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This is an excerpt from MEGA November 2025 Beauty Feature
Before the early 2000s, beauty journalism was confined solely to lifestyle editors from broadsheets and glossy magazines. These editors were royalty. Beauty brands disseminate information about new products and launches via newspapers and magazines, mostly for awareness. Reviews and GRWMs were not really common.
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In 2006, Sophie Uy started what was probably one of the first beauty blogs in the Philippines and things started to change.
Beauty industry events were no longer just the exclusive domain of lifestyle and magazine editors. Beauty bloggers started to be invited and the atmosphere, at best, could best be described as uneasy. Beauty brands realized this and started doing their events separately for mainstream media (called “trad media”) and for new media (the bloggers).
When Happy Skin was launched in 2013, there was a launch for lifestyle editors in the morning and a separate one for bloggers and magazine editors and writers in the afternoon. A drugstore brand from a multinational conglomerate had a big launch and the bloggers invited to the event were given iPads. As expected, this caused a ruckus.
Suddenly, “trad media” was told that their days were numbered and that bloggers were going to replace them. This was understandable because at this point, brands needed something more and took advantage of people’s fascination with the internet.
“We were the new kids on the block. When we were invited to events, we were either the second thought (a last-minute invite) or the revolutionary idea of a hotshot marketer,” said Liz Lanuzo, founder of the website Project Vanity, content creator, and jeweler.
Lanuzo founded Project Vanity in 2008 and it is still one of the strongest beauty communities in the Philippines.
Lanuzo recalled that in those days, brands worked with traditional media “to get information through the lens of experienced curators and tastemakers.”
“If they sell, great. If they don’t that’s fine because they got a good feature out and it’s ‘good for the brand.’”
It was no longer enough after a while. Brands, perhaps because of pressure from their principals, wanted more from those who wrote about their products.
The millennials went for beauty blogs because these provided in-depth reviews and wear tests of products they were thinking of buying. Then, there was the appeal of seeing “average people” talking about beauty—which they were passionate about—as compared with editors who they did not know.
The beauty bloggers made the intimidating world of beauty more relatable. Martha Sta. Barbara Villarama, who is known as The Beauty Junkee, started blogging by serendipity.
“The idea was born out of boredom in class. While in class, I got bored and decided to browse the internet for Bobbi Brown’s powder blush in Pale Pink and I came across online diaries where people talked about makeup and found a review of that blush,” said Villarama.
Villarama started searching for the platform that hosted these blogs and learned that it was Blogspot. “Some were using WordPress, but I found that complicated so I went for the former, put up my blog with the goal of simply talking about makeup and connecting with fellow makeup lovers, and the rest is history.”
Read more about Dinna’s conversation with Liz Lanuzo and Martha Sta. Barbara Villarama about the evolution of the beauty landscape in MEGA’s November 2025 issue, now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Images from: MEGA ARCHIVES. Photographed by JERICK SANCHEZ.
