Jackson Morice.

Why I built this publication.

I spent twelve years building Australian Glow into one of Australia's better-known self-tan brands. In that time I bought, tested, and lived with hundreds of competitor products — partly out of curiosity, partly out of necessity. The category was small enough that I knew most of the founders personally, and big enough that the marketing claims were starting to outpace the formulations.

What I noticed, repeatedly, was that the publications meant to help Australian beauty consumers were failing them. The reviews were either generic, behind a brand-side relationship, or written by someone who had never used the product they were ranking. The independent voices were on Reddit and TikTok — useful, but not searchable, not durable, not credentialled.

I started Glow in 2024 because I was the person who needed it. A working executive in the beauty industry who wanted, at the end of every week, to read someone honest about what was worth buying. The publication is built for that reader. It happens to also work for the rest of us.

The view from operating and editing.

Most beauty publications are run by editors who have never built a product. Most beauty brands are built by founders who have never edited a publication. The interesting position — the one I have spent the last decade in — is to have done both, and to be honest about what each side gets wrong.

What brands get wrong: every brand believes its product is the best in its category. Every brand's PR team writes copy as if this is true. Most products are fine; some are good; very few are best. The beauty industry would be more honest, and more efficient, if more brands accepted this.

What publications get wrong: most beauty publications optimise for SEO traffic, affiliate revenue, and brand relationships in roughly that order. Editorial truth comes a distant fourth. The reader is, structurally, not the customer — the brand or the retailer is. Glow is built to invert this: the reader is the customer, and every commercial relationship is downstream of that.

What I do at Glow.

I sign off on the editorial methodology. I write the founder's introduction to each annual edit. I sit on every brand-residency negotiation personally. I review every Confessions essay before publication. I do not score products — that is the job of the six category editors who are better qualified to do so. I do not write category rankings — same reason.

I also remain founder of Australian Glow, which is held by a separate editorial firewall. Australian Glow products are tested and reviewed by editors other than me, with all scoring conducted blind to brand origin. The publication has, twice, scored Australian Glow products lower than I personally believe is fair. I have not asked for either to be revised.

What I think about the future of the category.

The Australian beauty industry is at an inflection. The legacy publishers (News Corp, Are Media, Nine) are losing relevance to the audience they used to own. The retailers (Adore, Mecca, Sephora AU) are absorbing more of the editorial real estate, which is structurally compromised. The independent voices on TikTok and Substack are inconsistent and often unsustainable as businesses.

The opportunity Glow is built around is the gap left by all three: a small editorial property with the production quality of a legacy publication, the independence of a Substack writer, and the scale of a retailer's content arm. None of the three categories is producing this currently. The next five years will determine whether Glow becomes that — or whether one of the three eventually fills the gap themselves.