Face by Stace didn’t emerge as just another beauty blog. It entered the digital space at a time when beauty information was still dominated by printed magazines and early digital publications like Cliché, which operated with full editorial teams and traditional magazine voices. Independent creators were not producing magazine‑level beauty content, and beauty blogs were casual, diary‑style, and not treated as credible media.
At twenty‑two, I recognized a gap the industry wasn’t addressing: professional‑grade beauty knowledge wasn’t accessible to everyone. Printed magazines were limited by country, and even digital magazines were curated by editors rather than working makeup artists sharing real industry expertise. So I built Face by Stace deliberately — structured like an editorial beauty magazine, written with the precision of a certified professional artist and designed to be globally accessible.
I wasn’t repeating trends; I was creating content the industry wasn’t talking about, including topics like dehydrated skin versus dry skin, which had never appeared in mainstream beauty media at the time. Face by Stace became a digital beauty publication that looked and read like a magazine, but was independently created — something that simply didn’t exist yet.
A defining part of Face by Stace was its voice. I incorporated my personality directly into the writing — a cinematic, witty, confident tone that made editorial content feel alive. At a time when digital magazines had uniform, polished voices and blogs were informal, Face by Stace introduced a new hybrid: magazine‑level structure delivered with a personal, stylish, entertaining voice. That personality became part of the brand’s identity and one of the reasons editors, readers and global companies gravitated toward the platform.
The result was a platform ahead of its era. Face by Stace attracted global cosmetic companies organically — YSL, Dior, Estée Lauder, Sephora, L’Oreal, Make Up For Ever, Clarins and more — not through affiliate marketing, but through editorial‑level content that matched the quality of professional beauty journalism. In a landscape where blogs were treated as hobbies, Face by Stace operated with the credibility of a publication.
That credibility led to something almost unheard of in 2012: a newspaper editor taking on a blog. He made it clear that no editor was accepting blogs, yet he took a risk on Face by Stace because of its structure, its readership, its voice and its influence. With over 400,000 organic views in two and a half years — before Instagram existed — the blog proved that audiences were ready to get their beauty news online.
That momentum carried into television. Being asked to appear on TV in 2010, because of a blog was rare at the time but Face by Stace wasn’t functioning like a blog. It was functioning like a digital beauty authority. The platform’s reach and credibility opened doors that were were not common, not accessible and not being done by independent creators, such as bloggers in that era.
Face by Stace was a game changer not only in Canada, but internationally. It shifted how beauty information could be delivered, who could access professional beauty knowledge and how digital creators could be recognized by traditional media. Before influencers, before digital beauty journalism, and before industry understood the power of online editorial content, there was Face by Stace, without the ability to subscribe to this blog. A person had to rely on memory, the brand, the content to return to Face by Stace, curious to see what has been produced.
I’m Stacey Hobbs, thanks for reding Face by Stace! Until next time.
do you feel fabulous today?
