Larry Stansbury Has Been in the Room the Whole Time

Larry Stansbury has built a career most people in beauty media don't fully know. In this Voices to Know feature, Black Beauty Founders sits down with Larry Stansbury to talk about his path from publicist to writer to content creator, the lessons he's learned pitching editors, and what's next for Larry Stansbury.

VOICES TO KNOW · A BBF FEATURE

Before the Vogue byline and the brand deals, there was a fellowship, three jobs and $500. The writer turned creator on betting on himself, the chapter nobody knew about, and why the biggest names in beauty keep asking for him by name.

Larry Stansbury moved to New York City with $500 in his pocket, two weeks to report for work, and absolutely no idea what he was walking into.

He had a fellowship at Hill & Knowlton, the agency where his mother once worked, and that was pretty much it. No apartment. No map of the city in his head. He got scammed on housing before he ever unpacked, spent two nights in a hotel, and figured the rest out fast, the way you do at 23. He was making $15 an hour. When his first living situation fell through, he found a new place through a Facebook housing group in a single weekend and moved out quietly, leaving his portion of the rent under the cable box with the keys.

"It was a moment where I was like, this is a reality shock for me," he says, and then he laughs, because of course he does. Larry laughs at almost everything, including himself, which is a big part of why people love him.

To cover $1,700 in rent, he worked three jobs at once: the PR desk during the week, a gym job and a fitness studio around it. On bagel Mondays at the office, he took two or three of the extras and called it lunch and dinner.

"I was 23, 24 at the time," he says. "I can't do that no more."

What that season taught him, more than anything, was that he could bet on himself and actually put in the work. "Social media can show that everything is glitz and glamorous, and it's really not," he says. "You don't know what that person goes through after each Instagram post."

The résumé that opens doors for him now was never the obvious one. He transferred to Syracuse from a small liberal arts school in New Hampshire and got rejected from the Newhouse School three times, which, if you know Larry, is basically a punchline now. It was an associate dean who finally told him to stop applying, that he already knew how to do the work and should stay in the writing program in Arts and Sciences instead. He did. He graduated without a job lined up, applied all over Washington, D.C., heard nothing, and turned toward New York on instinct.

Before his fellowship ended, he gave his two weeks' notice with nothing else waiting for him. Then came temp agencies and fashion houses while he collected rejections from editorial jobs. A former colleague suggested he build his own website. He built it. He started writing on Medium, then went back to every editor who had ever given him an edit test and told them he was available. One of them needed help covering celebrity news. That became his first byline, at Good Housekeeping, and the rest, as they say, was history in the making.

His mother is the one who told him to write a book, during the pandemic, when he had been laid off and was home in Maryland freelancing. He read Gabrielle Union, Elaine Welteroth, Billy Porter, Alicia Keys and Ashley Graham, and decided a life did not have to be half a century long to be worth putting on paper. He published it himself, ran his own press for it, and sold out on day one. A book of poetry followed. Then Forbes came asking for his entrepreneurial advice, and true to form, he told absolutely no one, not even his own family, until he had the magazine in his hand and called everyone downstairs to see it.

Here is where the story gets really good, because most people in beauty know Larry Stansbury as an editor and creator, and almost nobody knows he has been on the other side of the pitch. Viacom. Hill & Knowlton. Press Hook. PR work at Time. He does not lead with it, and that is entirely on purpose.

"I don't like to brag," he says. His mother raised him to be quiet about his own résumé. "I actually will show a person." So he lets people find out for themselves. "When I tell people I used to be a publicist, everyone looks at me like, wait, you used to be a publicist. And I'm like, yeah. I know who's nice and not nice to work with."

That double life is exactly why his read on the inbox is worth the price of admission. He gets close to a thousand pitches a day, and the mistakes he sees are almost never about the product. They are about the person sending it: a pitch so generic it shows no idea who he actually is or what he covers, or the same product pitched again with nothing new attached to it.

He is also just delightfully unbothered about calling it like he sees it. Ask him about the industry's less glamorous moments, and he will happily tell the story, laugh through most of it, and land the point every time: be kind, be real, and never lie to him, because he will find out.

He is clear-eyed about where Black-owned brands still get short-changed, and part of it, he says, is a habit of pitching only Black media and stopping there. He points to founders who took their story to rooms nobody expected them in, and he pushes back on the idea that traditional press is the finish line. He watched Bask & Lather go up on a wall in a video and watched sales follow with no press behind it at all.

"Really invest in social media, because that's actually where you make the sales," he says.

Men's beauty is the white space he is most vocal about, and what the coverage keeps missing is who is allowed to be in it. He rarely sees Black men talking openly about grooming or about mental health, and being a beauty editor is part of how he built a closer relationship with his own father around it. When he interviewed Dwayne Johnson about his skincare line, the conversation went straight to mental health and men's grooming. "We have to create and define our own definition of masculinity," he says.

The pivot to content creation started with an outfit. He posted a video of what he was wearing to a brand dinner and watched it pass a million views. Then he did it again. Now he films a series called Editor-to-Creator Diaries, chronicling the transition with the same honesty he brings to everything, and he shot the entire first season in three days flat.

What he brings that a lot of creators simply do not have is the training. "Storytelling," he says, without hesitating. He will not call something the best product without telling you why, the ingredient, what the dermatologist said, the results over time. He did exactly that with a La Roche-Posay serum for Elle, and his editor told him it was her best performing story.

Talk to the people who have sat across from him and a pattern shows up fast: everyone wants him in the room. When he interviewed Gabrielle Union, the conversation drifted from home back in Maryland to her own journey through menopause, the kind of honest, meandering talk that barely feels like an interview at all. He still calls it one of his favorites.

Anok Yai told him something even more specific. On the red carpet, she pulled him aside and admitted that day had been a blur of interviews that all felt the same, girl after girl, bland question after bland question. Then he walked up. "When you came in, you were a breath of fresh air," she told him. Everyone else on that carpet heard about it too. It was, by her own account, her favorite interview of the day.

He has traded easy, unguarded conversation with everyone from Nia Long and Kate Hudson to Bella Hadid, Karrueche Tran and Winnie Harlow, always the same way, like they are regular people and not a story to get through. Cynthia Bailey talks about him so often it is genuinely how this writer first found him.

"I just talk to them like they're regular people," he says. "I don't scream when I see celebrities. I did scream at 50 Cent, I'll say that."

That mix, the sharp instincts and the genuine warmth, is what makes him nearly impossible not to like. He is funny without trying to be, generous with his time, and treats a first-time founder with the exact same energy he brings to an A-lister.

This writer felt it firsthand. What was supposed to be a quick interview turned into hours on the phone, and neither of us wanted to hang up. We laughed through most of it, easy and unfiltered, the kind of laughing you only do with someone who already feels like an old friend. His personality comes through even over the phone, and honestly, that is the whole reason this profile exists.

Ask him what the next five years hold and he will tell you, laughing, that he has no idea, and that he likes it that way. "I don't want to think I know everything," he says. "I don't know where I'll be, but I know it'll be somewhere greater and better."

A breath of fresh air.

That is Larry Stansbury.

Every single time.