I stood in the middle of the Los Angeles Convention Center, surrounded by over 15,000 beautiful people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many perfect faces. With glowing skin, perfectly winged eyes, and voluminous hair, the stars, fans, and sponsors embraced the Beautycon Festival LA as a celebration of a new beauty standard―a standard that excludes no one.
The feeling of safety and expression of empowerment felt close to foreign as our society collectively grieves for the lives lost to police brutality and mass shootings. Being in a community that celebrates both the similarities and differences of its constituents was all too refreshing.
In the Beautycon culture, the minority is the majority. The company leverages the new paradigm of content creation, permitted by platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Vine, and Instagram, connecting fans and brands with digital beauty mavens.
With the new opportunities for self-publishing, anyone can become a breakout star. A creator’s race, gender, sexual orientation, physical abilities, and body shape are no longer determining factors for attracting audiences, as mainstream media would have you believe. In fact, authenticity, and even quirkiness, have proven to be the keys to popularity online.
Just as many YouTube stars do not fit the mold within mainstream media, many consumers have also felt alienated, not able to relate to the “traditional” standard of beauty. By internalizing the exclusive beauty standard, many find fault in their own appearance. Finding content that features people that look like you or have a similar story to you is an empowering, impactful experience. Today’s diverse group of self-confident, self-made stars have inspired deep connections to their fans by offering access to their lives and sharing a “You’re not the only one” message. Messages of acceptance and camaraderie are what drives thousands of people to events like the Beautycon Festival LA.
Beautycon Media curates these stories and connections to make culturally impactful moments and experiences that actively challenge our cultural understanding of who and what is beautiful.
Who is behind this much-needed community? Consumer marketing and digital products expert, Beautycon Media CEO Moj Mahdara. She shared how the company is challenging the status quo.
Alanah Joseph: What made you invest in, and eventually run Beautycon Media?
Moj Mahdara: I was amazed by the power of content creators and publishers. They are the new “brands,” the new media companies. It fascinates me that mobile devices have created the opportunity for the everyday person to be become their own media platform if they choose.
Today’s content creators are bringing a new wave of self made entrepreneurship with their incredible ways of using content, technology, and media. Many of them have their own cosmetic lines and merchandise. It’s an exciting time where technology and resources are meeting the desire of the entrepreneur. Their success is a combination of their ambition and the available platforms.
Our biggest mission is to advocate for our community, the creator, and consumers by redefining and reshaping what beauty means.
-Moj Mahdara
Alanah: How is the company redefining beauty?
Moj: Our biggest mission is to advocate for our community, the creator, and consumers by redefining and reshaping what beauty means. What does it mean to be beautiful inside and out? Our creators think of beauty as an expression of power and creativity.
The content creators are the ones redefining what beauty is. Their diverse backgrounds and their voices are reshaping how we think of beauty. We are the platform that curates all of these experiences. We’re the voice of the new generation of amazing content creators from all walks of life.
There’s a shortage of Black, Latin, Middle Eastern, Asian, and full-bodied people in mainstream media. They aren’t being featured as traditional personalities. There’s a belief that the masses still want to see a “traditional” personality on the cover of magazines or on TV shows. Here what’s mainstream is missing: The masses want to see themselves represented in content, and that’s why YouTube, Instagram Snapchat, and Vine have been such a huge phenomenon. If you’re a young person of color or identify as LGBTQ, there’s a pool of content for you to consume that we aren’t seeing in mainstream media.
Alanah: Beautycon has a very accepting, fun company culture. What goes into creating a safe space where people feel good about being themselves?
Moj: Our community is an authentic expression of the people who work for the company. We all identify as “other” on some level. We all want to belong. We all want to feel beautiful, and we want to create a community that supports those things.
Beautycon Festival is about community. It’s about creating a safe space outside of all the things that are going on around us. We want to create a space where people can feel amazing in their own skin.
We all identify as “other” on some level. We all want to belong. We all want to feel beautiful, and we want to create a community that supports those things.
-Moj Mahdara
Alanah: How do you demonstrate to your audiences that makeup enhances your beauty, but does not make you beautiful?
Moj: Makeup used to be a concealer culture. It was about covering something up that was wrong with you. We believe in the saying “I woke up like this.” The content creators think of themselves as self-empowered and beautiful. They want to feel good about themselves, and express themselves. They show that they want to be healthy inside and out. Their attraction to beauty and beauty products is more about physically expressing what’s inside, rather than being about trying to cover anything up.
[Our content creators’] attraction to beauty and beauty products is more about physically expressing what’s inside, rather than being about trying to cover anything up.
-Moj Mahdara
Beauty is inherent. Race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identifiers are, in reality, non-factors in determining beauty. We are all beautiful. As being “other” becomes dangerous in a divisive world, it is even more important to celebrate the beauty that is within each of us. We need more communities and safe spaces as Beautycon Media seeks to illuminate.