Why I Say No To Influencer Events

A decision that I made many years ago is that I no longer wanted to attend influencer events. Obviously in 2020, due to lockdown, many of the events stopped anyway. However, my decision was made long before COVID put a stop to them. In my early years of blogging, I had attended quite a few influencer events from some of the biggest brands. At the time, it was very much a pinch me moment. I could not believe that some of the brands even know who I was. Not to mention that I was sat amongst some of the key influencers that I had watched for years. However, I didn’t love them. There were many times that I even wondered why I was there. In this post, I am going to share some of those with you…

The wastefulness.

One of the first events that I ever went on was to the opening of a Charlotte Tilbury concession in Selfridges. Honestly, I was almost hyperventilating with excitement. I got my train into the city center and I skipped into Selfridges. I was in a room with so many people that I had looked up to during my blogging journey. We all got to look at the products and were given amazing gift bags at the end. I could not believe that I had been given so many high value items. These were products that only a couple of months earlier I would scrape my cash together to try to buy. At the end of the event, I was seeing the gift bags everywhere. People were leaving them around like they were an inconvenience. This is just one example and I have many more!

The mean girl mentality.

I am sure that you guys knew this was coming. Some of the people at these events were arseholes. Honestly, they were just the worst. Most of the time, the people with large followings wouldn’t even look in my direction. One of them even had the nerve to ask me why I was there with them. I didn’t want to justify myself by saying that I have a blog that has been running for a decade and I write beauty for Vogue and Net-A-Porter. They made me feel like I was back in school and I hated that. I made a decision as I have gotten older to be more cut throat. The people like that which I already had in my life, I cut them out a long time ago. It just annoyed me that these companies know the culture and what these guys are like. 

Was it worth the time?

One of the last beauty events that I went to was a 3 day stay at Soho Farmhouse. It was dreamy and I had a great time. My issue with this is that it took a lot of my time. The trip itself was all expense paid and it was a lovely break. However, I spent my time helping to develop content for that brand and I didn’t get paid a penny. They were posting on their website, socials and in other places, but I wasn’t compensated for that. Other bloggers and vloggers didn’t seem to mind so much. They were in a luxurious place and it helped them to create new content of their own. But I have a value on my time and very rarely do I think that I get that from influencer events.

Does it mean that you can be honest?

My last reason why I am not a fan is because I don’t think that you can be honest. Granted, I was never invited to Bora Bora. But in my mind, how can you be impartial about products and a brand when they are the hand that is feeding you. Especially when you think of some of the biggest beauty bloggers, most of the time, lockdown aside, they are always in a different country with various brands. They aren’t going to want that to end. Very rarely following those trips do you see a genuine review of a product where anything other than positive things are said.

I hope that you guys liked reading this blog post about influencer events. I can remember when I first started blogging, I would have done anything to be invited. In actual fact, I was invited to a Benefit and Nars event in the very early days and I ignored the invitation. In my mind I was much too small fry and I just reckoned that they sent me the invite by accident. As I mentioned, for me, they were now all they cracked up to be. I had built up such an image in my mind of what they would be like. However, I do think that it was the ego of some of the larger influencers that ruined the experience for me. As a grown woman, I never want to be somewhere that I am not comfortable.