Long Live the Beauty Editor: In Defense of the Longer Read

What people need most right now isn’t more content. It’s translation.

I built my reputation as a beauty editor, but before that, I spent years on the health beat — poring over medical journals, interviewing experts on everything from food allergies to hormone imbalances.

When you read a lot of journals, you realize the responsibility you have in helping to parse complex and often conflicting information. In fact, you can find a study to support almost anything. Want to argue that coffee prevents cancer? There’s a study. Want to argue it causes it? There’s one of those too. That’s not a flaw, exactly. It’s the nature of how evidence accumulates.

No single study is supposed to be the final word. Even the landmark ones — the massive, decades-long studies that track tens of thousands of people, the ones that actually do shape medical guidelines — are still just one contribution to an enormous, ongoing body of evidence. A single study is a data point, not a verdict. It needs context: what population it looked at, how it was funded, whether it’s been replicated. That’s the part that takes real expertise, and it’s also the part that gets lost the fastest.

Consumers today have more access to information than any generation before them. That access is generally good. The problem is what to do with it i.e. how to tell a truly momentous, load-bearing claim apart from a single mouse study disguised as a thumb-stopping breakthrough.

What people need most right now isn’t more content. It’s translation.

Editors have always done this work. Journalists by nature interrogate a topic and dig deeper. On the beauty side, they ask the derm, then the derm who disagrees with that derm, and see where the disagreement actually lives. It’s slower than a 15-second video. But it’s a time-tested process that reliably turns expert knowledge into something a reader can actually use.

I was asked recently if I think the future of beauty media belongs to creators or editors. I strongly believe it’ll be both. Creators serve a real purpose in education today too. A good hook is often how someone finds out an ingredient or a trend exists at all. The issue isn’t the TikTok video with 1 million views. It’s what happens after the video. The information isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just missing part of the picture, and that was never a job the format was built to finish.

Short-form content structurally isn’t built for deeper discussion and explanation. It’s not great at nuance. Viral hooks run on absolutes. “This ingredient is why your skin is breaking out” performs. “This ingredient might be a contributing factor for some skin types, depending on formulation and a dozen other variables” does not. The format tends to push every claim toward its most dramatic, most singular version, lacking the balance and nuance that longer-form stories can bring.

I see creators and editors working hand in hand across a big beauty ecosystem, not competing for the same slice of attention. One gets you curious. The other dives deeper.

It’s been sad to see so many publications and newsrooms shuttered over the past decade, and some gutted editorial teams operating as a skeleton crew of e-commerce writers. None of this happened because readers stopped caring about editorial content. I don’t buy that theory and never did. What broke was the business model.

For a long time, advertising subsidized the glossy gorgeous part of publishing AND the expensive, unglamorous part of journalism: the follow-up call, the fact-check, the editor whose whole job was to slow a piece down until it was right. Then the ad dollars migrated to platforms that don’t employ a single editor, and they didn’t come back. Newsrooms didn’t shrink because the reporting stopped mattering. They shrank because the thing that used to pay for it disappeared.

The platforms that filled the void run on an economy where certainty travels, and nuance doesn’t get funded. Which is the gap DRMTLGY built this series to close.

DRMTLGY has always described its mission as making dermatological-grade skin care more accessible, not only through price and where you can buy it, but through how it’s explained.

This new Substack, The Art of Formulation, continues that mission and brings it one layer deeper. Yes, other brands have launched Substacks. But what felt fresher when the brand approached me was their goal of building a platform specifically for beauty editors to dive deeper and preserve a space for longer-form expert interviews. A new outlet for beauty writers and editors? A win-win.

Over the coming months, I’ll be with you exploring topics like ingredients and injectables. Then I’ll pass the baton to another editor.

For the meantime, I’m here to be your guide and translator. The science of beauty deserves a deeper look as much as any other subject.

So in the end, we’re left with: an editor, a publication, a sponsor who believes in the work enough to fund it and let the people who do the work do the work. It’s an old model. It’s also, it turns out, still a good one.