Are Beauty Industry Awards Making the Industry a Joke?

If the ceremony celebrating the best professionals in your industry is hosted by someone who has never worked in it, what exactly is being celebrated?

Are Beauty Industry Awards Making the Industry a Joke?

A recent awards announcement caught my attention. Not because of who was being recognised. Because of who was being brought in to host the evening.

A celebrity. One with significant public profile, a complicated public image, and no discernible connection to the beauty industry beyond having presumably used its services at some point. Alongside them, a lineup of other well-known faces. None of them beauty professionals. None of them industry figures. All of them, presumably, there because their name sells tables.

And I found myself asking a question I suspect a lot of people in this industry are asking quietly: is this what we have become?

Let's Be Fair About What Awards Can Do.

Before I make the argument, I want to make the other one properly, because it deserves to be made.

Awards, when they are run well, genuinely matter. Peer recognition in a skilled trade is not nothing. Being seen by the people who understand the work, who know how hard it is, who have sat in the same chairs and carried the same pressures, carries real weight. It is not vanity. It is validation from the people whose opinion actually counts.

There are awards in this industry that still do that job properly. The Professional Beauty Awards and Scratch Magazine Awards are not money-making exercises dressed up as celebrations. They are credible, they are judged by people who know the industry, and winning one means something because the people giving it out understand what they are giving it for.

That matters. The industry should have spaces where excellence is recognised by people qualified to recognise it. Not every awards ceremony has lost the plot. Some of them are still doing exactly what they should be doing.

But Here Is Where It Goes Wrong.

When a beauty awards ceremony needs a celebrity host to fill a room, it has already told you something important about its priorities.

Celebrity hosts sell tickets. They generate social media content. They make the evening feel like an event rather than an industry gathering. And if the people running it are more focused on the size of the room than the integrity of what happens inside it, that is where the problem starts.

The professionals in that room have spent years building their skills, their businesses, their reputations. They have invested in training, in products, in their clients. They have turned up every day and done the work. And the person standing on the stage handing them an award has no idea what any of that means, because they have never been part of it.

That is not a celebration of the industry. That is the industry being used as a backdrop for someone else's brand deal.

The Question Nobody Is Asking Out Loud.

Here is the thing about celebrity involvement in industry awards: it only works if you believe the award is about vanity rather than excellence.

Vanity is about who is in the room and how the photos look. Excellence is about the standard of the work being recognised and the credibility of the people doing the recognising.

The beauty industry has a complicated relationship with both. It is an industry that has fought hard to be taken seriously, that has pushed for proper regulation, proper training standards, proper recognition of the skill involved. And then some of its own award ceremonies undermine all of that by treating the evening as a networking event with a gift bag rather than a genuine recognition of professional standards.

It sends a message. To the professionals in the room, to the clients watching from the outside, and to the wider world that already has complicated views about what the beauty industry is and what it stands for.

Where I Land on This.

Awards that are judged by industry experts, entered on merit, and presented with genuine understanding of what is being recognised are worth having. They should be protected and supported, because they are doing something real.

Awards that are primarily a revenue model with a trophy attached, that measure success by room size and headline acts rather than judging quality, are not celebrating the industry. They are profiting from it.

The beauty industry is full of extraordinarily skilled people who deserve to be recognised properly. Not by whoever was available to host on a Saturday evening. By the people who actually understand the work.

When an awards show needs a celebrity with no industry connection to make itself feel legitimate, it has already answered the question. It is not about the professionals in the room. It is about the optics of the evening.

The industry deserves better than that. And honestly, it is about time more people said so out loud.

What do you think? Are we holding our own industry to a high enough standard, or have we let the wrong things define what recognition looks like?