ll remember 2024.

“A looseness, a casualness … I think that will be the prevailing aesthetic.”

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Until next time,

Britt