Into The Gloss built Glossier — Glossier let the blog go dark

Emily Weiss started Into The Gloss in 2010 while working at Vogue: a beauty blog built on interviews and reader comments. It peaked above two million unique readers a month, with 60 per cent of traffic arriving direct. In 2014 she used the blog's audience insight to launch Glossier with four products — the brand was, in effect, the blog monetised. Within a year of that launch, Into The Gloss closed its external advertising, which had included Lancôme and Bumble & Bumble, to make room for Glossier's own products.

The hollowing was gradual and then sudden. By 2019 the site was down to a skeleton team; when the in-house photographer and editorial assistant left, they were not replaced. Glossier laid off more than 80 corporate employees in January 2022 — founder Emily Weiss told staff the company had 'got ahead of ourselves on hiring' — and another round of cuts in August 2022 hit both the brand and the blog. Into The Gloss stopped publishing in June 2022; its social channels then went silent for months.

Insiders told Glossy there were internal conversations about sunsetting the site altogether after the layoffs. What survived was the franchise, not the publication: in October 2023 the blog returned around its Top Shelf interviews at a cadence of one profile a week, with CMO Kleona Mack insisting, 'We are not winding down ITG.' The site that had been Glossier's focus group — 'essentially Glossier's focus group,' as Mintel analyst Alison Gaither put it in 2019 — was revived as a content arm of the thing it had created.