Everyone Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Just put on some eyeliner and do dumb stuff with your hair, man
I feel like an ancient crone whenever it happens, but at least once a week, I think The internet used to be fun. This is not a novel thought and I don’t have a particularly intelligent spin or argument about it. As I’ve been reducing my social media usage, I’m encountering fewer futile “hot take” bombs lobbed at the algorithmic discourse engine. That’s good - less rage bait! Less rubbernecking other people’s bad-faith arguments! And it’s also heightened my sense that, well, the internet doesn’t…have…anything?
I’m writing this in my little newsletter so I obviously know that’s not true. And I write lifestyle articles for a living, so, again, I know better. But the internet of today is apocalyptic, littered with the corpses of other people’s LiveJournals, inhabited by Twitter and Instagram accounts that have been possessed and puppeteered by bots. The internet is dead, and I miss blogs.
Specifically, I mean beauty blogs. I mean the beauty blog that I spent all my time reading for three years, until it quietly imploded, right before I finished college. That’s what this week’s email is really about. That place where I find my mind drifting back to, unbidden and often, was called xoVain.
For the uninitiated, xoVain is the late arm of xoJane, a website run by Jane Pratt, the founder of 80s/90s feminist teen mag Sassy. I was a little too old for Tavi Gevinson’s online magazine Rookie when it came to the forefront, but when xoVain spun off from xoJane in 2013, I was finishing high school and had a looooot of time to kill in yearbook class. You may know xoJane because of its reputation as a hellsite. If xoJane were to win a women's media pageant, it would be crowned Miss Obnoxious First-Person Essay year after year. If you found your way to xoJane, it could've been through the keywords "cat hair in my vagina" or "all-white yoga class" or "I'm glad my friend died.” All those headlines were organized under one salacious, breathless title, a vertical called “IT HAPPENED TO ME.”
But among the 1,500-word Socratic soliloquies by thin sporty women reflecting on their own fatphobia, there were also beauty articles. Really, really good beauty articles. Creative ones. And in possibly the only prescient move ever made by the xoJane editorial staff, they said “Gee, we should really put all the beauty stuff on its own website.”
I’ll talk more about xoVain in a minute, but let me tell you about the internet right now. Have you been on it lately? Man, it’s so boring! Once upon a time, there were all sorts of good-to-great beauty blogs where you could kill eight hours at a time. I spent a lot of time flipping through Beauty Editor, Beauty Papers, Into the Gloss, IAmaBeautyGeek (that last one is still around!). Writers for Man Repeller, usually fashion-focused, dabbled in hair and beauty. Even retailers like Urban Outfitters and Violet Grey had awesome blogs that delivered real beauty service writing with personality and spunk.
And then…affiliate links…spon con…stupid Glossier…GOMI spam wars…YouTubers and paid partnerships with Urban Decay…Instagram…I know I sound like the Hot Dog Car Man from I Think You Should leave, but…it’s true.
We're so buried in our phones. Instead of giving someone a real smile...we send an emoji! We don't even look at porn on our computers anymore. We look at it on our PHONE?!
Every beauty blog got boring, or worse, it turned into a YouTube channel. And then those turned into TikTok videos. I’m not sure what happened but TikTok’s beauty content is, without exception, just a roulette wheel of boring shit I don’t care about. It’s either elementary-level makeup stuff for Gen Z babies just getting started (congrats to every twenty-something who learned about “PH lipsticks” this year and will soon realize that Tarte’s $22 version is the same as “mood ring lipstick” from the Dollar Tree!), or it’s next-level transformations that, while fun, do not fall within my sphere of interest (you’re…doing your eyeliner…as…Betty Boop in drag as an obscure Game of Thrones character? Better you than me!). There is very little “We’ll just try this and see if it works because why not” energy in the beauty world.
And where it does exist, it’s not text. It’s video. I read fast and I listen slow, and I like reading more than watching. So the “pivot to video” has left me feeling, more than anything, bored.
On Reddit, another place I’ve tried to source good beauty content, I encounter a different problem. People on Reddit go way harder than I do. Yes, there are posts/links/threads about fun eyeliner techniques and cute face stickers. But on almost all the beauty and skincare forums on Reddit, you’ll find people discussing lasers, fillers, plastic surgery, injectables. Everything skincare-related is anti-aging; everything makeup-related is about looking skinnier or younger. And it’s fine! Sometimes I want to look like a beautiful virgin toothpick. But sometimes I want to have…hear me out…fun?
The best part of late 2010s beauty writing was xoVain, and the best part about xoVain was twofold:
It updated CONSTANTLY. Every hour, all workday.
Everyone was so different.
Everyone was so different! Not from the world, not in an “I’m not like other girls” way, but from each other. You would see a tutorial on how to look exactly like Amelie on the website, then an hour later, a roundup of several “stinky” perfumes, then an hour later, an in-depth review of a random Avon how-to book from the 80s. Nothing was off-limits. My favorite writer on the site, Annie Kreighbaum, did all sorts of stuff. She did a post about “how to wash your hair the right way.” She did one about hula-hooping and using whitening strips. She did a Kelly Kapowski look and (I think) a slutty Barbie look. She did some sort of butt-vacuum for cellulite (which I think had to go live on xoJane for being “salacious”)?
The thing that sticks with me most is Annie Kreighbaum put dinosaurs in her hair. She got ahold of some little dinosaur rings and she put them in her braid and it was adorable. I THINK she might’ve later painted them gold, so they’d have this kind of high-class appeal, but now that xoVain is gone and most of the content is inaccessible, I could only find a photo on Tumblr.
We used to have hair dinosaurs, guys. And now we have short-form QVC. Yes, I know, this part sounds like I’m Sad French Anne Hathaway singing in a gutter.
There was a time when it all…went…wrong……….
I know that the creative-community-uplifting-pep-talk response is Well, if you want to SEE that kind of content, you need to CREATE it! Which is dumb because I don’t want to write it. I want to read it! Like, uh, hey, pardon me but…I do not tell you to go make a new Fast & Furious movie every time you miss Vin Diesel.
Actually, that’s not what I’m most worried about. I think xoVain was one of the last places where I saw a diverse community of writers really establish their own voices, instead of getting stuck in what I think of as the “voice gutter.” This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, in writing (oops sorry this newsletter IS about writing after all!). There’s a chart I hold in my head, which I call the “authority curve.”
When you start writing about a topic, you sound like yourself. You might not use the right terminology. You might not be great at conveying a topic in a way that other people find easy to understand or digest. But you sound like YOU!
Then, as you gain authority, and start to value having authority, you start to write in The Voice. This is the voice that every single writer on a topic falls into, if only briefly. It sounds brand-y. It sounds corporate, but friendly. If you’re writing about beauty, the voice says “hey girl!” If you’re writing news, the voice sounds like an AP newswire story with a couple words changed for the sake of house style. It is perfectly fine to inhabit The Voice while you learn your niche. And plenty of writers do The Voice so well, they either stay there forever, or they turn it into a vertical or magazine of its own. A lot of media websites have been born from this collective voice. Every single “It Happened to Me” article on xoJane sounded like it.
But in the best-case scenario, as you gain confidence and authority, you come back to yourself. This is true in all forms of writing. You leave behind the voice that sounds like everyone else, and you sound like You, but a better, smarter version. A You Who Knows Stuff. What I loved about xoVain was that the bottom of that curve, the brand voice, the everyone-else voice, was so narrow. Everyone writing for that website figured out how to sound like themselves and they did such a good job, I still recognize their writing when I encounter it in the wild today.
That bottom part of the curve, the “everyone else,” is where most of the contemporary beauty content I come across falls. There’s just no way to crawl back up the sides anymore. In large part due to the demands of corporate media, or social media algorithms, authority is the most vital part of online writing now. People are so concerned with having authority that they don’t leave room for weirdness. They want it to sound “right” and they don’t want to suffer through the chaos and shame of a comment section. And, yeah, I get it.
I don’t have an argument that can bring the old blogosphere back, and I don’t think subscription models like this one are a good alternative to a blog that shares hourly posts with titles like “oily beauty looks inspired by There Will Be Blood.” I just think it’s nice to remember what we had, remember what we miss, and think about how it can shape what we demand from future media.