About the Gazette

Glow Gazette is a quarterly about the history and culture of beauty. It is published by Glow Gazette. It is not a buying guide, a treatment directory or a clinical reference, and it does not want to be mistaken for one. We write about ochre and lead white, about mirrors and film stock, about mourning jewellery and rationing and the peculiar grammar of cosmetics advertising, because those things tell you a great deal about how people have lived.

What we cover

Five standing sections. The Making is material history: pigment, soap, scent, the chemistry of adornment and the regulation that followed when it went wrong. The Looking Glass is about images: the mirror as an object, then photography, then cinema, then the camera on the front of a phone, each of which quietly changed what a face was supposed to look like. The Trade covers the salon, the barber's shop, the department store counter, the copywriter and the invention of an industry. Customs and Rites is about occasion: mourning, marriage, wartime, hair, ageing and the rituals that shaped appearance long before anyone was selling anything. Received Wisdom is where we sort the record from the repetition.

How we handle claims

Beauty history has an unusually bad evidence problem. A great many of its best stories were written down once, by someone with no particular access to the facts, and have been copied ever since. We take three positions on this. First, we do not repeat a claim we cannot trace. Second, where a story is famous enough that ignoring it would be evasive, we print it inside a circulates but unverified block: the claim, where it appears to come from, and what is actually established instead. Third, we distinguish between what an object shows and what someone has inferred from it. A residue analysis can tell you what a substance contained. It cannot tell you that the substance was worn for beauty rather than medicine, ritual or insect repellence.

We cite institutions we are confident hold relevant collections and published research, and we link to their own pages rather than to summaries of them. We do not cite accession numbers, because catalogue identifiers change and a wrong one is worse than none.

What we are not

We do not tell readers what to do with their own faces. We do not use the past to shame the present, which is the standard move in this genre and a tiresome one. People in every period have had reasons for what they did, and those reasons are usually more interesting than the mockery. Nor do we treat the modern industry as uniquely cynical. Sales copy has been overpromising since at least the seventeenth century, and the regulatory response is itself part of the story.

How this is paid for

Three revenue lines, all disclosed, none of which touches editorial judgement.

• Paid listings. Museums, archives, exhibitions, courses and cultural programmes relevant to our subject may buy an entry in the listings. Entries are ordered alphabetically, labelled paid, and carry only verifiable facts that the buyer supplies and we can check: name, place, dates, what it is, what it costs to attend. There is no ranking, no score, no editor's pick and no way to buy a better position. We do not review listed institutions differently, and a listing never becomes an article.
• Newsletter sponsorship. One labelled sponsor line per issue, at a published rate. Sponsors see the rate card and nothing else. They do not see the letter before it goes out, cannot suggest topics, and cannot be mentioned in the editorial part of it.
• Membership. Readers can support the magazine directly. It buys nothing except the magazine continuing. There is no members' area, no bonus content, no discount scheme and no early access, because inventing perks would mean building a product instead of a magazine.

There are no affiliate links on this site, no display advertising, no sponsored articles and no paid search. We make no product recommendations of any kind, so there is nothing for an affiliate network to attach to. What we will not sell at any price is published in full.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would like to know. Corrections are made on the page, dated, and described rather than quietly patched. Write to the address on the contact page. Our full working rules are in the editorial standards.