What is this Glossybox thing, anyway?

The beauty corner of YouTube has been inundated with reviews and unboxing videos of something called Glossybox. You may recall a little while back I reviewed JustFab.com, a shoe subscription service — well, it seems a lot like that.

Glossybox is a worldwide company, but is just now coming to America. In order to raise some hype, they’ve sent boxes free of charge to a whole lotta Youtube beauty vloggers, not just the big name gurus. This shows a transition in the way fashion and beauty products are marketed to young consumers. While we may still covet our issues of Vogue, we are spending more time browsing Youtube, blogs, Chictopia.com, and Lookbook.nu than magazines for fashion and beauty “inspiration.” I mean, these days you can even watch people unbox new shoes on Youtube with a detailed review — times are a-changing, people! (Which is sad for all of us who hoped to be magazine editors.) Lots of companies are offering free products in exchange for blog updates and vlogs.

Let’s take a look at my favorite Youtube fashion/beauty/paranormal blogger, Grav3yardgirl, as she opens her free Glossybox:

From what I gather, you pay $21 each month for one monthly box filled with five different travel size beauty products (a nice way to dress up what seems like samples to me) curated by “beauty experts.” I am not sure if you can skip months or not, like you can with JustFab and ShoeDazzle. They are packaged very nicely, and some of the products actually are full size, like OPI nail polish. The company promises that all the brands are high end or luxury. So, is it really worth the $21 per month? That’s $252 per year, and as grav3yardgirl says, that’s potential shoe money. Perhaps the added retail cost of all the contexts is enough to draw you in. I definitely want to see more.

The whole thing is still in the “beta” stages for America, but I am intrigued. Their marketing tactic has certainly succeeded in creating a lot of buzz.