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Changing your direction in life can be intimidating. Add eight million eyeballs into the equation and it becomes terrifying. This is the position in which Louise Pentland found herself in September 2016.
After seven years of creating ‘vanilla’ content online as Sprinkle of Glitter, Louise decided to rebrand in order to cover more adult themes on her social media platforms. As she tells us in the cover interview, “I’d played it safe for so long and then last year I was like ‘fuck it’. I never wanted to be a children’s entertainer.”
It has been a bumpy road since making the move away from PG content, but Louise is feeling inspired, reinvigorated and excited to produce videos again. In the interview, which you can find on page 48, Louise also opens up about the fallout from her morning-after-pill video, the difficulties she’s faced in her personal life and why there will always be people seeking to tear her down.
In this issue, we also speak to skincare specialist Caroline Hirons (p7), who weighs in on sponsored content, press trips and the mainstream media. On page 152 we speak to Chanel Ambrose, who discusses confidence, collaboration and the desperate need for more diversity in brand campaigns. You can find an interview with Laura Jane Williams on page 98, who talks about her battles with burnout, the pressures that come with publishing a best-selling book, and why women are her life’s work.
We’re back with another ‘In conversation with…’ feature on page 76. This time Liv Purvis and Joe Galvin step up and discuss relationship boundaries, Instagram bots and online witch hunts. Other features include a look into the double-edged sword of being a social media role model (p62), an investigation into anxiety and depression and their representation online (p84), and a round-up of top tips on how to beat Instagram’s shadowban (p26).
Also be sure to check out our interview with David Evans of Grey Fox Blog (p124) and our interview with Hayley Goleniowska of Downs Side Up (p33).
That’s it from me, I’ll see you back here for issue 14 (the cover of which will be graced by the winner of the Blogger of the Year in our inaugural Blogosphere Blog Awards). Until then, I’ll leave you with my favourite quote from Louise’s interview: “Yes, I like to wear florals and I like to wear pink lipstick, but I also like to say ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ a lot, and I like to drink shots with my friends on a Friday, and I like to have sex.”
