Makeup and fragrance, from the inside.
We cover colour cosmetics and fragrance the way a good buyer and a working makeup artist talk about them over lunch: what launched, what sold through, and which shade range stopped three shades short.
Six issues, shade by shade.
Gloss Report launched in the summer of 2025 as the colour and fragrance title of VOL Collective, the independent editorial studio in New York. The first issue carried ten founder interviews and a swatch wall of 140 shades photographed on twelve skin tones.
The method has not changed. We count every shade in a range, ask about undertones, doors and reorders in the same story, and say so when a good formula comes in a range that leaves people out. Wear claims are reported as the brand's until someone has shown otherwise.
Today 36,800 people read Gloss Report each month, most of them in the US, and 10,700 get The Launch List every Tuesday. Sixty-one percent of them have returned a complexion product because the shade was wrong, and 44 percent mix more than one foundation shade. We write for them.
The people behind Gloss Report
Daniel Mercer
Publisher & Editorial Director
Natalie Hayes
Editor-in-Chief
Vivian Hart
Executive Editor
Ramin Vandi
Director of Features & PartnershipsCamille Donovan
Managing EditorKara Jennings
Deputy EditorMarcus Alvarez
Senior EditorDaphne Reyes
Commissioning EditorSara Harper
Contributing EditorEmma Rhodes
Science EditorVeronica Hayward
Fact-checkerDominic Abbott
Photo EditorApril Kaplan
Contributing PhotographerChloe Winters
Picture ResearcherWhitney Okafor
Social EditorDanielle Anderson
Newsletter EditorWhitney Doyle
Features EditorKendra Pruitt
Features EditorHeather Castellan
Features EditorGloss Report, year by year
- 2023
VOL Collective begins
VOL Collective publishes its first interview in New York. Its beauty stories keep returning to the same questions: who a shade range leaves out, and why one blush sells out while a better one does not.
- 2024
A launch calendar and a list
Our editors start keeping a launch calendar, a restock log and a list of the founders and session artists whose work readers should know.
- 2025
Issue 01
Gloss Report launches in the summer with ten founder interviews and a swatch wall of 140 shades photographed on twelve skin tones.
- 2026
Issue 06 and the first Swatch Night
The kit guides launch in July, from smudge-proof eye makeup to true foundation matches, and The Launch List passes 8,000 subscribers. This autumn, readers test the shades from Issue 06 on Bond Street with the founders and artists who made them.
