NEW SHADE OF LIPSTICK: Glamour is throwing its hat into the crowded beauty Webosphere with its own digital site called Lipstick.
Launching today at 10 a.m., Lipstick.com is essentially a separate entity from glamour.com and counts as Condé Nast’s first digital spin-off, according to a spokeswoman.
Visitors of glamour.com who are looking to peruse beauty content will be directed to Lipstick, which will also have a link on its site that will take readers back to Glamour. Content will be similar to what readers would find on Glamour’s current beauty site, but there will be more of it. Lipstick will also feature stories from contributors such as Vanessa Bayer of “Saturday Night Live”; models Coco Rocha and Chanel Iman, and Bee Shapiro, beauty writer for The New York Times.
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According to Michael Hofman, Glamour’s executive digital director, the decision to create a new site was twofold. Glamour drives roughly 7.5 million unique visitors a month, with a large, undisclosed portion going to the beauty section of the site, he said. A separate site would not only maximize how beauty content will be displayed — for example, Glamour can right-size beauty images and utilize special zoom-in tools for viewers to see makeup — but it also opens a larger revenue stream for the brand.
“The newest thing is that we have a whole array of native [advertising] placements,” Hofman said. “We have those on glamour.com as well, but we have them more elegantly integrated on Lipstick.”
Additionally, there will be an e-commerce space for editors to link their favorite products to Glamour’s third-party vendor, Shop Glamour.
While there will be “clearly labeled” sponsored posts as well, Hofman noted that the staff would be made up of Glamour’s print and digital teams. The title’s executive online editor Lindsey Unterberger will also serve as Lipstick’s executive editor.
The second reason Glamour decided to launch Lipstick is that Condé Nast has owned the domain name since 1999. “They’ve been sitting on this name,” offered Glamour beauty director Ying Chu. “When we found out we could potentially grab Lipstick.com, we were all like ‘Yes!’”
Name aside, when asked if Glamour’s new site could pose a threat to sister publication Allure, among others, Chu said, rather democratically, “I think that anyone who does beauty content is a friendly competitor.”
Noting that the Glamour reader differs from the Allure reader, Chu said of Lipstick: “It’s a friendly sister site.”