How Trendmood Gets the Scoop

When Amy Liu, the founder of Tower28, was strategising her skin-friendly beauty brand’s latest launch — a powdered blush, called Getset — she considered all the standard launch options; a days-long festival of programming? An influencer trip, a Vogue advertorial or both?

Liu decided to take a simpler, but equally — if not more — effective approach. “We’ll just send it to Trendmood,” she recalled thinking. She would ship a box of blushes to LA, where they would quickly find their way into the feeds of nearly two million beauty obsessives around the world.

The beauty industry relies on @trendmood1, an Instagram account run by the Los Angeles-based makeup artist Sophie Shab, to disseminate news about new products. After the Estée Lauder Companies-owned label Smashbox promoted its new blush stick through the account, it saw not only a lift in social chatter but a boost in its direct-to-consumer sales.

“Trendmood is so relevant to that deeply engaged beauty consumer,” said Michelle Shigemasa, the global general manager for Smashbox and skincare label Glamglow, “which is really exciting to brands.”

Since Los Angeles-based makeup artist Sophie Shab launched Trendmood in 2015 as a space to gather and share information about upcoming MAC Cosmetics launches, it has come to resemble a small but mighty news organisation. Before the news of Prada’s makeup collection went wide in 2023, Trendmood had it first. She announced the return of Marc Jacobs Beauty, which was licensed through the LVMH-owned incubator Kendo, two years before the news officially broke that it would be revived by Coty.

Shab gets her intel in a variety of ways: Many of her followers who work in the beauty industry send her tips, and she often looks to international markets for hints on products to come. But increasingly, brands are taking Liu’s approach, incorporating Trendmood into their plans from launch.

Her ascendance represents the ongoing paradigm shift in beauty media, away from institutions and towards Instagram. Now, she wants to take on commerce, too, with a growing Trendmood Box business and plans to open a physical space in Los Angeles that will host events with brand partners.

What Trendmood lacks in editorial perspective it makes up for in exhaustive coverage.

“I remember always feeling like I could get the inside scoop from her, even as a beauty executive,” Shigemasa said. “Being relevant, amplifying remarkable product, being consumer-centric … that’s what Trendmood is.”

Social Butterfly

Shab has a lifelong love of makeup. As a teenager growing up in Israel, she would recreate the makeup looks she saw in magazines on her friends’ faces. After graduating from beauty school, she moved to Peru to study fashion design, moonlighting as a makeup artist. She met Michael, her partner in life and in business operations who is known to her followers as Mr. Trendmood, on a trip to Los Angeles.

Shab moved to LA from Peru in 2011, and launched her account a year later, though she admits she was “not a social media person” — and despite her success, still doesn’t really consider herself to be one. Though she runs the account herself, she only sporadically appears on it; early fans recognised her at conventions by the swatches on her arms. While some bloggers built audiences on their transformations or personalities, Shab did so on her breathless enthusiasm for cosmetic consumption.

The name came to them almost by accident: “We sat down, and we talked about trend — beauty was my thing, but I also loved fashion. And we also thought about the mood…”

“Trend, mood — Trendmood!” Mr. Trendmood said.

In the beginning Shab mostly covered MAC Cosmetics, a favourite brand and one constantly known for newness, scraping websites to collate and repost information on upcoming drops. (Her husband said that MAC and Sephora initially suspected the account was a mole among their ranks.) Soon she began to get tips from readers who worked at stores, and her coverage expanded.

One night, Mr. Trendmood awoke to the glare of his wife’s phone; she was writing up a launch for the next day. “I looked at her account, which I hadn’t looked at for four months, and she had 20,000 followers,” he said.

Now she has closer to 2 million, and her audience dwarves those of other mainstream beauty publications that break launch news. (Allure, the closest thing Condé Nast has to a Trendmood competitor, clocks in at 1.3 million followers.) What Trendmood lacks in glossy imagery and editorial perspective it more than makes up for in relentless product coverage. “So much of Trendmood is revealing something or breaking news,” said Grace Murray Vasquez, a VP of strategy at influencer marketing agency Fohr.

That channel has been employed by brands like Smashbox and Supergoop hoping to, in Shigemasa’s words, “drop product like it’s hot.” After Shab gave Supergoop’s Glowscreen her seal of approval in 2020, the brand returned to Trendmood for the go-to-market strategy of their Glowscreen Drops, which were given to her audience “to test, fall in love with and buzz about ahead of the official release,” said Tina Ghory, a senior director on the brand’s social and influencer team.

She’s still doing much of what she did in the account’s early days. “The only difference between then and today is that now we work with brands, brands reach out, creators reach out,” she said. All help comprise the Trendmood community, which Shab characterises as the everyday beauty consumer — somebody who loves the makeup market as much as the makeup itself.

At times, her approach has ruffled feathers, though Shab insists when she posts, it’s “all public information.” By her logic, if a product is in a store, it might as well be on her Instagram. She sometimes finds out about launches from international social media users, who may pick something up she hasn’t seen before; she also pays attention to launch events that brands hold in other countries. Though she inhabits a space somewhere between a journalist and a social media influencer, she quickly defaults to the latter camp when it comes to sourcing tips.

“It’s not like I’m hacking the website,” she said. “That’s social media. Everybody walks with their phones, everybody is filming everything.”

Vasquez contrasts a platform like Trendmood with the rising number of beauty newsletters, which her clients are targeting for more qualitative coverage. “The big swing towards Substack has been, in some ways, a reaction to a lot of algorithm overwhelm,” Vasquez said. “People want expertise, not just announcements.”

Out of the Box

Animated by Shab’s passion for beauty products, Trendmood has developed an audience of die-hards who would risk their livelihoods to slip her launch details. It was only a matter of time before she thought about selling to them more directly.

“At one point, everybody was making their own brands,” she said, but doing so wouldn’t have been very Trendmood. She and her husband began talking about a box, not unlike Ipsy or Birchbox, but that captured the pleasant, inside-crowd feeling of opening a PR package.

One day, he surprised her with a mock-up of a mailer cast in Trendmood’s signature dawn-soft purple; another day, she surprised the both of them by impulsively posting it to her Instagram. The first Trendmood Box “dropped” in 2019, and there have been 30 boxes since, each one sold from a fixed inventory rather than on a subscription. Since the boxes contain full-sized product, they’re sold at a premium of around $50; Mr. Trendmood said that recent drops have sold as many as 50,000 boxes.

The beauty box model can be lucrative if done well; brands are incentivised by publicity (or the need to free up storage space) to offload a never-ending stream of free product. The leader in the category is Ipsy, which has an upgraded offering called Boxycharm and includes full-size products from brands like Fenty or Olaplex; it costs $32 and arrives 12 times a year.

Trendmood touts its non-subscription model as a point of differentiation, but its drops come more or less as frequently every four to six weeks. “She tries every single product that’s in there,” Mr. Trendmood said affectionately.

For the first time in the history of the Instagram account, Trendmood will inhabit a physical space in LA. A Melrose Avenue pop-up will host brands and fans, who can shop Shab’s selects in person, attend activations and perhaps meet the woman behind the account.

The brand said they hope to open it as soon as this summer, but Shab couldn’t wait to share the news — and naturally, has already posted about it.

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