#DamnGood Celeb Special! Kate Middleton, Selena Gomez & Pamela Anderson: The Unsponsored Holy Grail Beauty Products They Actually Use

Carlene Higgins (0:01)

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Welcome to Breaking Beauty, the podcast all about the breakthrough people, products and moments in beauty.

Jill Dunn (0:14)

We're your hosts, Jill Dunn and Carlene Higgins.

Welcome back to Breaking Beauty Podcast, everyone. I'm one of your co-hosts, Jill Dunn. We're in your feeds, so it must be Wednesday. I'm here alongside Carlene Higgins.

Carlene Higgins (0:30)

Hello.

Jill Dunn (0:31)

Like we are every single Wednesday. It's a hot, hot summer. It's the middle of July.

And so we wanted to do like a fun episode this week, our most popular episode, the hashtag Damn Goods.

Carlene Higgins (0:43)

Yeah. So as you know, every week we're in your feed talking about the breakthrough people, products and moments in beauty and what's popping right now.

And every month we do what we call our hashtag Damn Good episodes, where we talk about the Damn Good products that are lining store shelves. And we usually have a theme, a lot of times it's around a season, like spring, summer, what have you. But since we already did our summer roundup, we were like, let's just have some fun.

Jill Dunn (1:07)

Absolutely. And being from the magazine world, we were always obsessed with the topic that we are doing today. Like it was always a headline.

Carlene Higgins (1:16)

Yeah.

Jill Dunn (1:17)

And so the headline today is...

Carlene Higgins (1:20)

Da da da da. The damn good products that celebrities actually use and asterisks around unsponsored. So we really dug down. Jill is like a beauty sleuth. So I know she's going to be hitting us with some really legit products that are unsponsored, that celebrities are actually out there using. That's what we really want to know. We don't want to know what they're going to pay for.

Jill Dunn (1:43)

Yeah. And I think that the era that we are in, Carlene, what is so different from our magazine days, is that we came up in sort of the era of the celebrity spokesperson. So the Lancome face, the L'Oreal Paris face, yes, that still exists. But in this day and age, every celebrity has a brand. So when they're actually talking about something that they don't own, it's like my ears are perking up. Yeah. You know what I mean?

And I'm genuinely interested.

Carlene Higgins (2:08)

Absolutely. And also big topic of conversation that we were talking about earlier this year was this idea of product placements. You had some great pop culture examples of just how with marketing, these brands are getting really smart and also really ballsy about how they show up in these pop culture television shows or movies that everyone's talking about.

Jill Dunn (2:30)

And we just came off of what I call panel season, where it's like Canlion, all these advertising panels. And I saw a clip on my social media of a girl who works for a big advertising agency, and she was talking about how they pride themselves on not paying for any of the placements. So there are whole entire agencies out there dedicated to trying to get products placed, movies, TV shows, backgrounds of podcasts. But I'm just, when I'm scrolling, I'm always thinking about that.

What is paid, what is not, what is little snuck in there. Absolutely.

Carlene Higgins (3:05)

And I think this is really in the ether right now, because like we said, it's really pushed past this threshold where they are getting really ballsy, where it's like the characters in the shows are using talking points from like a marketing brief, which is what we would do when we're being paid to talk about something that we feel like we align with.

Jill Dunn (3:25)

Or one of our advertisers.

Carlene Higgins (3:26)

One of our advertisers.

Jill Dunn (3:27)

Which we always disclose, everyone.

Carlene Higgins (3:29)

And they don't disclose. And this is what kind of rubs me the wrong way.

And what we've talked about before, we always disclosed from day one, but there are definitely social media people out there who are not disclosing, who are endorsing products that they're being paid for. They're not being upfront with the fact that they're being paid. And so I think that's what really inspired our episode. It was like, let's go out there and find the products that celebrities are really using and seemingly not being paid. And I feel like there is a very small window of time left to be able to do an episode like this. Because I think marketers are just getting kind of more and more clever about how to do this. Especially in movies where they don't make them disclose.