What is glamorous?

Glamorous is a JavaScript library, originally created at PayPal, that lets developers write CSS styles directly inside their React component code rather than in separate stylesheet files. The idea is to keep styles close to the components they belong to, making it easier to track down where a visual change needs to happen. It was part of a category called CSS-in-JS, which became popular in the React community around 2017 and 2018. Important note: this project is officially deprecated and no longer maintained. The README prominently states that it has been abandoned, and the maintainers have pointed users toward a migration path to a different library called Emotion. Anyone discovering this project today should not build new things on top of it. The issue tracker has a dedicated thread explaining the situation and offering automated migration tooling. When it was active, glamorous worked by letting you create styled React components with plain JavaScript objects describing the visual properties. You could apply colors, spacing, fonts, and other CSS rules without writing a separate .css file. The library built on top of an earlier package called glamor, which handled the actual CSS injection into the browser. Glamorous added a React-friendly API on top of that foundation. The project attracted a community of related tools, including testing utilities, a React Native version, a VS Code extension, and an integration with Stylus for developers who preferred that syntax. There was also a companion website at glamorous.rocks that hosted tutorials, examples, and API documentation, though that documentation may no longer be maintained. With over 3,600 stars on GitHub and 67 contributors listed, glamorous had meaningful adoption during its active years. Its closest conceptual sibling was styled-components, which the README lists as direct inspiration. For anyone maintaining older code that uses glamorous, the migration guide linked in issue 419 is the recommended starting point.