Why I Said Goodbye to Glamazon Diaries After Almost 20 Years

If You Googled “Glamazon Diaries” and Landed Here. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. After nearly 20 years — 19, to be exact — I closed the chapter on Glamazon Diaries and relaunched as Makeda Rabioux. No drama. No fallout. No burnout spiral that finally broke me. Just growth. And a quiet, steady recognition that the name I had built everything under was no longer big enough to hold who I had become.

If you’re here for the first time: welcome. You arrived at exactly the right moment — the beginning of something truer. And if you’ve been here since the Glamazon days, since the early DC fashion coverage and the New York City dispatches and the pieces that went up at midnight because I was too excited to sleep — thank you. You built this with me. And this space is still yours.

This post is the real story of why I changed the name. Not the polished version. The real one.

What Glamazon Diaries Was, and What It Built
Glamazon Diaries started in Washington, DC. It was the first fashion blog in the city — which sounds more impressive now than it felt at the time, when blogging was still a strange, uncertain thing that serious people weren’t entirely sure was going anywhere.

I was driven by a simple desire: to create a space that genuinely reflected the experiences of women like me. At the time, I couldn’t find that space anywhere else, so I built it. And over the years that followed, it became something I couldn’t have imagined when I started — a platform that took me to fashion weeks, into rooms with some of the biggest names in the industry, into the pages of Vogue, The New York Times, and Cosmopolitan.

The name had magnetism. It carried its own persona — polished, aspirational, a little untouchable. Glamazon was tall in every room. Glamazon knew what she was doing. Glamazon had it together in a way that felt like the point.

For a long time, that worked. The persona opened doors. The name did its job.

I built a 19-year digital footprint under a name that had a costume stitched into it. Eventually, I outgrew the costume.

What Wearing a Persona for 19 Years Actually Costs
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about building a brand around a persona: it works, until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, it doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly starts to cost you something you can’t quite name. I started editing myself to fit the name. Not in enormous ways — not at first. Small choices. A topic I didn’t cover because it felt “off-brand.” A personal essay I wrote and didn’t publish because the voice felt too raw, too unpolished, too honest for a brand called Glamazon. A trip I took and barely wrote about because the experience was complicated, and complicated didn’t fit the aesthetic.

The performance was subtle. But it accumulated. And somewhere in the middle of grappling with questions of identity, purpose, and what success actually means — questions I’d been sitting with for years — I caught myself reading a draft I’d written and thinking: This is good, but it doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like Glamazon Diaries. Those are not the same thing. And the day I recognized that clearly, I knew something had to change.

Why My Own Name Was the Hardest and Most Important Choice
When I started thinking seriously about rebranding, I went through a long list of name options. Evocative ones. Clever ones. Names with good domain availability and a clean Instagram handle. Names that felt safe. I kept coming back to my own name. And I kept talking myself out of it.

Makeda Rabioux is my married name. My given name is Makeda Saggau-Sackey. Both of them are full names — names that announce themselves, names that don’t ask permission to be in a room. And I had spent years quietly worrying that a name like mine was “too much” for a blog. Too specific. Too ethnic, if I’m being fully honest about the fear underneath the fear.

The beauty industry, the fashion industry, the media industry — they have spent decades telling women who look like me, and with names like mine, that we need to make ourselves more digestible to reach more people. I had internalized that message more than I realized. Glamazon Diaries was, in part, a digestible version of me.

Choosing Makeda Rabioux as my brand was the most direct act of self-reclamation I’ve made in two decades of putting myself on the internet.

My name is not a niche. My name is the whole point.

The Life That Made This Rebrand Inevitable
I am a Ghanaian woman in her early 40s, living in New York City, married in an interracial relationship, raising two children under two. I am a person whose life has genuinely changed — not just professionally, but in every dimension that matters.

The questions I’m sitting with now are different from the ones I was sitting with when I started Glamazon Diaries. Back then I was writing about fashion in DC, navigating a city, figuring out what it meant to take up space in an industry that wasn’t built for me. Now I’m navigating marriage and motherhood and the particular texture of building a life in New York City while holding onto yourself — while also doing it all, as I’ve always done, in style.

Glamazon Diaries was built for a version of me that needed a certain kind of armor. Makeda Rabioux is built for the version of me who has learned when to take it off.

The rebrand wasn’t just professional. It was personal. My brand name is my married name — which means that choosing it as the name for this space wasn’t just a business decision. It was a declaration of this chapter. Makeda Saggau-Sackey built Glamazon Diaries. Makeda Rabioux is who she became.

What This Space Is Now
Everything you loved about Glamazon Diaries is still here. The fashion coverage — my first love, approached now with a mindset of buying better rather than buying often. Practical style advice for real life, for real bodies, for the slow and intentional wardrobe rather than the trend cycle. The beauty content that goes deep, that talks honestly about what works for skin that has lived and shown up. The personal essays that trust you to handle the complicated parts.

And now: the things Glamazon Diaries didn’t always have room for.
The realities of multicultural marriage and what it actually looks like to build a life with someone across cultures. The particular joys and challenges of raising children in New York City. The questions of identity and becoming that don’t resolve neatly but deserve to be asked out loud. The community of women I’m here for — women in their 30s and beyond who are navigating self-love, motherhood, marriage, and career, and who want a friend who tells the truth about how complicated all of it is.

That’s what this new space is for because I somehow still feel like I’m on the Cusp of Becoming, which is coincidentally the name of my newly launched Substack. The name came from the thing I kept noticing in my own life — that becoming isn’t a destination. It’s a posture. You’re always on the cusp of it, always in the middle of it, always more than you were last year and less than you’ll be next year. I wanted a space that honored that instead of pretending the journey was already complete.

The filter is gone. The costume is retired. What’s left is just me, writing like nobody’s watching — even when everybody is.

A Word to the Community Who Built This
I want to be direct about something: this rebrand was not a response to anything you did. Not the audience, not the feedback, not the requests. You have been extraordinary — generous with your time, your attention, your loyalty, your DMs at every hour of the day and night for the better part of two decades.

This was a response to growth. My growth. The kind that happens slowly over years of doing work you care about, and then arrives all at once as a recognition: you are not who you were when you started, and that’s not a problem. That’s the whole point of doing it.

I’ve been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, and Cosmopolitan. I’ve collaborated with some of the biggest names in fashion and beauty. I’ve built something real. And all of that happened under a name that I’m now ready to let rest — with gratitude, and without grief.

What comes next is better. I know that in the way you know things that are true before you can prove them. If you’ve followed along for years, I hope you’ll stay. If you’re new — subscribe below. You’re arriving at exactly the right moment.