Follower count: 5.38M YouTube subscribers, 8.2M Instagram followers, 1.2M TikTok followers
First year on YouTube: 2011
First video: A Kim Kardashian New Year’s Eve look that I had recreated from her cover of Glamour.
On pursuing content creation full-time: I had been on YouTube for over a year when I quit working at MAC. My mom was the only person that said, “I believe in you. If you think that you can do this, you can do this.” At that point I was making between $2,000 to $3,000 a month off of AdSense, which was big money to me. I thought, if I quit MAC, I know that I can throw myself into this community more and I can make more money. Everyone was like, $2,000 or $3,000 a month is not enough to support yourself. The month after I quit, I made $12,000 on YouTube.
On her first viral video: It was a smoky cat-eye tutorial and didn’t go viral for three or four months. I think it got 15,000 views, and a few months later I thought, oh my gosh, how did this video get to 70,000 views? Then it was 100,000 and it just kept going. I learned that Kylie Jenner posted a picture of my video on her Tumblr page with a link. This is when she was just known as the Kardashians’ little sister, she hadn’t popped off yet, but I thought that she was just so fun and young and cool. I think that video got 20 million views in the first year.
On the 2016 makeup tutorials she still follows: I still do my eyeliner the same exact way. Also, I used to always tell my audience, “do not make the fishy face” when you contour. I’ve always said you have to follow from the very top of your ear to your mouth. That’s where you want the shadow to be.
On how the industry has changed the most: It’s become very strategic. Back in the day when a product came out and it wasn’t good, all of us OGs would just be like, “This new lip gloss is not good. Don’t waste your money. Moving on.” Point-blank period. Now, if a really huge brand launches something, no one wants to give their honest, negative feedback because they’re like, “well, I want to work with that brand and I don’t want that brand to stop sending me PR.” I do wish that’s something we could really get back to, is people giving honest reviews
On what she misses the most about the early days of beauty YouTube: The love for makeup. I miss going to my subscription page on YouTube and being like, oh my gosh, four of my favorites all uploaded in the last 24 hours. It was like a TV show, because each video was 20 or 30 minutes long. I would be excited all day and I would know that it’s going to be absolutely no drama, no negativity, just makeup. I would be going through a lot of hard stuff in my personal life, but when I was watching beauty YouTube, none of that existed.
On what she doesn’t miss about the early days of YouTube: The pressure to post. There was such a small group of us and our audience loved us and it was such a privilege, but if you did not post… people were coming with pitchforks on Twitter. The demand was so intense, which was amazing, but also [high] pressure. I remember being so sick one time with the flu in my apartment and [thinking], I have to film, I have to post, because my audience was so upset with me.
