Shatteredshards kicked off 2011 with a weekly beauty bloggers' writing prompt/challenge…now in its fourth week. It's a bit like Beauty Blogs' Backstage, in that it gets us to share a bit about ourselves and our blog…but all the questions come from one source, they're available in advance (if you're the preplanning type), and there's no requirement about how long you've been blogging, or how frequently. Want to find out more? Check it out!

Is there another beauty blogger who makes you want to improve as a blogger? How so?

Since everyone has slightly different definitions of “beauty blogger”, let alone “blogger”...that's kind of difficult for me to answer.

Christine at Temptalia always has great product release information including descriptions and professional photos, and has multiple substantial updates almost every day. One of the differences is that she's focussed on large commercial brands like M*A*C and Dior that have dedicated PR departments of a few dozen to over 100 people. I primarily feature indie cosmetics (and only a few brands of those, because I don't go out and try every one that I find), and most indie cosmetics companies are between two to a dozen people total…who handle customer service, product research and development, order fulfilment, web sites/storefronts, marketing, and everything else. Companies of that size can't generate the same quality and quantity of formal press releases, professional product photos, lists of new releases months in advance, et cetera because they're too busy creating the products to put together all of that information. Folks who feature small-business goods have to work a bit differently than folks who feature goods from multinational corporations with budgets larger than some nations. On the one hand, I'd like to be able to provide more information about upcoming releases from indie companies. On the other hand…that information either isn't collected for easy dissemination, or isn't there at all.

There are other beauty bloggers who have some techniques I admire, but not necessarily techniques that I want to emulate (just because that's not where I care to focus.) As an example, Grey over at Le Gothique reviews a lot of indie beauty companies, from cosmetics to soap to skincare to jewelry and more. She has a pretty thorough rundown of what she notices when ordering products from indie companies, and what she thinks about each company's offering. She focuses on some things that I personally don't care much about - I really don't care about packaging other than “it kept the product from spilling or breaking in transit, and it's a good container”, but to some folks, the extra care that goes into making packaging attractive or anything other than starkly utilitarian is something that they pay attention to. I don't care to focus on products in quite the same amount of detail that Grey does, but I like that others take the time to routinely call out what's important to them, and why. There are other bloggers who will mention packaging - just about any of us will mention the packaging when it's either outstandingly clever or mindnumbingly stupid - Grey is just the first example that popped into my head, so I picked on her. There are also other beauty bloggers who focus more on a wider range of companies and products than I do - again, I just picked on Grey because she's a one-stop-shop example. But since I don't buy lots of handcrafted things, and my personal fashion style is fairly simple (knit tops - four styles, four or five colors of each; sweat pants or yoga pants or soft cotton/Moroccan pants, depending on the temperature; and inexpensive tennis shoes or sandals), it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me to review clothing. (I have some lovely skirts that I wear from time to time. But again…not a huge focus on those. Check back in ten years or so. I may have undergone another metamorphosis. But probably not.)

Brittany over at Clumps of Mascara has several regular features, kind of a themed schedule: Mascara Monday, Fotd Friday, special stuff for nails, a Beauty and the Male segment. While I like the organization, I don't know that I have enough activity to spread it out quite like that. I've still got a backlog of kits that I haven't cataloged yet, and while my color acquisition has slowed significantly in the last year (yes, really) I have started cataloging my nail polishes. In 2011 I can see myself developing a slightly more regular schedule - one more varied than an eyecolor look a day, to help keep me from burning out - but I don't know that it will be quite as regularized as Brittany's.

Most beauty bloggers have better photos than I do. For a while I thought it was solely down to two things: 1) my utter lack of knowledge about photography; and 2) my shaky hands which made it hard to get non-blurry photos. Then I did something breathtakingly simple: I bought a new camera. It has 3 times the megapixels of my previous camera, and it has an automatic image stabilization feature…in short, it's 6 years' worth of improved digital-camera technology. Suddenly…holy carp, I'm taking better photos!! I know how to use Photoshop to tweak the light levels and image saturation so that I can make the photos taken in my variable-light environment (the bathroom countertop, I am teh glam) a little more consistent; and because of my professional background in web usability (and my personal OCD tendencies) I already knew about using uniform image sizes wherever possible to enhance the site's overall appearance…but having better quality photos has made a dramatic difference. I've already planned to spend 2011 rephotographing my ginormous stash, and including more detail-photos of all my colors. (Because I don't have enough stuff to do already. See, there's that OCD again!) I haven't learned all of my new camera's capabilities, and I would like to get a tripod - I suspect that will greatly help with the product photography - but I don't know that I'll ever go to the extent of having a small photography setup just for my beauty blog.

Additionally, I started this blog primarily as a way for me to catalog my collection and share information about dupes and near-dupes (especially between BE and the various indie brands…that mission has kind of faltered now that the two indie brands that make up the bulk of my collection have both shut down.) I'm not interested in making this generate money for me, or act as a kind of a portfolio to help me break into advertising or editing or PR or marketing or anything else. I've got a “career field” (web development and usability), I'm established in it and I keep growing in it, it pays my mortgage and my other bills quite well. Beauty blogging is my playground. Some folks knit, or scrapbook, or bake, or make jewelry…or any of two dozen other activities that could be done at a professional level, but for them it's something either wildly tangential to or utterly separate from their career. They may do professional- or museum-quality work in their chosen hobby…meaning that they may knit, or bake, or make jewelry that's of exceedingly high quality. They just don't care to go to the extra work of pricing it, stockpiling it, marketing it, handling customer service and shipping, tracking taxes, and all the other aspects that go into selling goods in the general marketplace. For me, it's the same thing. I get paid to write HTML and CSS. I get paid to create and edit graphics. I also get paid to write (technical writing). I just don't get paid to do any of that stuff -=here=-. The happy upside of that is I'm in control of what is done when, where, why, and for how long. If one day I want to wipe all of this out, I can (though it's not likely that I would.) If one day I decide that I don't want to display anything from Company X, or any reviews of product type Y, I can delete all of those entries and while readers may want them back, I don't have a boss or a team or a customer saying, “Hey, I paid you money to put that up, why is it gone?” or “I paid you money to make me look good, why did you say A-B-C?”.

(Side note: it's amazing to me how many instances I hear of, where companies automatically assume that giving PR samples to a particular blogger means that the blogger will either write a good review about the company, or that the blogger will at least refrain from writing a negative review. Um. No, really, folks, if that's what you expect, then state that up front. It gives the blogger a chance to laugh hysterically, share the story on Twitter where we'll all mock the living shite out of you even if we don't know your company's name, and then compose themselves long enough to email you back saying “I'm sorry, this won't work for me”. If you want someone to unstintingly sing the praises of your company and your product, that's going to cost you quite a bit more than 30 coin or a string of beads. You'll have to put someone on the regular payroll. Or…here's a wacky thought: consistently provide a good-quality product or service. One-two-three-DUH.)

Holy carp. For a question that wasn't going to be easy for me to answer, I've written a dissertation!

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