Q&A
Influencer appeal
Estée Lalonde, a beauty influencer with over two million followers, tells India Hurford-Jones how spas and salons can work alongside content creators and how launching her own brand changed her perspective
How can beauty businesses such as spas and salons best work with influencers?
“The honest answer is that I now sit in both chairs - I'm still the creator working with brands outside of my own and now I'm also the founder of a beauty brand – Mirror Water – interested in working with creators. And the same thing is true from both sides: it only really works when the person genuinely uses and loves the thing. You can really feel the difference in a piece of content between ‘I love this’ and ‘I was paid to say I love this’, and so can the audience. Audiences are far more literate than the industry gives them credit for.
“So, my advice to a spa or salon would be to trust the creator to bring their magic. Bring someone in, give them the actual experience, and let them describe it to their audience in their own words. A slightly imperfect, real account will always outperform a glossy one that sounds like it came directly off your website.”
How important is it for a beauty or wellness business to have a strong identity and personality beyond the service it provides?
“I'd say it's the whole thing, really. The service or product obviously has to be great, but that's the price of entry. What people actually remember is how you made them feel and the world you built around the product. Nobody recites an ingredients list back to you. They remember whether your brand felt like somewhere they wanted to be and that’s the same for a physical space or treatment.
“With Mirror Water, I wanted the identity to come first and the products to live inside it – the feeling of being in nature, where nothing is asked of you, feeling at peace and treating your body with a bit of care.”
What was it like building a brand, and what have been the biggest challenges?
“Humbling, mostly! I'd spent years building my career as a content creator, where you can have an idea over breakfast and it's out in the world by the afternoon. A physical product business doesn't move like that – you wait and then you wait some more and there's no edit button once it's sitting on someone's bathroom shelf.
“The hardest part has been spinning all the plates at once as a solo founder – formulations and getting products exactly right, cashflow, manufacturing, managing a team and the leap from being the face of something to running the operations behind it (or often both at once!).”
What’s your advice to beauty professionals looking to raise their personal profiles online?
“The instinct when you're building a profile is to broaden to be palatable to everyone. The people who cut through are the ones who consistently talk about the exact thing they love in the exact way they'd say it to a friend. And I'd gently warn against chasing whatever's going viral this week.
“You can build an audience on a trend, but you can't build a relationship on one. I'd rather grow slowly with people who actually want to hear from me. A great place to start as a founder is Substack, and support the essays with content on other platforms.”
What trends does the beauty industry need to prepare for in the near future?
“So much of the industry right now is pointed at optimisation – skincare that promises measurable, clinical results, longevity, the merging of beauty and wellness into one big pursuit of doing everything right.
“I understand the appeal but I think people are getting tired of being improved all the time, and you're already seeing a counter-current: a consumer who's exhausted by being polished, reaching for sensory pleasure and indulgence instead of another protocol. That's the shift I'd bet on – beauty as something you feel, not just something that just works.”