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Beauty and The Dirt: Gossip! Fashion! Glamour!
June 8, 2008
Adryan Dillon
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| Courtesy photo |
| Adryan Dillon with research material for her work at Beauty and The Dirt, a fashion and celebrity gossip Web site. |
My fashion editor might wear Prada and all the women in my office might prance around in stilettos, but my internship in the fashion and beauty industry this summer has been a far cry from the horror of the book and movie, The Devil Wears Prada.
I work at Beauty and The Dirt, a sort of hybrid blog and online magazine that covers all the latest celebrity gossip, new makeup products, fashion trends, entertainment news, nightlife hotspots and glamorous travel destinations.
The content of Beauty and The Dirt is written through the eyes of Mimi, who is “a makeup artist with a demanding social calendar and busy diary.” The Web site is her world, and as she says, “you might never want to leave.”
My office is located on Carnaby Street, the epicenter of all the fashions of “Swinging London” in the sixties. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan would peruse the racks on Carnaby Street to find the latest Mod fashions.
My co-workers are extremely nice, fun, stylish and smart writers who are regularly producing new content to post to the site. The all-female (surprise, surprise!) staff is small, so I am asked to do a significant amount of writing.
During the Cannes Film Festival, I followed the ongoing gossip and news surrounding the super-posh festival and wrote a daily column about it. I have written articles about London’s theatre scene, the new Beverly Hills 90210 TV series, the MTV Movie Awards, Britain’s music festivals and makeup artist profiles.
I am responsible for writing content, finding photos and publishing the article on our Web site, www.beautyandthedirt.com.
I interned at a print magazine before, and here I really enjoy the immediacy of how fast you can publish articles on the Internet and how many people you can reach. Beauty and the Dirt’s Web site receives one million hits per month.
There are many perks of working in this sector of the industry. Just this week, I was given tickets to see Rufus Wainwright at the Hampton Court Palace Festival. Hampton Court Palace was built by Henry VIII. The concert was in the courtyard of the palace and I can think of very few more stunning places to see a concert, certainly none in America.
My summer internship in London has been absolutely fabulous. I cannot think of a better place that I would like to work. I don’t ever want to leave Mimi’s world.