It's a big month for us, as L'Oréal - the world's largest cosmetics company - launches a new customer acquisition programme using the Buyapowa platform. We'll be helping some of their best-loved brands to bring peer-to-peer selling - a cosmetics industry tactic ever since Victorian times - beautifully up to date.

It couldn't come at a better time, with the challenge of acquiring new customers growing more and more difficult for the skincare and beauty industry every day. Shoppers are blinded by the flood of pharma-jargon spewing out of billboards and tv adverts ("five times more prettiness particles than other brands!"). Meanwhile, new players and hipster indies come to market every day, creating such an avalanche of choice that it's easier to find a botox needle in a haystack than it is to settle on a new moisturiser.

And the people we used to turn to for help - the celebrities, YouTubers and bloggers collectively known as 'influencers' - are so utterly in the thrall of paid promotions and playing the PR game that, every time you take their advice and purchase today's 'holy grail' product, you can't help but feel that it's your gullability which is paying for the