About Vanity Desk
Vanity Desk is an independent beauty publication about products, brands, marketing, and the business of making us want things.
I’m Tess Dunn, a digital marketer, SEO strategist, writer, and the founder of QUILL, an independent platform that generated more than 13 million organic impressions and over 220,000 clicks in its first 16 months.
Vanity Desk is the next version of that work.
QUILL began as a broader resource focused on inclusive recommendations and accessible information. Over time, I’ve become less interested in simply telling people what to buy and more interested in the entire machine behind the purchase: the claims brands make, the audiences they overlook, the trends they manufacture, the search behavior they chase, and whether the product itself is actually… well, good.
That’s what Vanity Desk is for.
Here, you’ll find honest beauty reviews, product testing, brand and campaign analyses, industry commentary, consumer culture, and occasional essays about what beauty sells us beyond the bottle.
I approach beauty from two directions at once: as a consumer who has opinions about the products she buys, and as a marketer who understands how those opinions are sold.
I care about formulation, performance, price, packaging, accessibility, and who a product was actually created for. I also care about positioning, messaging, search strategy, audience trust, and why certain products become unavoidable while others disappear quietly into the clearance section.
Vanity Desk is not built around pretending every launch is exciting. It is not a stream of press releases rewritten with more adjectives. And it is definitely not a place where every product is somehow the new best most exciting thing everrrrrr!
Sometimes the lipstick is excellent. Sometimes the campaign is better than the product. Sometimes a brand has absolutely no idea who it is talking to or what it’s talking about. I’m at the intersection of it all.
What you’ll find here
Vanity Desk covers:
Honest product reviews and wear tests
Beauty marketing and brand strategy
Launches, trends, and industry commentary
Consumer behavior and beauty culture
Search, content, and digital strategy within the beauty industry
Recommendations that do not require pretending every product is life-changing
Free subscribers will receive regular reviews, commentary, and analysis.
Paid subscribers will receive deeper industry breakdowns, expanded essays, behind-the-scenes strategy, and additional recommendations from the Vanity Desk.
About Tess
I’m a digital marketer and editorial strategist with experience across SEO, content strategy, social media, brand voice, analytics, and audience growth.
My work has generated millions of organic search impressions, substantial growth in reach and engagement, and tens of spreadsheets open on my computer and hundreds more tabs open in my brain.
I built QUILL because I wanted useful, inclusive information to be easier to find. I built Vanity Desk because I wanted a sharper place to examine beauty itself: what works, what doesn’t, how it is marketed, and why we keep buying it.
Welcome to the desk. ✍️
