The Return of Estée Laundry

What do you call a sleeping watchdog?

Estée Laundry, the anonymous Instagram account, first used the canine comparison to explain itself when it spawned to life in the spring of 2018: “We are the beauty industry’s watchdog.” And watch, it did, keeping vigilance for five straight years until suddenly going quiet.

While the inner workings of the fashion world have no shortage of sleuthy, snarky social media voices, beauty’s planet has startlingly few, unless you count independent voices on YouTube and TikTok with intermittent hot takes.

In July, for the first time since 2023, a new post appeared on Estée Laundry, imploring the account’s near 200,000 followers to share “any exciting beauty brands?” (The most popular answer was Danessa Myricks’ namesake makeup line.) Within a month, the account had returned to breaking news, and was the first to share an internal memo announcing layoffs at Shiseido Americas last week. The watchdog had woken up.

But the Instagram account would now like to distance itself from the original metaphor. “We think of ourselves as a beauty industry observer,” said a representative from Estée Laundry over email, after identifying itself as a “group of outsiders with ties to the beauty industry.”

The account was previously known for keeping tabs on founder faux pas, mass layoffs and poor judgement calls on the part of brands and executives. Figures like Drunk Elephant’s Tiffany Masterson, Violet Grey’s Cassandra Grey, executives from the Estée Lauder Companies and the Kardashians loomed large. Unlike other Instagram entities like Trendmood, which focusses on launches, or Peoplebrandsandthings, covering anodyne marketing activations, Estée Laundry provided more pointed, even downright judgemental coverage.

It went on an unplanned hiatus at the end of 2023, when members of the collective departed and the progressive growth and industry knowledge it became known for began to sputter post-pandemic. The rebooted version hopes to double-down on “longform opinion pieces” and commentary based on the tips it receives, with a weekly Patreon newsletter called Laundry Service.

“We were trying to figure out where we fit,” the representative explained.

Kirbie Johnson, who writes the Ahead of the Kirb newsletter and hosts the Gloss Angeles podcast, has already noticed a tone shift in the new Laundry, one that favours straight beauty news but still maintains its bark. “They have a place in the beauty ecosystem because they have information, and information is currency,” she said.

Instagram Accountability

Forged in the shadow of fashion-industry accounts like Diet Prada, the Instagram account known as @esteelaundry showed up in the spring of 2018, with its earliest missives taking aim at brands knocking off one another — how Trinny London’s Eye2eye pots resembled RMS’ Lip2cheek, or Bliss’ “melting jelly” taking after Glossier’s “milky jelly” cleanser — before taking on the heavier yoke of covering beauty’s corporate culture from the inside.

The account’s most memorable coverage came from its scrutiny of founders and companies who were ignored by non-beauty accounts but were celebrities in the industry’s imagination. While sometimes reporting on their business practices, the posts instead tended to emphasise their tone deafness when interacting with the social media public; Jerrod Blandino’s “Rich Lives Matter” birthday cake in 2019; Grey styling a Celine bag on Skid Row; Anastasia Soare taking a photo with the Dalai Lama and apologising for it; Ulta Beauty’s 2022 email subject line asking shoppers to “Come hang with Kate Spade” fragrances after the designer’s death four years earlier.

Its scrutiny intensified into the pandemic, as the industry reckoned with social disparities, particularly when it came to race, against the backdrop of a global health crisis. In 2022, after former Estée Lauder Companies executive John Demsey posted and then deleted a meme that blended Sesame Street characters with Covid-19 and a racial epithet, Estée Laundry reposted the meme and wondered aloud if it was time for Demsey and the company to part ways. The next day, the executive was suspended.

Other companies faced equally critical commentary, from Mecca in Australia to Unilever Prestige in the UK to global L’Oréal outposts.

“We kept hearing stories about brands and founders… [who] were openly willing to exclude people of colour and some executives that had a reputation for bullying behavior,” Estée Laundry said. “We were surprised no one was talking about it.”

Talking about something isn’t quite the same as reporting on it, and some observers are reluctant to qualify the Laundry as a news source. “I see it as crowdsourcing,” said Johnson. “They like to hear what is happening behind the scenes, and because they’re an anonymous collective, they’re able to do a lot of things that maybe some of us aren’t able to do without due diligence.”

Estée Laundry addressed criticisms of its own fact-checking by pointing out that “social media functions differently from traditional media. It’s meant to be a conversation, not a static story.” The account clarifies that it only posts a story after receiving a critical mass of tips, and always notifies the subject by tagging them.

New World Order

In the two short years since Estee Laundry’s disappearance, the beauty world has changed once again, with values once championed by the industry like DEI initiatives and gender equality no longer top of mind. Halfway into a year defined by near-constant geopolitical chaos and economic uncertainty, the collective thinks it deserves another shot at moderating the conversation. But this time, it wants to use a louder voice.

The returned Estée Laundry still retains its bit-lip logo and Instagram-native aesthetic, but is elevating its coverage, publishing on Patreon to subscribers who pay $8 per month. The first installment of its weekly letter Laundry Service, published on July 18, recounted the Shiseido layoffs with context about the company’s performance and anonymous testimonies from affected employees.

The flurry of M&A activity that preceded the account’s comeback is a “coincidence,” the representative said, though the exact reason for their return cannot be so easily explained; as if somebody blew a dog whistle.

“We’d assumed other accounts would continue doing what we were doing. And while some do, most people are still very hesitant to share their real opinions,” a spokesperson explained. “We felt it was time to come back and see if we can still make an impact.”

To realise its ultimate goal of vanquishing beauty’s bad actors and evil girlbosses, the account will need to cultivate its journalistic skills instead of relying on audience tips, which would require some of its members to step into the light. But the account’s greatest cover is its anonymity. As Johnson put it, “you gotta be able to know who somebody is to sue them.”

So far, Joyful greetings have filled the account’s comment section: “Missed you omg!”, “So glad to see you back on my page !!!!”

Meanwhile, the greater industry — especially those who have been burned by the account in the past — are watching the Laundry with anticipation.

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