On Lafayette Street in SoHo, young, fashionable women lined up around the block to enter a minimalist, millennial oasis, the most perfect Instagram feed brought to life. Staff members glided around the store in pastel pink suits, each embodying the kind of girl that Glossier made us all want to be: beautiful, yet effortless.

"We want to inspire, but we also want to be realistic and show beauty in real life,” Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss said in a 2017 interview with Inc., just as the brand had reached what Weiss herself described as “cult status.” Even Chrissy Teigen and Reese Witherspoon wore Glossier’s signature Cloud Paint blush to the Oscars. 

We understood the irony of the message as we sampled their sheer, almost-not-there lipgloss, then looked into a mirror decorated with white vinyl letters in the bustling pop-up shop: you look good, our reflection told us. Glossier affirmed our inherent beauty, then reminded us that we can be even more beautiful if we buy their “Boy Brow” pomade, which sold one tube every 32 seconds by 2018.

Glossier’s commoditized feminism aside, it’s no easy task to launch a $1.8 billion company in the brutally competitive beauty industry, especially one with such broad appeal. After all, Glossier’s founder and CEO Emily Weiss is very, very far from the first entrepreneur to profit off of our desire to look good. And who cares? That Cloud Paint is pretty magical, if we’re being honest. Like with many consumer brands geared toward women, we buy in not just because of the marketing, but because of the product itself.

Glossier founder Emily Weiss speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018. Image Credits: TechCrunch

But as Weiss steps down from her current role and prepares for maternity leave, her success and subsequently typical choice to become her company’s board chairperson has been co-opted as the end of the “girlboss” era.

What even is a ”girlboss” anymore? Once a vaguely aspirational term of praise reserved only for affluent white women, the moniker now reflects the maddening contradiction of workplace feminism: we know that it’s not enough to just be a woman in power, and that what we do with that power matters far more than simply wielding it. Yet women founders and CEOs remain frustratingly rare as Silicon Valley’s glass ceiling persists, almost impenetrable – venture capitalists (only 13% of whom are women in the U.S.) allocate 98% of their funding to startups helmed by men. It’s no wonder, then, how we’ve ended up with the paradox of the “girlboss.”