Three years ago, if you asked the average Australian beauty consumer where she went for product information, she would say Vogue Australia, Marie Claire AU, or Beauty Heaven. The brand-side teams I worked with planned PR cycles around the editorial calendars of those publications. Mecca and Adore stocked products partly on the basis of the coverage they would receive in those mastheads. The publications had real power, and they used it.
Today the same consumer says TikTok, an Instagram beauty creator, or a search query that returns either a YouTube review or an editorial publication she has never heard of. The legacy publishers are still publishing, but their share of the discovery and verification journey is collapsing. Most of them have not noticed yet. The ones that have noticed — Vogue Australia in particular — are responding in the wrong direction, doubling down on celebrity-led content that the audience has signalled it does not want.
This essay is the medium-term forecast. Where I think Australian beauty media is going, what is going to replace the current incumbents, and the editorial choices that will determine which players inherit the audience and which ones do not.
What the legacy publishers got wrong.
Three structural choices made over the last decade have made the legacy beauty mastheads vulnerable.
The first was the gradual blurring of the editorial wall. Sponsored content (always present) crept into a higher and higher percentage of total editorial output. Branded reviews became indistinguishable from independent ones. The Australian beauty consumer noticed faster than the publishers expected. By 2023, the trust premium that the legacy publications had earned over forty years was largely gone.
The second was the deprioritisation of category specialism. The beauty editor at a magazine that also covers fashion, lifestyle, and celebrity does not have the time to become a real authority on retinol formulations or LED device clinical evidence. Generalist beauty editors became less useful at exactly the moment that the audience became more specialist — driven by the same TikTok creators who could explain niacinamide in detail.
The third was the assumption that print-derived editorial templates would translate to digital. The 800-word product round-up, written for a glossy magazine spread, does not work as a search-optimised editorial format. Google rewards depth, structure, and specificity. The legacy publications gave it surface, narrative, and adjective.
The trust premium that the legacy publications had earned over forty years was largely gone by 2023. They have not noticed because the metric they track — circulation — is the wrong one.
What is actually replacing them.
Three categories of competitor are moving into the gap. Each one is partial. Together they will divide most of the audience the legacy publishers used to own.
Beauty creators on TikTok and YouTube. The discovery layer. Strong on personality, strong on demonstration, weak on consistency and durability. Most individual creators will not exist as commercial entities in five years (the economics are punishing). The ones who do — Hyram, Susan Yara, Caroline Hirons internationally, several emerging Australians — will compound into authority publications in their own right.
Independent editorial publications. The verification layer. This is the category Glow exists in, alongside Substack-based critics like Jessica DeFino (US), professional-grade reviewers like the team at Beautypedia (US), and a handful of Australian peers. Smaller audience than legacy publications, but with disproportionately high trust per reader and disproportionately high conversion per visit. The category is structurally sustainable because the unit economics are better than legacy media — a 10-person editorial team with 80,000 readers can run profitably; a 100-person magazine with 800,000 readers cannot.
Retailer editorial. Adore Beauty's content arm, Mecca's editorial team, Sephora AU's content function. Excellent production quality, deep product expertise, structurally compromised by the underlying commerce relationship. This category will own the consideration layer ("which of these three should I buy") for any consumer who has already accepted the retailer as the editorial filter — which is most Australian beauty consumers under 40. The legitimacy ceiling is lower because of the conflict of interest, but the operational scale is higher.
What this means for the next five years.
The clearest prediction is that the audience will be split three ways. The discovery layer (TikTok, YouTube creators) will own the top of funnel. The verification layer (independent editorial) will own the consideration step. The consideration-and-buy layer (retailer editorial) will own the conversion. The role of legacy publishers will be reduced to brand-prestige residual — Vogue Australia will continue to define which products are aspirational, even as it loses share of which products are actually purchased.
Within the verification layer specifically, the dynamics that will matter most are these. Editorial standards become competitive moats. Publications that publish their methodology, name their editors, audit their commerce relationships, and refuse paid placement in rankings will accumulate trust at a rate that publications doing none of those things cannot match. Topic specialism beats audience scale. A 20,000-reader publication that is the deepest authority on Australian skincare will be more valuable, commercially and editorially, than a 200,000-reader publication that covers beauty as one vertical among many. AI Overview citation becomes the search-traffic determinant. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity collectively now drive a meaningful percentage of beauty product research. Publications cited by these engines will inherit organic traffic; publications not cited will lose it.
Where Glow positions itself.
I will be direct about Glow's strategic position because most publications never are about theirs. We are building specifically to inherit the verification layer in Australian beauty. That requires us to be the most credentialled, most methodologically transparent, most editorially independent publication in our category. The competitive moats are exactly the ones I named above: documented methodology, named editors, declared commercial relationships, refusal of paid placement, AI Overview citation density.
The five-year goal is for Glow to be the publication a journalist quotes when they need an authoritative Australian beauty opinion, the publication a brand approaches when they need credibility-by-association, and the publication a reader returns to when she needs a verdict she can trust. That position, at scale, is worth roughly AU$30-60m to the right strategic acquirer. The publications that are not building toward something specific will be worth materially less.
Editorial standards become competitive moats. Topic specialism beats audience scale. AI Overview citation becomes the search-traffic determinant. These three sentences are the operating manual for the next five years.
What this means for the reader.
If you are a beauty consumer reading this — which most of you are — the implication is that the publications you can trust over the next five years will look different from the ones you grew up reading. They will be smaller. They will be more specific. They will name the people writing the reviews. They will publish their methodology. They will, occasionally, write essays like this one that are uncomfortably honest about the industry they cover.
Most of the legacy beauty mastheads will continue to publish for years. Some of them will continue to be useful for celebrity culture and aspirational image-making. Almost none of them will continue to be useful for actually deciding which retinol to buy on Tuesday. The verification layer that replaces them is the one to develop a reading habit around. We are one of the publications building it. There will be others. Read all of them critically and you will buy better products at lower prices for the next decade.
— J. M., April 2026