Beautycon is back in business after a four-year hiatus. The annual convention, once hailed as the Super Bowl of beauty, is returning to Los Angeles on September 16 and 17, boasting new management — but it’s got big shoes to fill, and the lingering shadow of a mysterious demise to overcome.
Launched in 2011 by former YouTuber Marina Curry, Beautycon got its start as a place for influencers and content creators to meet. By 2013, the event was attracting some of the biggest brands and influencers of the era — NYX Cosmetics, bareMinerals, and Carli Bybel, one of YouTube’s early beauty vloggers, headlined Beautycon that year. 2013 was also the year Curry recruited digital media entrepreneur Moj Mahdara to bring the event to the next level.
In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Mahdara, then Beautycon’s CEO, called the festival the start of a revolution. And revolutionize it did. Mahdara turned Beautycon, once a peer-to-peer festival, into a full-blown brand, launching e-commerce and Beautycon.com, a digital content platform. Business aside, Beautycon’s values were also ahead of the curve. Before diversity and inclusion became table stakes for brands, Beautycon made an effort to platform influencers like YouTuber Michelle Phan, Lancôme’s first Vietnamese American spokesperson, and Gigi Gorgeous, who came out as transgender in 2013. In an era dominated by autocratic women’s media — headlines that told us to conceal this and expose that — Beautycon felt like a unicorn. A 2017 Forbes article described the company’s content as more “how-you” than “how-to.”
But the golden age of Beautycon wouldn’t last. The trouble began in 2019, when news broke that the company had gone through two rounds of layoffs in three months. Then came a civil suit, filed by 3G Productions. By May 2020, Beautycon was reportedly operating with only a handful of salaried employees. Shortly after, former Beautycon employees came forward with allegations regarding…
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