MAGAZINES have long been oracles of beauty advice for women. These days, beauty bloggers, celebrities and tweeting makeup artists also dole out tips and tout must-have products — that they may have received free. But Makeup Alley, a 12-year-old low-frills Web site that focuses on user-generated reviews, has quietly come to be the standard bearer for the unvarnished truth about beauty products online.
Thomas Neal Gilbert for The New York Times
William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times
SCRUB-A-DUB The Salux nylon Japanese bath towel gets a 4.9 out of 5 on Makeup Alley.
According to its New York-based founder, Hara Glick — who, unlike most beauty editors, is so low-profile that she didn’t even want to be photographed for this article — Makeup Alley now has 1.1 million members, which is roughly equivalent to the circulation of Allure. They hotly debate the finer points of Clarisonic skin-cleansing gadgets on the site’s message boards, which get 45,000 posts daily (the site had 2.1 million unique visitors in June), Ms. Glick said. They also swap their used blush, lipstick and other items, so no ill-suited purchase goes to waste and something “new” is always in the mail, even if funds are low and outsiders think it’s gross.
On MUA, as Makeup Alley is known to its members (or MUA-ers), classics like Maybelline Great Lash are forever being debunked, and off-the-beaten-path finds like the exfoliating Salux nylon Japanese bath towel — which, one reviewer joked, would be pried from her “cold, dead, exquisitely exfoliated hands” — are talked up.
Most notably, Makeup Alley (which does not sell anything, and carries minimal and discreetly placed advertising) has a library of well-cataloged, super-specific criticism that allows women to do their prepurchase research among peers they trust, despite or perhaps because of their pseudonymity.
Becky Kester, a 36-year-old medical assistant from Bixby, Okla., and a top reviewer known as LuvsBrdedDragns at Makeup Alley, said that she trusts a product rated with four out of five “lipsticks” (the rating system) on MUA more than the winners of readers’ awards in magazines like Allure and Self.
“It might be the ‘best thing she’s ever tried,’ ” she said, referring to a hypothetical magazine tester, “because they’ve given her $400 of free products — really, everyone is for sale.” But not MUA members, in Ms. Kester’s judgment, because “it’s your sister, your neighbor, your co-worker; it is the people who are using the same product you’re using without any kickback.”
“They got out and purchased it, used it,” she continued, “and they say, ‘This is worth the money,’ or ‘Don’t waste your money.’ ”
Lupita Valdés, 33, a top reviewer at MUA under the pseudonym sugarmartini, estimated that no less than 98 percent of her purchases are based on MUA reviews. “I take the time to look at reviews on my mobile before I buy,” said Ms. Valdés, who works as a publicist in the entertainment industry in Panama.
Another fan is Umair Haque, the author of “The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business,” who stumbled on the site while searching for a perfume for a girlfriend. “It’s an economic engine for transparency and accountability in makeup,” he said. Mr. Haque, a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, said he thought MUA was exemplary because “people trust peers more than they trust anyone else, more than journalists or marketing departments.”
Why? “They don’t have a strategic conflict with their peers.”
As for beauty editors and reporters who recommend products? “I’m not saying they don’t have value,” Mr. Haque said, “but if you’re looking for an unconflicted source, you’ll probably look to a fellow consumer.”
Unlike magazine beauty editors or in-the-fold bloggers who might worry that they’d be disinvited to the next Chanel shindig, the average woman has little reason not to rant about the bad reaction she had to, say, one of the company’s lipsticks.
During a recent interview, Ms. Glick — a brunette with a few sprouting grays who was chicly dressed in white jeans, an airy blouse and tan ballet flats with a sparkly toe box — was self-effacing, yet adamant about keeping the MUA community pure. Her company, which employs fewer than 10 people, makes its money solely from advertising; its purpose, she said, was to give members the tools to become “informed consumers.”
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