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Women I admire: Caroline Hirons

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Since I’ve had blogs I’ve always wanted to devote a series to profiling women I love unconditionally. Public figures, I mean, that anybody could look up to.

Before you ask, no, it’s not a duplicate of my ‘styling icon’ series, even though they also are all women. If that series is about professional profiles linked to the styling profession, this one is about females across the board of professions and personalities. The only common trait they have is that I feel for them that complex feeling that is half “ohmygod I love everything she does” and half “I want to die and come back as her”. In a word, this is a more frivolous series, and only occasionally professionally relevant.

Today’s post is the exception to the rule, because it’s devoted to Caroline Hirons, aka “the queen of beauty”.

In fact, a crucial reason why I (and thousand of others like me) love CH is because of her influencer role and how she plays it.

‘Influencer’ takes what I do and makes it about what I can do for a marketing team or brand. I’m a blogger/YouTuber. I have influence, but it’s not why I do what I do.

– Caroline Hirons, interview March 21, 2018

For starters, Caroline Hirons didn’t start in her profession to become an influencer. Quite simply she developed a passion for what she was doing (selling skincare), she trained for it, worked with it, and then naturally went on to open a blog, a YouTube channel, a Facebook group, and eventually an Instagram feed that could revive discontinued products and make them into bestsellers just because she mentions them.

Breathe. That was a handful, I know. But that’s the breathless feeling you get whenever she launches anything.

On May 1 she sold out her Spring kits in around an hour (featuring skincare products from some of the best brands globally, some of which were produced in a limited edition for the kit). Some 60 thousand kits went in 60 minutes distributed over half a day, because her well-prepared website would crash every other minute (with up to 100 thousand connections at a time). On May 4, when she announced discount codes from the same brands in the kit, most of the brands’ global e-commerce websites crashed in a matter of thirty minutes. Some of the brands ran out of the products included in the kit in a couple of days.

You cannot fake these metrics, and this is the kind of numbers you should ask a prospect influencer about when you’re considering working with them.

Not the number of Instagram followers they have (CH has just over 400 thousand, but she had around 300 thousand a few months ago). Then you should look at how they operate and at the kind of engagement they generate.

On the website of the agency representing her, Caroline Hirons is said to be “honest, informative and extremely helpful when distributing skincare advice”, and that’s not a marketing spiel. I personally have a history of DM on Instagram where I asked her for advice and she answered, always in person (her dry and assertive style is pretty unmistakeable).

The same kind of interaction happens in comments on her social media posts and during her lives. Again, you cannot fake this kind of interaction with numbers, nor numbers can adequately describe it.

The reasons why I love Caroline Hirons and why you should go check her out now if you don’t follow her already, are also a large contribution to the engagement she generates.

Assertive competence

Many women are tremendously competent about what they do, or about their passion, but they convey that either with arrogant self-centredness, or fake humbleness, or self-deprecation. Instead, CH states what she knows without frills or embellishments, with assertiveness and a clear sense of purpose. In short she puts her competence to use to help people and to provide advice and guidance.

I’m sure this has to do with how she acquired that competence. She naturally transitioned from selling beauty products in real life (at beauty counters) to consulting brands on how to best sell their products, then moving onto effectively selling beauty through the Internet. It took her twenty years to get there, and before that, she had trained, tried, worked for the industry she influences about.

That level of competence cannot be faked. It provides a consistent stance on the topic at hand that maybe won’t register immediately with fans, but over time it will get traction. Some wannabe influencers don’t realize that talking about every product they are submitted as if it was their favorite, relaying the spiel they’ve been fed by the brand, makes them much less impactful and more interchangeable over time.

In terms of working with bloggers in a sponsored situation, it works best if you leave the script at home and let the blogger advise on what will work. We know our reader/viewer better than anyone. And brands that won’t listen/think they know better are best avoided, no matter how much money they wave in front of you. The reader comes first.

– Caroline Hirons, interview March 21, 2018

It’s not just a matter of credibility (as I said, I doubt most fans give it enough attention to notice), it’s definitely more about relevance and impact.

Strong opinions

If you’ve never heard Caroline Hirons rage against novaxxers you’re missing out. But even if you don’t agree with her opinion you can appreciate her coherence and the strength of her beliefs.

Coherence leads her to turn down collaborations and to publically state she had changed opinion on a product or brand, generating backlash (as it happened recently with Drunk Elephant) as well as waves of support.

I can’t give specific brand examples, that would be beyond unprofessional, but I am asked to endorse products that I don’t use all the time. We all are. It may be turning down a fortune but it’s not worth your reputation with your reader.

– Caroline Hirons, interview March 21, 2018

This level of integrity conveys substance to any statement Caroline Hirons make. I’m not the only one trusting her as the sole source of information on how to care for my skin (check with Francesca Marano and Daniela Scapoli).

Self-awareness

What makes it even more natural to trust Caroline Hirons is the frequencey with which she shows awareness of her role and of her impact. And of the consequences of her actions.

She constantly warns her followers not to “credit card their skincare”, and she always provides alternatives in any price range for the products she mentions and promotes. Furthermore, she uses her influence to affect change. Like at the beginning of the pandemic, when she was very vocal about calling out retailers for laying off employees or for keeping them home without pay.

It’s not common to find that level of self-awareness, but I believe it’s the mark of true greatness.

So yes, I will die happy if I can have an inch of that greatness when I get her age (in seven years). I know, it’s impossible, but a woman can dream.

Feminism, sisterhood and female solidarity

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Tiny disclaimer: I began writing this post in 2019 and worked on it in February 2020, as I’d intended. But it wasn’t finished until April 15, 2020. You find it with a February date because I wanted it to belong to that time before a Global Pandemic hit. In those days, this is what I was thinking about. Also, it’s a rant. If you’re looking for something more proactive, please Google Translate C+B, the collaborative project I co-founded in 2013.

It’s February, March will roll over in 10 minutes and we will find ourselves at war. Between women who’d rather be remembered for 364 days than celebrated for one day only, men who’re unsure whether to buy flowers or cower from rebuke, other women seeking to mindlessly celebrate with acquaintances because they were too busy to develop real girl-friendships.

Despite my usual existential optimism, gender issues tend to bring out a nihilistic approach from me; I’d been meaning to write about on the blog for two years.

Specifically, I wanted to discuss three things that are often mistakenly superimposted, and yet they are seldom exercised at once, feminism, sisterhood and female solidarity.

This boggles my mind.

The way my teenage self thought about it, this is the way: every woman should be a feminist by definition, and any feminist woman should aim to reach equality for her whole gender; as a natural consequence she should feel part of a group of peers (a sisterhood), and she should show solidarity for every other woman, providing her help and support.

Then I grew up, I went into the working world, and I found out that some women who are loudly proudly claiming to be feminists are actually fighting for their own equality, not necessarily for the equality of treatment of all women.

I discovered that some women achieve manager positions by pretending not to be a woman, as if they were ashamed of their gender, choosing instead to act like men and making sure no other woman will have the same opportunities they had. As if they thought their success was just a product of some token positioning, so any other woman could usurp it. I was enraged by these examples, and at the same time, I pitied the women who could not shake such an impostor syndrome and own their own well-deserved success.

I attended some Women Entrepreneurs meetings and listened to female entrepreneurs discussing maternity leave and their female employees not differently from what men would have done. I kept a guilty silence (silence is always guilty when an injustice is witnessed, this I know), but I was mostly sad for the opportunity smart women lost to make a difference.

Then Instagram came. On this platform you could be a small influencer and at once find yourself sleeping with a good friend’s boyfriend (after she’d invited you into her home, to support you). I’m told these are things that can happen to anybody, but in the spirit of the sisterhood, you could at least come clean to your friend as soon as you felt the urge to go through with it. You could at least apologize, and feel like shit. On Instagram, instead, you go on to post endlessly about feminism, about your lofty values, you gather the praise of fans who look up to you as a muse while leaving it to that spineless douche who’s your friend’s boyfriend to come clean. Your conscience was washed cleaned by posting about feminism anyway.

The very specific story above is real. It happened last year to people I know. When I scheduled this post idea I meant to write the full names of the people involved for two reasons:

  1. first of all, I find it appalling that anybody can profit from a fake moral image. The woman who slept with her friend’s boyfriend runs a business where here personal values are central to her value proposition. Those personal values are a hoax;
  2. secondly, I believe silence is guilty, not stating that what’d happened was wrong made me feel physically ill. As if by not pointing my finger I had become an accomplice.

But there are no names in this blog post because at the end of the day I realized the link between feminism, sisterhood, and female solidarity had a resonance. And the spineless douche boyfriend would have suffered no consequence of being exposed.

If being a feminist means to fight for equal opportunities; if sisterhood is about feeling like all women are on the same boat; if female solidarity manifests itself in lending a hand when another woman stumbles, staying by her side to help her fend off attacks, and helping her climb with us.

If these three things are intertwined (and I think they are), this blog post was an opportunity to remind us of it, and to try and forget all of those times we were meant to say “I’d rather work/spend time with men. At least I know how to defend myself.”

Finally, I would like us to remember that claiming to be a feminist, then disregarding sisterhood and female solidarity, is an empty claim.

That woman who’s walking around with her fake moral will have to face her own conscience. To herself she’ll have to explain not so much how she fell for her friend’s partner (it happens), but why she didn’t have the courage and sensibility to face the music like a woman, rather than like a man.

Cover photo by Becca Tapert/Unsplash.