Christmas every day
<p>Cindy Ingalls started her "Prime Beauty" blog in January 2010 for women over 40 who are looking for beauty tips on product insight. She now has over 16,000 followers from all over the world that read her product reviews, tips and tricks.</p>
<p>Most days Cindy Ingalls' front porch has a box or two from companies wanting her to review their products. She also has been asked to write articles for other blogs due to her site's popularity.</p>
Sinking into the chair at her small home office, Cindy Ingalls rummaged through the latest box of free merchandise.
At the top, a hair dryer.
"My third so far this year," she said.
The rest of the stuff she hadn't even asked for - shampoo, hand sanitizers.
More to put in the pile.
"It's like Christmas every day," she said with a laugh. "I just get all these little goodies."
It took dedication getting to the point where FedEx pays a daily visit to Ingalls' Coeur d'Alene apartment, prompting neighbors to query about the stream of packages.
She tells them it's for her work online.
No, not selling anything, she corrects those who don't understand the word blogging.
On her website, primebeautyblog.net, Ingalls reviews beauty products. She gives tips on blushes, creams, glosses, foundations, self tanners, eyeliner, hair dryers.
Popularity is constantly climbing, with the site averaging about 30,000 hits a month.
The blog has even been rated by online researchers as among the top 50 beauty sites.
Her angle: It's all for women over 40.
"There are a lot of blogs for 20, 30 year olds," explained Ingalls, originally from Southern California but raised in Coeur d'Alene as a teenager.
When she browsed online forums a few years ago, she said, she found plenty of exchanges about products trendy for teens, and what caused breakouts.
"Women over 40, they don't think about what will break them out," she said. "They think about wrinkles."
The 55-year-old could feel the gap in information.
Middle aged women these days don't want to fade into spinsters, she said. Yet they don't want to approach make-up sales counters where there is "a peacock-hair colored sales assistant with rap music blaring in the background."
Ingalls came to the rescue.
The blog she kicked off in August, 2009 started out small.
A few days a week, she could write and mess around with makeup - a joy since the modeling days of her youth - while keeping her full-time job as an administrative assistant at North Idaho College.
She created a simple, amateur site herself, reviewing products she already owned.
At first, not much happened.
"When I first started, I had 30 to 50 readers," she said.
She kept plugging. Eventually she was writing every day, constantly testing products and posting reviews.
She promoted her site, utilizing search engine optimization so her blog would pop up under fashion-related searches. She networked with other bloggers.
"It's hard work," Ingalls said, adding that her endeavors were spurred by the loss of her mother, Millie Hauptmann, a poet and former newspaper columnist.
"I wanted to see if I had any of the talent she had," she explained.
Late last year, subscribers started picking up.
This January, she hired someone to build an impressive, more functional site.
Subscriptions escalated.
Today, the site boasts 16,000 subscribers worldwide, with 1,300 Twitter followers and 600 on Facebook.
"Some are from really weird places, like Serbia," she said. "But the top three are U.S., Canada and the U.K."
Her blog features pieces of everything: Tips on skin care, makeup applications, hair care. It rates brands, reviews products about to be released and suggests where thrifty shoppers can find deals.
Readers can even learn to coil their hair in the same french twist Natalie Portman was sporting at the Golden Globes.
"I think it's the writing," Ingalls said of what has earned her popularity. "Mine is very conversational. I try to take the aging thing with a grain of salt, with a lot of humor."
That's indicative in the sign hanging by her desk: "I'm still hot. It just comes in flashes."
No reason to fear age, Ingalls said, a theme of the site.
"I want to let women know that just because they're getting older doesn't mean they can't be the best they can be," she said. "It's not all about making the exterior more beautiful, but the interior, as well."
Ingalls has plenty of experience to draw from for the blog, after working in retail for years for chain and department stores in Portland, Ore., and as a buyer for Broadway Southwest department store in Phoenix.
When she was in her 20s, she was a runway model in Spokane, Portland and Seattle.
"Back then, they didn't have make-up artists and hair stylists come in. You had to do it all yourself," Ingalls remembered. "I learned a lot. It developed my love for makeup and fashion."
So far this year, Ingalls has made about $1,000 in advertising for the site, she said, which she hopes will accrue.
The real bounty, though, are the hundreds of free products she receives from companies hoping for her reviews. Drawers in her bedroom and bathroom are stuffed with samples, her office cluttered with boxes of them.
"I should count up all the lipsticks and glosses I have one day," she mused. "One commenter asked how many I had in my purse. I counted up 11. And that's just in my purse."
Sure, it's all fun, she said.
Bottom line, she hopes her readers will feel a little more beautiful. More confident.
That goes for her, too.
"It's good to be the age I am, because I've got a lot more self confidence than in my 20s and 30s," Ingalls said. " I'm just taking the aging in stride. I'll try to be great for as long as I can."