Episode 3: How Sociologist Mercedes Lyson Built a Career in Beauty Blogging
Welcome to We Built This Life. Thank you so much for tuning into today. This is episode 3 and this is a story about Mercedes Lyson, PhD, a sociologist who has an online beauty blogging business called L’Amour et la Musique, which she manages while being home full-time with her young son, who, as of August 2019, is about 10 months old. L’Amour et la Musique emcompasses a YouTube channel and a Patreon page, and we’ll talk about all of that. But I wanted to just touch on how I found Mercedes. I have been a viewer of her YouTube content for a while now, and on that channel she primarily publishes product reviews, mainly in the green/eco beauty space. I have a real interest in green beauty, especially skincare, I think it’s fun, and whenever I’m thinking about buying a product and I want someone else’s opinion on it—because green and eco beauty can get expensive so it’s nice to do some research first about other people’s experiences—I go to Mercedes’ channel first. She is very honest and open about products, even those that don’t work out for her, and I trust her reviews immensely.
This episode is going to trace Mercedes’ career path, from her early influences, her parents, through when she received her PhD and some work that she has done in the research field, to her building L’Amour et la Musique, and even to her work as a DJ, because that ties in a little bit L’Amour. We also talk about influencing vs. journalism, the two avenues that someone who has an online business like blogging could pursue, and she discusses the thought process he has gone through in trying to figure out which avenue would be the best for her.
Before we get into the episode, I wanted to say that when I think about Mercedes story as a whole, I think about this motivational quote, or some version of it, that is often used in planners and on Instagram, and it’s this: “Just Start.” It’s just two words, but it’s really powerful. And it comes from this tendency of humans to have ideas about what we want our lives to look like—what we want to do for work, what we want to do as a hobby—but so often these ideas remain just that, they’re ideas without action. That’s understandable because it is hard to get started. It’s scary to begin something new and even harder to put yourself out there for others to see while you begin that new thing. You have to be willing to look like a beginner and to make mistakes and to learn from them. And from my point of view, it seems like Mercedes is okay with doing that. When she wanted to make beauty videos, she propped up her iPhone on a box and got started. When she wanted to learn how to mix music, she went out and bought the equipment and taught herself how to do it. She has not been afraid to pursue her interests. And if anything, I hope that piece of her story makes you think, even if it’s just a little bit, about doing the same thing in your own life. That thing that has been nagging at you, that you’ve always wanted to do or that you’re curious about, just take that first step and get started. Onto this week’s story.
Early Influences
Mercedes Lyson grew up in Ithaca, New York. Her parents, who taught at Cornell, were a big influence on her and they would inform the professional path she would choose for the next several years.
Mercedes: “I come from a family of academics. Both of my parents were college professors. My dad was a sociologist and my mom was an English professor. It was sort of the family business in a way. And sociology, I guess, growing up with all of the dinner table conversations with a sociologist as a father really made an impression on me. My dad was sort of a raging progressive Marxist too, so there was a lot of politics and fight the man but support local food systems and get to know your farmer. My sister and I grew up going to nature camps and touring dairy farms for some of my dad’s research projects and things like that. As I got a little bit older into high school and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, he would let me come in and sit in some of his freshman seminars where he was mostly teaching entry level stratification classes. I think I was very taken with wanting to understand the world from a sociological lens. That was very appealing to me. I always tell people my sister also has a PhD in sociology and both of us substantively studied the same thing that my father did, which was the sociology of agriculture, food systems, community, things like that. We kind of have all done the same thing, which I think speaks to how strong the family influence was.”
Earning a PhD in Sociology
After going to the University of Chicago for her undergraduate work, where she double majored in sociology and Latin American studies, Mercedes took a few years off from school. She worked in policy, she did an AmeriCorps VISTA program. And then she got to this point where it was time to decide what she wanted to do next. Because of her interest in health and wellness, she had considered medical school. But her parents advised her to not accumulate as much student debt, and that’s when she chose to pursue her Master’s and PhD in sociology at Brown University. She began the Master’s program in 2007 and graduated with a PhD in 2013. But here’s the thing: Mercedes never really wanted to be an academic. She wanted the education, but she didn’t want to work in academia.
Mercedes: “I always knew that I didn’t want to be an academic myself, which is kind of the inherent tension that’s been a part of my life. Growing up as a product of an academic family and knowing that I could pursue that, but honestly never really wanting to. Entering into graduate school wanting the education, but not necessarily wanting to be part of academia and all of that really came to a head after graduate school when you actually have to figure out what you’re going to do.”
In 2013, after graduation, Mercedes spent a year in an unfulfilling position with a higher education company, then she stared to build her research career. Since then, she has been a design research and project evaluator at Northeastern University and a survey researcher with Tufts Medical Center. That position at Northeastern in particular really made an impression on her.
Mercedes: “It was in computer science and health science kind of hybrid position. They hired me as a qualitative expert and my boss, she was a junior faculty member, I think she had only been out of graduate school a few years longer than I had. We just had a really great dynamic and she was a human centered designer. Soshe was a computer scientist who would design technologies, but before she would design, say a mobile app or a stand along kiosk or something in a community center, she would do really extensive fieldwork, ethnography wioth the community that she was trying to develop the technology for. So we did a lot of work with mobile health. I worked on an Aetna Foundation funded grant that was funding community organizations to develop mobile apps to work on nutrition and physical activity interventions in low income communities across the U.S. But part of that was understanding what the actual needs of those communities were specifically. I remember one of the projects was a recipe app and they were working with a particular population. I think there was like a Mung population in Camden, New Jersey and they wanted to help try to impact the Type II diabetes rate. They had a cooking app that was culturally appropriate. It was that sort of thing. That was kind of the flavor of the interventions.] So that was kind of the project that I was on mainly and it made me want to pursue, it has so many names now, UX, user design experience, research human centered design. I identified that as a way that I could use my qualitative research skills in a nonacademic capacity. Companies are hiring for these sorts of positions all over the place now. I sort of think of it as the more ethical version of market research or consumer insights work.”
So that is an introduction to Mercedes’ career in research thus far, and that last field she mentioned—whether it’s called user design experience or human-centered design—is a field she is considering working in when her son gets older.
Starting a Beauty-Focused YouTube Channel
While Mercedes was in the beginning stages of building this research career, when she was still at Brown actually, she began to build on one of her other interests: Beauty.
Mercedes: “I had always grown up with an interest in beauty and beauty products. I remember being 11 or 12 years old and going to buy chapsticks or press on nails or cover girl compacts, whatever the popular products of the early to mid 90s were. I always think to myself that had I not been born into a family where I was pushed into academics so much, I really would have 7b..wanted to go to beauty school or something of that ilk and maybe try to have a go of it at being a makeup artist or an esthetician.”
Mercedes didn’t go that route with her career, but she decided to focus on beauty in content form, and that’s when she began developing L’Amour et la Musique. Her business’s name stems from this one day when she was completing her Facebook profile and under the religious views section, she wrote down “Love and Beats.” Later, she developed a deep interest in France and decided to use Love and Beats as the name of her business, but in the French language. L’Amour et la Musique was the closest translation.
L’Amour et la Musique mainly covers beauty, and Mercedes has written online that beauty encompasses many facets for her. First, there’s skincare and makeup, these tangible expressions of beauty that we’re all very familiar with, and these are the topics that Mercedes mainly covers on her YouTube channel.
Mercedes: “I had stumbled on this world of beauty blogging and people who were making videos on Youtube. The landscape was completely different in 2011/2012. So I had almost been a participant/observer of the beauty blogging world for a while. And then around 2013/2014, I was really unsure about what I wanted to do professionally, but I decided that I wanted to make YouTube videos and really do it in a very bootstrap way. I wanted to teach myself how to film and edit.”
“My very first video was published in the spring of 2014, I think. I remember it all really vividly. I think because I had been watching beauty videos for so long, years by that point, I had a really good idea of the content that I wanted to make. What I really wanted to do is do what kind of mainstream conventional beauty YouTubers were doing but from a more eco holistic perspective. And there really weren’t many people who were doing that niche of beauty blogging at the time. So my very first video was a what’s in my makeup bag video. I thought t would just be easy, straight forward. I knew that I could just riff on the products that I use everyday. I sat down with my iPhone, I think it was an iPhone 4. I don’t evren remember, but it was an old generation iPhone. I didn’t even have a tripod, I just put it on its side, propped it up against a box, and filmed. That was kind of it, to be honest. I never to this day, I don’t really overthink filming videos. I’ve always just sat down and talked.”
Mercedes has continued making YouTube videos since then, usually one a week. Her research background definitely comes out in these videos, which, in my opinion, take a deep dive into the green beauty or just beauty in general space. As an example, in a recent video, Mercedes did a review of a green beauty box that contained a phyto-retinol product, a plant-based retinol. Retinol helps with cell turnover and it is a trendy product right now, it’s marketed as an ingredient that we are supposed to use as we age. And there are synthetic retinols and plant-based retinols and in this video, Mercedes was reviewing a plant-based retinol product. She talked about facets of the product that you would normally expect to see in a review—the texture, the feel, her experience with using it, even the packaging and presentation—but then she went deeper into her skin care philosophy and her feelings about Retinol, and she talked to a few other people in the industry to form those thoughts. So in addition to a product review, she’s to people and doing research and thinking about what she learns and that thoughtfulness comes out in her videos and it makes for a more substantial, a meatier look at skincare and beauty and the industry.
Through the years, Mercedes has also made some important connections and partnerships and she did this while working full-time. For example, she has been a brand ambassador for Beauty Heroes for a few years. Beauty Heroes is a monthly subscription box containing eco skincare products, and Mercedes receives this box ever month—she’s one of several ambassadors who do—and posts a review on her YouTube channel, and she can say whatever she wants in that review. This was a relationship that developed organically—one of Mercedes’ viewers emailed the founder of Beauty Heroes, Jeannie Jarnot, and said that Jeannie should think about working with Mercedes and the partnership grew from there—and to date, it has probably been Mercedes’ longest-running and most lucrative partnership. She also partners with other brands, including Stark Skincare and Activist Skincare. Those partnerships are all different as far as what that relationship looks like.
L’Amour et la Musique has grown. She’s developed partnerships, she’s grown a following. And this endeavor that started as a hobby or an outlet for creative expression has grown into something more. Now L’Amour et la Musique is a business. With this in mind, Mercedes has been thinking about where she wants that business to fit in. Is she an influencer? Is she a journalist? What is her role within this online space?
Mercedes: “There’s been big shifts in the blogging world, and I put it in air quotes all the time, influencing has really taken over. This is essentially, bloggers that have some sort of following and credibility, being often directly compensated to promote certain products and influence consumers buying decisions that it’s really really murky water because a lot of time that compensation isn’t fully disclosed. I feel like consumers are really bombarded with very subtle, I wouldn’t say nefarious, but really very subtle forms of marketing…[I just know this kind of anecedotally or word of mouth. But some influencer content work, they’re contractually obligated to only say certain things about a product. You literally are not allowed to say anything even potentially negative about a product. Which is, you know, it’s a commercial. This is not even blogging. And it’s tough. Sometimes there are Beauty Heroes boxes that I have issues with or I have issues with the brand or the products themselves. I always try to be well-rounded but also diplomatic about it. I think viewers and consumers are owed that. This is circling back to my dad. He was a huge Ralph Nader, civil rights advocate so I think that has also carried through to me too. Consumers are not just there to be duped, which is what most companies, they just want to sell product for the most part. Companies aren’t inherently ethical or care about those sorts of things.”
“As I saw a lot of my peers and colleagues in this space starting to do more sponsored content—and not to knock it at all because if you’re good at it, it can be extremely lucrative… For me, I feel like it really hampers my creativity to have to at all be beholden to someone. I really consider myself the black sheep of the blogging and influencing world because I just don’t want to play by the rules that people do. I don’t want to have a post where people have to tag a friend to enter. I don’t want that kind of thing. I did a few sponsored projectsI tried it here and there andit never felt right. I never liked doing it.”
Building a Community on Patreon
Wanting to get some insight as to what direction she should go in, Mercedes talked to a creative consultant who has been in the beauty industry for decades. And this consultant said something that Mercedes has been mulling over.
Mercedes: “She was like, you know, if you want to be ethical in the beauty industry, truthfully, you’re really going to struggle to make a lot of money doing. There’s not a lot of room for ethics. And I think she’s right. It’s sort of a harsh reality. And I think some people might not even think of it that way. But for me, my word, what I am saying about products, I wouldn’t want to even remotely hoodwink people if that makes sense. That’s not why I’m doing this. She kind of helped me identify where in the beauty space I would want to be. And I think it really is as a beauty editor, beauty journalist, where I can sort of maintain my own voice.”
“[But] I still wanted a way to make L’Amour I guess worth my time. Because people I really don’t think understand how labor intensive it is. And when people value what you have to say and want to watch your content then you do sort of feel like, well, it would at least be nice to have some money to invest back in the business for equipment or for hiring a graphic designer or what have you…[So enter Patreon, which I think has been really and truly the right outlet and direction for me to go in.”
Patreon is a membership platform for creatives. People who view content will pay content creators like Mercedes a certain amount of money a month, kind of like a subscription fee, to support their work, and they’ll get perks for that fee, such as additional content. Mercedes started her L’Amour et la Musique Patreon page—which is different from her YouTube channel—in 2017. Depending on the subscription tier, people who support her will be able to watch an additional video a month or a Get Ready with Me livestream, where she will show how she applies products and chat with her viewers in real time, as well as some other perks. As of August 2019, Mercedes has 119 people supporting her on Patreon.
Mercedes: “It’s essentially a crowdfunding site to support independent creative content that you enjoy. But it’s people giving donations and often times they get bonus content for doing so. I really wanted to start this because I saw it as a way to keep l’amour sponsored content free while continuing to grow the business. Not only has it been really great to have the financial support to keep re-investing back into l’amour; it’s actually ended up being a really really enjoyable and beneficial space for me to keep making content. What I mean by that is that I think social media nd some of the experiences I’ve had in making l’amour and putting myself out there publicly, you know, opening yourself up to the good and the bad, I’ve just become really really quite private, especially since having a baby. I don’t talk about my son, I never really show his face on any of my YouTube or Instagram content. I don’t think I’ve ever even said his name. So I keep it really under the radar. But the space where I do get to kind of let it all hang out is on Patreon I almost see it as a barrier to entry to get to know the more personal side of L’Amour. I can be much more unedited over there and talk more about personal things that are going on in my life. So every month I do a Patreon exclusive video where I put up a poll of usually 3 to 4 video options and people vote on what video they want and I end up making whatever the most popular video is. People are very interested in the more personal chats. Like recently I did a video on what’s it’s like to be in a cross -cultural relationship. My husband is Iranian; he’s parents were born in Iran and he’s a first-generation Iranian. So I did a whole video talking about what that’s like and raising a kid with someone who is from a very very different cultural background then myself. I would never do that video on YouTube now. Just because, I don’t know, the way people communicate on social media has taken a really dark turn for the most part.”
So that is the first part, the beauty part, of L’Amour et la Musique. There’s the YouTube channel, which is free and Mercedes puts out great content over there, and there is the Patreon page, the subscription type service that offers different perks depending on the tier.
A Side Hustle as a DJ
I also wanted to touch on the second part of L’Amour, since it has also been such a big influence in Mercedes’ life, and that’s music. Like academics, that music influence came from her family when she was young. Through the years, that interest evolved until Mercedes started finding gigs as a DJ. And her work as DJ turned into a nice side hustle for her while she was in graduate school and even afterward.
Mercedes: “I grew up in again, a music appreciating household. This was driven by my mother. Both my sister and I started taking piano lessons at age 7 or 8. And I ended up taking classical piano lessons for 15 years or so. It was a huge huge part of my life and I am so thankful for it. I am so thankful that I didn’t quit and I perservered. So that was kind of my foundation, I would say. And then I was always into music, which I know I sound sort of base or whatever. But I just remember, even as young as 3rdor 4thgrade, 9 or 10 years old, just loving people like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston and in high school, I was very into soul and neo soul and in college, I got really into down tempo and house music. I just felt like increasingly my music world was just getting bigger and bigger. And then I found house music as kind of an outgrowth of all that. When I talk about my foray into house, a lot of people come to it from rave culture. I honestly had no idea that that even existed. I come from a pretty sheltered and I was not a partier, I wasn’t even going to parties in high school the way all the cool kids do. That wasn’t really me. So I found house music very organically. And I loved house music because it incorporated a lot of elements of music that I loved before like really beautiful female vocals and just these lush, deep sounds. I got into deep house specifically. And if you get into house music specifically or club or rave culture at all, house music is meant to be layered. So the songs have very long intros and outros. So the way that you mix two sounds is by layering the tracks together. Sort of house music DJing 101. Which is different than hip hop where they do things like quick cuts, it’s a very different style of DJing.”
“So once I fell in love with house music, I became obsessed with the way music sounded layered together. I was like, I totally just want to learn how to do that and I want to create those sounds. And I was so drawn to it because it’s almost like a form of live performance art. That’s the way I think of DJing. No 2 times you mix a track together is it the same. It’s a very in the moment organic process. And it was so appealing to me. This is way before I even got into beauty blogging. I would say like around 2004/2005 was when I started getting into house music.“
“I ended buying a set of turntables and a WHAT and a mixer and I started poking around a record shop that was local to where I was living in Chicago at the time. And I just started teaching myself how to beat match, which is not easy to do. But it was so much fun. And I think with my background in piano where you’re practicing to a metronome all the time, so house music is on a 4/4 beat so you’re counting beats of 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 to get the tracks to layer. But you’re basically adjusting each of the tracks by ear. And if you ever watch DJes who specifically are working with records, they’re kind of always touching the record or tweaking the record. They’re speeding it up and slowing it down to get the two…That’s what DJes are doing when they are touching the platter of records. Sometimes they’ll do it with CBJes. Butyou’re adjusting the tempo of the record so it will blend with the other track…Even to this day, it speaks to my soul to blend two tracks together.”
Mercedes began DJing house parties while she was an undergraduate student living in Chicago.
Mercedes: “You end up playing in so many different environment, where the sound, you have horrible feedback or you can’t hear yourself. It’s like any, like a singer who can’t hear themselves singing, it you can’t hear yourself mixing, it’s called a trainwreck, it sounds you’re tracks don’t match and it sounds completely horrible and everyone knows you are messing up. 100%. A lot of places aren’t even equipped, they don’t have professional sound equipment, so you’re having to lug your own speakers or a monitor. The speaker that you listen to as the DJ, they call it a monitor, soit just so widely varies, the equipment that you play on, the way the sound system is, the acoustics of the space. It’s really really way more complicated then the drunk people showing up to dance at 1 a.m. think it is.”
When she went to graduate school at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, Mercedes lugged all of her equipment with her. That equipment wasn’t used for a while because she was busy with grad school and studying. It was around 2010 or 2011, Mercedes got together with some friends—two other PhD students from Brown who were in another department and another friend who was a lighting designer—and formed an all-women DJ Collective.
Mercedes: “I was so thankful to have this because as I told you, I had never wanted to be an academic even though I went to graduate school. There were parts of that environment that I was really inspired by and kind of found my groove in but I was so glad to be tethered to a reality outside of academia… Providence. It’s a very artistic town because the Rhode Island School of Design is there so there’s just a lot of performance galleries and artists lofts and artists spaces, things like that. So I had really gotten tied into this community of people. And there was this new bar opening up in downtown Providence and they were going to have a dance floor in the basement with live DJs, and the bar, well, there were two bars, one upstairs and one downstairs and they were also going to have a DJ kidn fo doing more not as much club music on the upstairs. And we knew the guy that the bar had hired to book DJs for. So he was like, hey, you girls are just starting this DJ Collective, Do you want to play, the place is called the The Salon, it’s still there. He said, do you want to have a Saturday night monthly gig at The Salon and we were like, yeah, we do. We were super nervous but this place was just starting out, no one knew what it was going to be. So that was our first gig… That’s when DJing really took off for me as another side business. I was doing gigs really regularly my last part of graduate school and making a fair amount of money doing it actually. I was doing it up until I moved out of Boston last spring.”
Mercedes now lives in Chicago with her husband, Kave, and her son, and she’s not currently DJing, but she would eventually like to set up her turntables in her home and start mixing again just for herself.
Finding Her Own Path
When you look back at the different paths Mercedes has pursued in her life sociologist, Beauty YouTuber, DJ—there are really fascinating contrasts there. She has a PhD from Brown University—an accomplishment that would be looked upon quite favorably in our society—but she’s also passionate about skincare and makeup, which at first glance feels like it’s completely on the other side of the spectrum from academia. Everyone can have a lot of varied interests. But since I discovered Mercedes on YouTube, I loved how she owned the sociology/research part of herself and beauty part of herself and the music part of herself no matter how different those interests seem to be. That’s not always easy to do.
A few months ago on Instagram, Mercedes alluded a little bit to the challenge in balancing these very different interests and that challenge can come in how people perceive those choices. Probably several months ago now on Instagram, she posted some Stories around her birthday. There’s an image of her desk with this present she had just opened from her husband and it’s a Blue Yeti microphone so she can start a L’Amour et la Musique podcast. Over top of the image or on the next slide maybe, she wrote about how nice it was to have someone in her life who supports her and her interests because that hasn’t always been the case in her life. Here is how she has come to terms with pursuing a path that others might not agree with, and for her that has been L’Amour et la Musique.
Mercedes: “It’s been a very solo endeavor…I think My parents and my family really never really, it’s not like they had active disdain for it but they truthfully were never supportive and to this day they really aren’t, which maybe sounds a little bit harsh. But to this day, I see other people who are in my same position, which is a passion project that’s maybe turned into an online creative entrepreneurial business for them. And their parents or their siblings are their number one fans. I don’t even think that my family watches my content, which is totally fine. But L’Amour really became something that I was really doing for myself. I was talking about beauty products with friends so much all the time and when I saw that there was an opportunity for me to put something out there, I really felt called to do it.”
The last line there, about paying attention to opportunities and the things you feel called to do and going after them for yourself, is where I want to leave Mercedes story today.
Before we go though, I am so thankful to Mercedes for taking the time to talk with me for this episode. She gave me a full hour, I think while her baby was sleeping, and I could not be more appreciative that she gave me her time. Please head over to the shownotes, where I will have all of the information about where you can find Mercedes on YouTube, Patreon, and Instagram. I’m also going to a link to a few of her videos that I think would be a great place to start if you want to get a feel for the kind of content she’s producing every week. We didn’t get a chance to talk about this, but Mercedes is also finishing a two-year classical astrology apprenticeship program, and what she has learned in that program may be a part of L’Amour in the future, and she is also going to start that podcast that I mentioned so be on the look out for that. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to We Built This Life today. I’ll see you next time.