Before it was a media strategy, the beauty magazine was a thing. It was a paper object, with a cover, with a spine, with a weight in the hand that could not be replicated on a screen. It had a smell — the smell of offset ink, of the particular clay used to finish the cover, of the adhesive in the perfect binding. It had a sound — the small give of the spine when you opened it past the centre, the soft crack of a page that had been read many times and then smoothed back. It was a thing in the room, on the table, and later on the shelf, in the way that very few things now are.
It is worth saying this clearly at the start, because the conversation about beauty print — what we still call the magazine, even when we are talking about a Substack newsletter — has, for twenty years, been dominated by people who have not had the experience of the object. They have not held a Vogue of 1968 in the hand and felt its heft. They have not opened an Allure of 1991 and smelled the perfume strip on the cover. They have not, in short, been to the magazine.
This essay is, in part, an argument that they should go.
1892 — the newsstand object
The first issue of Vogue was published in December 1892, in New York, as a weekly society paper. It was a small format, sixteen pages, on a thin coated stock that would not, by modern standards, survive a single reading. It was, by the standards of its day, an expensive object — a subscription cost more than a working man earned in a day. It was sold at the newsstand as a luxury, alongside the Saturday Review, the Atlantic, and the imported Illustrated London News.
The early Vogue was not yet a beauty magazine. It was a magazine about how to be seen — what to wear, where to be seen in it, who to be seen with. Beauty was a small department, mostly concerned with the complexion, and largely written for a clientele who already had a face. The first advertisements for skin preparations appear in the mid-1890s. They are short. They are also, in their way, the first advertising in what would become a hundred-year genre.
What the early Vogue already was, in 1892, was a physical argument about what a magazine could be. The paper was chosen for its hand. The cover was finished in a way that invited touching. The typography was, for the time, lavish. The object said: I am not a newspaper. I am something else.
1920s — the beauty service
By the early 1920s, the American beauty magazine had begun to specialise. Vogue ran a Beauty Service — a subscription programme in which readers could write in for a personalised regimen of products and instructions, which would be returned to them in a typed letter by a beauty editor on staff. The Beauty Service was, by any measure, the first beauty direct-to-consumer operation. It was also the moment at which the magazine stopped being a one-way object and became a correspondence.
The 1920s magazine, in other words, was already a service before it was a publication. The reader wrote in. The magazine replied. The reply contained product names. The reader went to a counter. The counter stocked the products. The loop closed.
It is worth pausing on this, because the modern beauty ecosystem — the editorial review, the affiliate link, the recommendation engine, the Sephora loyalty programme — is, structurally, the Beauty Service with a digital interface. The format has changed. The loop has not.
1930s — the magazine as instruction manual
The 1930s were the moment the beauty magazine became an instruction manual. The depression had reduced the budget for professional beauty services; the magazine, with its full-page diagrams and step-by-step instructions, was the only place a woman could learn how to apply the new cosmetics that the mass market was beginning to produce. Max Factor ran instructional spreads. Elizabeth Arden ran instructional spreads. Helena Rubinstein ran instructional spreads. The magazine was, in this period, the manual for the cosmetics industry.
The page was, in this period, doing a particular kind of work that the modern page does not. A 1934 Vogue page contained, on average, around 70% text and 30% image. A 2024 Vogue page contains the reverse. The text was long, technical, and addressed to the reader directly — place the rouge here, blend outward, allow to settle before powder. The reader was, in effect, being taught by the magazine, in the way that one is taught by a book.
1940s — the wartime object
The wartime magazine was a different object. Paper was rationed. Page counts were reduced. The covers were often unvarnished. The content was, in many cases, surprisingly intimate — letters from beauty editors in the field, photographs of women applying lipstick in war work. The wartime magazine was, in this sense, a companion object: something a woman had on her bedside table, not because she was going to read it for instruction, but because she wanted to feel that the ordinary life, including the cosmetic life, was still going on.
The wartime beauty essay had a particular tone — not the dryness of the 1930s manual, but a kind of warmth, a kind of insistence on the small pleasures, that would have been unrecognisable in a different decade. Red lipstick is morale, wrote one Vogue editor in 1943. Wear it for yourself and for the war. The lipstick was not, in this framing, a luxury. It was an act of persistence.
1950s — the magazine as a department store
The postwar beauty magazine was, structurally, a department store. The pages were 70% advertising. The editorial was 30%. The advertisements were, often, indistinguishable in tone from the editorial — the same serif, the same paper, the same neutral photography. The reader could not, in many cases, tell where the editorial ended and the advertisement began, and was not necessarily meant to.
The 1950s magazine, in other words, was the period in which the beauty magazine completed its transformation from a publication into a retail environment. The reader, picking up the magazine, was not reading a beauty article. She was walking through a beauty department. The departments had names — Skin, Makeup, Fragrance — that we have inherited, almost unchanged, for the modern beauty magazine.
1991 — Allure and the magazine as science
When Allure launched, in March 1991, it was the first major American beauty magazine to make a sustained argument that beauty was, in part, a scientific question. Allure published its first Best of Beauty in the same year. It ran, from the start, comparative product tests — the same product, on the same skin, photographed under the same light, with the same panel. The magazine was, in this period, the only beauty publication that was, in any methodological sense, doing empirical work.
The Allure moment was, in retrospect, the last great period of the beauty magazine as a serious editorial object. The magazine had advertising, but the advertising was bracketed off from the editorial in a way the 1950s magazine had not bothered to do. The magazine had authority. The reader could, in 1991, read a product review in Allure and believe that the reviewer had, in fact, used the product.
2005 — the indie magazine and the curatorial gesture
By the mid-2000s, the mass-market beauty magazine was in slow decline. The covers were increasingly indistinguishable from one another. The editorial was increasingly derivative. The advertising was increasingly the whole show.
The indie magazine arrived in this period — Cherry Pickle, in 2012; The Establishment, in 2016; Into the Gloss, in its first iteration as a standalone magazine, in 2018. The indie magazine was a curatorial gesture: a small editorial team, working with limited advertising, deciding what to publish not because it would sell but because the team thought it was worth publishing. The indie magazine was, in short, the return of the magazine as a publication, after a forty-year period in which it had been, mostly, a retail environment.
The indie magazine was also, often, beautiful. The paper was heavier. The photography was more literate. The typography was better chosen. The object, in the hand, had weight. The reader was being asked, by the object, to slow down.
2020 — the magazine as a website
The 2020 magazine is, in most cases, a website. The website is read on a phone. The phone does not have a paper smell. The website does not have a spine. The website is, structurally, an infinite scroll of pages that are not, in the meaningful sense, pages at all.
This is, for the older object, a sad thing.
The website is also, in many cases, doing excellent work. The website can publish more, faster. The website can host video. The website can be in conversation with the reader in a way the printed magazine could not. The website is, in many senses, a more useful object than the magazine ever was.
But the website is not a magazine. The website is something else, for which we have not yet found a better word.
What we are doing, here
We are publishing a magazine. We have chosen to publish it on a website, because this is, in 2026, the most efficient way to reach the reader we want to reach. But we have, in the design and the cadence and the tone, tried to keep something of the older object in mind. We have, in particular, tried to keep in mind the magazine as a thing: a thing with weight, with a spine, with a voice that does not change to chase the moment.
We have, in other words, tried to publish the kind of magazine that, if it were printed, would survive on the shelf.
We hope you will keep us on the shelf.