The year is drawing to an end, as is the decade (whoa), and the time has come to reflect on the past 12 months. I flipped through my “Best of 2019” Instagram highlight and it was a wonderful reel of great moments I went through in the past year. I started the “best of” highlights in 2018 and it’s a tradition I plan to continue, as it’s such a fun thing to look back on. If you regularly post on stories yourself, making a highlight of the best moments of the year is something I highly recommend. It’s a great little way of keeping memories.
Today I’d like to look back on what 2019 was for Loepsie. I love roundups, so I thought it’d be fun to share the most viewed videos and blog posts on Loepsie with you, as well as my most liked Instagram posts of 2019. The best of the best, according to the numbers. It’s always fun to see what did well and what didn’t in terms of reach and engagement, and the results are often surprising. 2019 was definitely a year full of surprises in that regard. Let’s take a look!
Top Videos
#5 Trying The Curly Girl Method On Straight Hair
A silly little experiment at the start of the year proved to be something quite a few people are interested in. The curly girl method, a way of styling and caring for curly hair, became popular towards the end of last year and I wondered what would happen if I tried the method on straight hair. I ended up using the method for a few weeks only, as it had few benefits for my straight hair. Of course, haha :)
#4 Cute & Easy Hairstyles For Long Hair
The most classic of classic Loepsie content: a good old-fashioned hair tutorial. I honestly don’t know what it is about this particular one that made it so well received, but I’m not complaining :)
#3 What To Wear With Hip Dips/Violin Hips
Now here’s a video I was pretty nervous about making. I carefully started making more fashion-related content this year, and this is one of the videos I’m most proud of. I was nervous about pointing out my hip dips so prominently in a video as they are a bit of an insecurity of mine, but I decided to own them and make a helpful video for other dip-hipped ladies. Many girls wrote to me saying the video really helped them, and I’m super happy about that.
#2 Recreating A Photo Of My Historical Twin
This video was so much fun to make! I recreated this old photo of a young lady who looks just like me when I was younger. The video was very well received and I ended up making a few more videos of the same category. I have a couple more photo recreations planned for 2020 as I still really enjoy making them.
#1 I Followed An 18th Century Hair Tutorial (Don’t Try This At Home)
Now here’s one I most certainly wasn’t expecting. In spring this year I went through a little bit of a creator’s crisis. My channel hadn’t been doing so great, I had run out of video ideas, and I felt rather down about the whole thing in general. I made a video announcing my creator’s block as a kind of disclaimer, should I decide to stop uploading for a while. The comments on that video were so encouraging though, telling me to stop worrying about what people want to see, and to start making videos I want to make instead. I was able to flip a switch in my head and for the first time ever, truly disregard all my worries about how a video would be received and make what I thought would be “the most boring video ever”: 20+ minutes of me reading an almost unreadable 18th century book and failing to follow the instructions it gave. Lo and behold… it went viral.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand why this video gathered so many views, but I’m quite happy it did. It was a lot of fun to make and it pulled lots of new people to my historical content, which I’ve been making more of in the past few years and really enjoy. This video truly gave a wonderful boost to my channel and career in general, and it has made a year that started out pretty bleak business-wise, one of the best in a long time.
Top Blog Posts
#5 Benefit Cheekleaders Palette
The best-read posts on my blog are generally the ones that people find on Google, and one category that still does great on Google is beauty product reviews. As beauty blogs are slowly dying out and reviews are harder to come by, my own little reviews become easier to find and gather more traffic.
I don’t do them very often, but every once in a while I get an itch to do a nice old school makeup review. Such as this one, of the Benefit Cheekleaders blush, bronzer and highlight palette. A fantastic product I still have in my daily makeup routine.
#4 My Favourite Vintage Clothing Shops In Amsterdam
I’m glad this post is up there with my most read posts of the year, as it took a bit of a higher effort than most of my blog posts do and it’s one I’m very happy with. This blog is a purely “for fun” part of my online presence so it’s on a bit of a backburner compared to my YouTube channel, but I really enjoy writing both my simpler, more personal posts and these more time consuming ones.
I went around the city to check out nearly all the vintage stores I could find, and curate a list of the best ones in terms of product selection and shopping experience. I refer to this list myself every now and then, and I’ve been able to send it to quite a few people who were looking for vintage shopping tips.
#3 My Favourite Instagram Accounts To Follow
This one is surprising to me, as it’s not something I’d imagine you’d bump into through Google, haha! I made a little compilation of my favourite Instagram accounts to follow, and quite a few people seemed interested in that. Considering it did so well, I might make a new list a few months down the line.
#2 The Best Things I’ve Done For My Mental Health
Self-improvement and intentional living is probably my favourite category to write about. I feel like these subjects are super valuable, and I spend a lot of time reading about them myself. When I write these posts it’s always from the heart and if reading them helps just one person, I’ll be more than happy. I’m glad to see this is the second-best read post this year, and it does motivate me to write more of this type of content.
#1 NYX Bare With Me Base Review
The most read post this year is… a makeup review. Haha! This was a bit of a hyped launch and I released my review pretty early on, so I think that’s why it did so well. I enjoyed writing it and I still use these products daily as well, but in the future, the beauty reviews I do will continue to be very occasional. It’s fun content to make every now and again, but as I get older my interest in makeup dwindles and it has less and less importance in my life. Probably my favourite thing about beauty reviews is the product photography though, and I’m really happy with how this shoot turned out.
Top Instagram Photos
2019 has been the year I really stepped up my Instagram game. It’s a platform I struggled with ever since I joined it; I just couldn’t make it work the way I wanted to. That has completely changed this year though, and I feel like my Instagram is finally what I want it to be. I have a more consistent style on my feed, and share casual snapshots on stories frequently. I’ve gained a lot of followers this year which is fantastic, and I find myself truly enjoying being on the platform now.
#5
My fifth most liked post is a pretty recent one. I got myself an Adobe CC subscription with Lightroom this autumn and started editing my pictures in a more professional way, which was received very well on Instagram. I really love the colours in this picture, and I think it’s very feel good in general.
#4
Ah, there it is again. The recreation of my historical twin. I had SO much fun making this picture look old and authentic and considering the free online software I used for editing, I think I did a pretty good job. Better than I expected, anyway.
#3
2019 was also the year that I took up a brand new hobby: sewing clothes. Not just mending and altering, but actually sewing the whole thing. This pinafore dress was my first project and one that I’m still super proud of. I wear it all the time and it does surprisingly well in photos.
By the way, this picture is pretty much how I see the ideal version of myself, haha! I wish this was actually my life.
#2
I LOVE this photo! It’s another recreation, but this time I got Robbert to feature in the photo with me and I adore the result. We rarely take pictures together, let alone styled ones like this, so this is very special to me. I’ll also never forget we took this in literal scorching 40°C weather, even though you can’t tell that in the picture at all.
#1
And the winner is: my current profile picture! After I did my first photo recreation video, I started receiving lots of pictures from you guys of other historical ladies that I resemble, and this one of Marie Doro was the most requested one. It was a really hard one to recreate and I struggled a lot in the process, but I’m very happy with the end result. I think it’s a great picture and I’m not surprised at all that this is the one that received the most likes of 2019. It’s one of my personal favourites as well.
Thank you so much for a fantastic year! As I mentioned above, 2019 started off at a bit of a low when it comes to how my social media platforms were doing. It all turned around however, and I have you to thank for that. I’m super grateful that I still get to call this my job and be here after all these years. Here’s to an even better 2020!
