What content is our industry putting out, and what impression does that give?

I was on a flight recently, sitting next to a young guy scrolling through his phone. I wasn't snooping (okay, maybe a little), but I couldn't help clocking what kept coming up on his feed: house sales in the millions, cutting boards made by men, and Snapchat selfies of his mates.

It got me thinking about what his feed would look like if he was consuming beauty content instead, and more specifically, how much of what he'd see would be influencer beauty (GRWM videos, product hauls, unboxings, PR packages), and how much would actually come from the professional side of our industry.

Because when you look at what the typical professional hair and beauty business is putting out, the range is genuinely narrow: before and afters, hair consultations or transformations, and the occasional meme or trend. That's largely the slice of us that makes it onto a consumer's feed.

And I think that matters more than we're giving it credit for.

It's no wonder students come into the industry expecting glitz and glamour, only to get hit with the harsh reality of product knowledge, prescription, and technical depth. It's also no wonder consumers are approaching the professional beauty therapist with less trust than they used to, when the majority of what they see of us is memes, trends, and the occasional transformation shot.

Meanwhile, the content that would actually build credibility and lift the perception of our industry is largely missing from the feed.

I'm talking about career journeys that show what it really looks like to build a life in this industry, client journeys that follow the long arc of a skin or hair outcome (not just the finished look), the "how I built this" stories behind our businesses, genuine how-to content (how to cleanse properly at home, how to extend a colour between visits), what a treatment actually looks like from start to finish, and concern-based education that speaks to the stuff clients are already Googling at midnight, whether that's pigmentation, breakouts, scalp health, or thinning.

None of that requires you to become a full-time content creator. It just asks you to bring the same depth you bring to your chair or your treatment room to the content you publish.

Here's the part that actually gets me fired up. There are roughly 40,000 hair and beauty doors across Australia. Every time someone in this industry raises the alarm about the impact influencers are having on consumer behaviour (the pricing pressure, the misinformation, the DIY mentality), I think about that number.

Imagine if every business owner, across every one of those 40,000 doors, committed to making one genuinely great, genuinely insightful piece of industry content on their next upload. Not a full strategy overhaul or a campaign, just one considered, well-made piece. Collectively, that's 40,000 pieces of professional beauty content entering the feed in the same window, and that's enough to actually shift what a consumer sees when they open Instagram or TikTok and land on our corner of the world.

We can't outspend the influencer economy, but we can absolutely out-depth it. The professional side of this industry holds the knowledge, the outcomes, the education, and the lived experience. We just need to let more of it out.