Beauty Influencers and Their Changing Identities

Abstract

This paper explores how within the beauty community, specifically looking at the YouTube and Instagram community of influencers that have amassed millions of followers, beauty influencers are shaped by the community as they make changes to their identities based on the platforms they are on. The platforms explored are Instagram and Twitter, discussing the infrastructure and community each platform has and the power they have. Examples of beauty influencers and their scandals are used to illustrate this point. The community and individuals who participate in the community are discussed briefly, in terms of what role they play and what power they have individually and collectively. Overall, Instagram is found to lean towards community and Twitter towards infrastructure to influence change within identity in beauty influencers.

Keywords: identity, Twitter, Instagram, social media, beauty influencers, power, beauty blogging

Introduction

The beauty industry has benefited from the fast paced and ever growing community it has attracted online. The dynamics the community present many questions as to how they continue to work and grow. In this paper, I aim to look at identity in communities and networks and will focus on the online beauty community, specifically looking at the YouTube and Instagram community of influencers that have amassed millions of followers, and I argue that beauty influencers are shaped by the community as they make changes to their identities based on the platforms they are on. The theme of power will be explored as it is a concept that ties into all aspects of this paper. First, I will compare both platforms of Instagram and Twitter, discussing their differences and similarities. Next I will examine each platform individually starting with Instagram and the relationships between individuals and influencers and how this relation shapes an influencer’s identity. Finally, I will explore Twitter and its infrastructure and, community and how it can impact how an influencer creates their identity. For the purposes of this paper, I will only discuss influencers who have a relatively large following, English and Western sector of the beauty community. This will help narrow the paper and explore influencers who do alter their identity at a larger scale.

Definitions

Key concepts such as community and identity must be defined to create a framework for this essay. According to Sanders (as cited in E Rice et al., 2004, p. 4), community is made up of four elements, which include “a place to live, a spatial unit, a way of life, and social system”. E Rice et al. (2004) further states that virtual communities though may not fit into past definitions of communities which were made more for physical communities, still are communities as they are based on different ideas compared to physical communities. They are more focused on the individual conveying their identity as true as possible without general regard to social rules in physical communities. Virtual communities are based on “shared social practices and interests”, and physical based on “shared social and physical boundaries” (E Rice et al., 2004). A more recent definition by Preece (as cited in Cavanagh, 2009, p. 2) states a community’s characteristics include “shared goals, common interests, shared activities and governance, mutual satisfaction of needs, co-operation, enjoyment, pleasure and location as common understandings of community”. This definition of community can be used to define and lay out characteristics of the beauty community. The beauty community of influencers all have a shared interest in beauty, with a focus on cosmetics and they all have a mutual understanding and passion for it. They share social boundaries in the form of grouping together influencers who have the same style of makeup or content and the social practices are very similar across influencers, sharing their makeup or lifestyle surrounding the topic of beauty. Instagram’s algorithm pushes this further by recommending similar beauty accounts to a user based on who they follow, as they post similar content. This showcases that the beauty community has characteristics of a typical community and it is not a new concept of a community. Twitter showcases this as well by the hashtags displaying several users posting makeup looks or tweets relating to beauty, showing their participation and shared interests. Dyrberg (1997) defines identity as the final product of identification, one that happens due to the existence of complex power relations. Such a definition is relevant to beauty influencers that make a brand out of their name, their identity is formed through power relations and what they do.

Instagram and Twitter

Both Twitter and Instagram have its differences and similarities in the way the community and platform encourage for aspects of identities. Both Instagram and Twitter have a like function which usually means that the viewer is showing their approval of the post (Anagnostopoulos, Parganas, Chadwick, & Fenton, 2018). The way one responds to post however, are different, as on Instagram, the comment stays within the post, while on Twitter, a new tweet is made but is attached to the original tweet (Highfield & Leaver, 2014). This difference can cause an influencer to alter their identity differently, as on Instagram, comments may have little effect due to the grouping of all the comments. Whereas on Twitter, each individual reply is a tweet on its own, creating a more sense of self for the individual as beyond their username, their display name and profile photo are shown, which might have a greater effect on how the influencer takes feedback from their posts and decides to alter from it. It might also affect the way a commenter makes their comment and what kind of message they decide to leave. Those on Instagram are only identified by their username in the comments but on Twitter, more of their identity is shown. The way comments are made on both platforms and how they can affect alterations in identity can be seen through the example of Samantha Ravndahl, who posted a photo of her in Japan and including in the description her experience and what lessons she has learnt through the trip (Ravndahl, 2018). Immediately, her post received negative comments, calling her privileged and uncultured. Ravndahl turned the comments off on that post and has never since posted anything on her Instagram of similar content. She also posted the same photo and caption to Twitter and received some negative comments but also received drastically different, positive comments. This shows that bad comments in her Instagram post gave little care in leaving a negative comment, whereas on Twitter, those who left comments realised and understood the content Ravndahl was posting. This example shows the differences between the two platforms and displays the different aspects of them. Conversely, influencer James Charles receives many positive comments on both platforms but projects drastically different identities on both platforms, with Twitter, he creates an identity of being relatable and tweets about everyday things, however with Instagram, he focuses more on makeup, fashion, and lifestyle, thus creating a professional version of himself. Both influencers show even on different platforms, communities can be similar or drastically different and how an influencer may want to alter their identity differently across platforms.

Instagram

The beauty community on Instagram are often mocked by influencers on other platforms, from their wavy brows to breast insert blending sponges, one may look at them and not understand how they work. The community can be broken up into four dominant users; brand accounts, influencer accounts, update accounts and, individual accounts. This paper will focus mainly on influencer and individual accounts, looking at the relationships and community formed around influencer accounts. Individual accounts can be viewed as the everyday participant on an influencer’s Instagram posts. These accounts may view their interactions on posts having little to no impact, however Granovetter (1973) argues that their interactions is tied to bigger aspects of social structure and that they have little to no control of this. Such interactions can also be viewed as weak ties, which are relationships people have that hold lesser value than strong ties which are ties that have a relationship that holds a strong bond. The interactions consist of commenting or liking an account or post and, viewing these posts, and the way they do this affects the community they form by influencing the social cues. This in turn impacts the influencer users who take the feedback they receive from the individual users to alter their posts/account and in turn they tweak their identity to fit the community.

Since Instagram is limited to photos, videos and a text description, this impacts how an influencer can build and present their identity. Highfield and Leaver (2014) point out that compared to other platforms, Instagram encourages “standardised bits of information”, instead of giving an extensive story. This is due to the limitations of the platform, one is only allowed to post media and text is only an option in captions and though one can share text via images, it still is a media format. This is also brought over to Instagram stories where stories are limited by time. This forces influencer to share a snippet of what they want to. Such standardised information is reflective of influencer accounts, with majority of their posts being photos at an event, a restaurant, the beach and, so on. This limit influencers on what and how much they can share about their identity. Thus, each post is important in helping to build and alter their identity, with help from comments and feedbacks from their followers, the individual users. This creates a feedback loop, allowing influencers to create and enhance any aspects of the presented identity that received approval to grow more. Thus, this shows how influencers are influenced by individual accounts and how they are shaped by the community and don’t shape themselves, they might create an identity initially, however are eventually shaped by the community. Such can occur through comments as help represent the community and are part of the influencer’s identity as they take on their suggestions and whenever you visit their page, the comments reflect aspects of the influencer, again showing that individual users shape influencers. This relationship works as individual users get content that they desire and the influencer gets more likes, comments and, views on their posts, thus increasing their influence on people. This reveals that identity of influencers are in the hands of their followers and the community. Due to the strong ties influencers and individual accounts have, in which individual accounts help to provide influencers the power they have, they almost force influencers to change their identity or fear losing their power. This is displayed by beauty influencer James Charles who has had his identity damaged by a racism scandal, which will be discussed later in detail, tries to the best of his ability to prevent another racist scandal to his name appear again in fear of losing his reputation (Charles, 2018). It must also be noted that influencer accounts can become individual accounts on other’s Instagram pages. This allows influencers to experience a similar role to individual accounts, but will never fully experience it as their power and influence will translate in their interactions as their fans will back them up.

Twitter

Twitter in the beauty sphere is perceived to be a smaller platform compared to Instagram, but serves a purpose for some influencers. Like the analysis done on Instagram, I will only look at influencer accounts and individual users. Twitter has a different dynamic compared to Instagram, due to the limitations of the platform, where each tweet is limited to 240 characters. Veletsianos (2012) observes that the social networks within Twitter is a result of user’s connections with one another. Twitter not only separates each tweet from another, making each unique and a post of their own, but also structures each tweet consistently, having aspects such as date and time, username, text, and if added, links, photos, videos, hashtags and, mentions (Highfield & Leaver, 2014). This consistency leads to the platform easily being used for conversation and collaboration (Gruzd, Wellman, & Takhteyev, 2011). An influencer typically has several thousand followers and interacts with their fans. Interactions include, likes, replies, follows and, retweeting/quote tweeting. Such interactions can be easily seen on the influencer’s and individual’s page. Interactions and posts are quick and fast paced, this simulates the everyday life more in comparison to other social media platforms. The community works and is active as those who participate use Twitter to keep in touch with people, in this case to learn more about an influencer’s life (Gruzd et al., 2011). Influencers can receive tweets and comments about a tweet they posted from individuals, either positive, negative or neutral. Due to more direct, public and accessible conversations, Twitter becomes a more social platform, actively displaying strong connections influencers may have.

The nature of Twitter may cause influencers to alter their identities in terms of the relationships they show publicly. This is especially relevant as in the beauty influencer industry, the friendships one makes are also business relationships, so they might want to boost each other’s following count by faking the strength of the relationship. The community here plays a part as they can be happy to see the close relationship and encourage is by following the other influencer, thus leading to both influencers gaining more power through influence. This displays the power community has on identities of influencers, if they enjoy the identity they showcase, they encourage it and follow them. A way the platform shapes influencers is the nature of the platform. It restricts influencers with the character limit and the fast-paced tweets. Information is spread quickly (Milstein, Lorica, Magoulas, Hochmuth, & Chowdhury, 2009) and can cause influencers to rethink their tweets or count on the fact that Twitter moves quickly and tweet controversial things, as it is a platform of instantaneous posting. This can be seen through the example of James Charles, who got himself into trouble by posting a racist and ignorant tweet, joking about Ebola and Africa. Charles was quickly reprimanded by many and called out for being ignorant and racist and soon after, he apologised (Tea, 2017). Charles was blind to how fast information can spread and how it doesn’t just pass and was reminded of this through his ignorant and racist tweet. After such an event, Charles is no longer seen to be joking about race or Ebola and he has yet to post a tweet without much thought. This shows the power and immense influence of the community and how they can collectively create power in numbers and use it against people who are ignorant and racist. It showcases the way a community and dynamic of a platform can cause an influencer to tweak parts of their identity to fit the platform and its user’s demands.

Conclusion

Overall, both Twitter and Instagram’s community and platform play a part in how an influencer constructs and changes their identity. After exploring both platforms and discussing their similarities and differences, both platforms either lean towards community or platforms in how they influence change. Twitter leans towards the way the platform is constructed and Instagram leaning more on the community. However, both platforms use both platform and community to influence the change. Beauty influencers gain more out of changing their identity power and influence. A little was discussed about the community and the relationship they hold with influencers and the power they have in numbers and individually.

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