I recently learned a fun new word – skinfluencers. It doesn’t take a creative genius to work out what that stands for, skin influencers, or influencers who mostly promote skin care.
Skin care is great, first of all. Whether you’re the sort of person with a fully structure skincare routine or more of a ‘wash face, moisturise, and go’ type of person, it’s important and knowledge is definitely power with how to look after your skin – especially seeing as everyone’s skin is unique.
Somebody even did the research and found out that millennials care more about skin care than any other generation, which is another fun statistic to bust out next time someone tries to ‘Ok Millennial” you, which seems to be depressingly often.
But I digress.
We first saw the rise of skinfluencers after the Federal Trade Commission over in the USA decided that Instagram influencers needed to let people know when their posts were sponsored content by a brand or anybody else. You know the sort, they have to be labelled #ad or #spon or have it clearly written somewhere in the caption. It’s not hard.
Because beauty bloggers in particular were basically posting wall to wall #sponcon and #ads, the new laws hit them harder than most. Thus, the skinfluencers were born.
The theory is that all of a sudden they aren’t beauty influencers being paid to spruik whatever they’re paid to spruik – skinfluencers reckon they’re reviewers. If they’re only researching and reviewing products, then they don’t have to stick to the #ad rule.
It means we’re seeing skinfluencers now who aren’t admitting when something is an ad, and occasionally just making stuff up. In short, they’re trying to kick the rules in classic influencer style.
Earlier this year, the US government put out a website and video telling influencers to pull their heads in and follow the rules. Will it lead to a new wave of skinfluencers? We’ll just have to wait and see.