#ive watched the same tutorial 5 million times
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Im learning live2D and I'm going to be good at it immediately and not give up. Never kill uour eelf
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※ JENNA MARBLES SENTENCE STARTERS, PT. V ※
here’s sentences from 10 more of jenna’s videos! feel free to change names/pronouns/zodiac signs/etc.! I • II • III • IV
OPPOSITE CONTOUR TUTORIAL
“What’re you gonna do…?”
“It’s fun for me…!”
“This does exist on the Internet, and it looks amazing.”
“I’m a professional.”
“I can see up your shorts.”
“I’m just gonna get started here.”
“I’m getting mindfucked already.”
“My cheeks don’t look broken, my nose looks broken.”
“You’re already looking mad fucked.”
“Well, finally, the outside matches the inside. Broken, beaten down, sad, tired, mad fucked.”
“Don’t judge me, okay?”
“I look like Voldemort.”
“Please ignore all of his Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie jokes from a decade ago.”
“I look like an amphibian that belongs in a river.”
“Oh, no, Jenna…”
“I thought you’d be a little more open-minded.”
“Don’t look at me directly, no, don’t…!”
“It’s looking like day 3 or 4 after a bad sunburn.”
“You calling me dirty?”
“Who you calling dirty, daddy?”
“I look like my father.”
“I think it looks good.”
“We went off-roading for dick, and we found it.”
“I thought this was gonna be a little more dramatic than it is.”
HOW MANY BALLOONS WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE MY DOG FLY
“I mean, I’m curious, aren’t you?”
“I love my dogs more than I love people.”
“I wanna see how many balloons it will take to lift Marbles off the ground.”
“You gon’ fly, boy.”
“Let’s start with 10 and see if we can fit them in the car.”
“We have a lot of balloons already, I don’t know how many more we need.”
“His feelings are very hurt by that.”
“It takes 72 balloons to get this off the ground.”
“Welcome to our new living room, it consists only of happy birthday balloons.”
“Are you ready to take flight?”
“The people at Party City hate us.”
“He doesn’t even care.”
“He doesn’t know where he is no matter what.”
“We really thought this was only gonna take 15 balloons.”
“It took us six car fulls of balloons.”
“Is he asleep in space?”
“He does not give a fuck.”
“I did not think he was gonna be this chill.”
“He’s asleep. He’s fucking asleep.”
“Alright, well, this is our dog, now.”
“There’s not much else to do.”
“This is too many balloons.”
“I was happy, bitch.”
“I’m too old for this shit.”
“You’ve been dealing with me for 8 years, you’re a very patient guy, you know that?”
“I hope that this brightens your day a little, because it brightened mine.”
“What a fucking mistake this was.”
“I’ll never let go. Just kidding, I’m letting go.”
“Well, this was stupid.”
GOOGLE DEEP DIVE WITH ME
“So I’m having one of those days where I can’t make a good thought if I tried to think it.”
“This is all I do, which is why I’m so fucked up.”
“You just start googling things and watching videos and clicking on things until you just don’t know where you are anymore.”
“See, that’s what the fuck I’m talking about.”
“This is like my pet peeve in life.”
“Oh, this fucks me up.”
“God, I’m so fucking turned on right now.”
“Okay, that’s actually highkey dope.”
“Here it is, my favorite picture of Kylie Jenner.”
“This is so fucked up.”
“The Internet is fucking brutal.”
“Happy Australia Day, y’all are nasty.”
“If breastmilk is vegan, why hasn’t someone opened a booby cheese café?”
“Whole Foods ain’t that weird.”
“What’s the word for this? No.”
“Stop putting your boobs in my mouth.”
“Where is he going!?”
“This is like, highkey beautiful.”
“That is lazy as shit.”
“Why don’t you smoke a blunt while you’re at it?”
“It’s only $649, to be the laziest fuck you’ll ever meet.”
“She got all the way to the park to do that…?”
“This is the single dumbest thing that costs 600 dollars.”
“Exercise is free, don’t you ever forget it!”
“She’s dead inside.”
“Hello, 911, there’s a lady walking around, she’s terrifying…!”
“Wait, what the fuck is a zorilla!?”
“It’s like a gorilla, but it’s a fucking skunk.”
“Is this everything you hoped for?”
“I’ve never been happier.”
“Look at how many Air Buds there are!”
“So how many dogs are Air Bud?”
“Damn, I forgot how good Air Bud was.”
“That is the same person…!”
“I’m actually crying.”
“There’s literally no way that’s all Julia Roberts.”
“My head hurts. I have a headache now.”
DOING MY MOM’S MAKEUP
“Have you ever gotten your makeup done before?”
“I’m beginning to wonder why I said yes.”
“Step one of getting ready is just don’t have bangs.”
“That brush is sharp.”
“He actually wanted to die.”
“What, are you tired already?”
“I don’t have any blush, so I’ll just rub this dirty brush on your face.”
“You look like J-Lo reborn.”
“Have you ever been so illuminated in your life?”
“You look like a new woman already.”
“I just got insulted in my own salon.”
“If you didn’t want shit on your face, you shouldn’t have agreed to this.”
“You’re looking like a million bucks already.”
“Do you trust me? You shouldn’t.”
“Isn’t this the worst?”
“Drink away your fear of looking beautiful.”
“It sounds nothing like The Police!”
“I know you can’t see, and you think I’m massacring your face right now, but you look cute as fuck.”
“Farther away is better.”
“If you’re scared of eyeliner, drag makeup isn’t for you.”
“We’re off to Walgreens.”
I SUCK AT VIDEO GAMES 4
“Julien is here, mostly to laugh at me.”
“Who would’ve thought that you actually had to do something?”
“I did it. It only took me three minutes but I did it.”
“I’ve never laughed at a pun out of anything other than a courtesy.”
“Stop making everything about aliens.”
“Here I come to fuck yo bitch.”
“You know it’s my dream to make a Twitter account talking nothing but trash to NASA 24/7.”
“There is no 5-second rule. If you drop something, you just fucking eat it at your own free will.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I think you can eat food off of the ground.”
“Goodbye everybody. Goodbye everybody. Goodbye everybody!”
“I like to fuck all day, forever.”
“Guys, I don’t have a job, I just fuck for a living.”
“Look at these sick moves.”
“Damn, is my family annoying.”
“I would be the most talented male stripper the world has ever seen.”
“Why can’t I shoot my gun underwater?”
QUADRUPLE DOG SWEATER
“He thinks that Cher, Shakira, and Celine Dion all have the same voice.”
“He thinks that Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, and Sandra Bullock are the same person.”
“It’s trash and garbage and why would I ever see it?”
“It’s a trash movie and he thinks it’s a cinematic masterpiece.”
“I looked for it on the Internet, and it doesn’t exist.”
“Watch out, kids, because when you turn 30, all you’re gonna wanna do is craft.”
“I wanna do it all the way out, and not in a practical way.”
“I want it to exist.”
“They are so tolerant of my fucking bullshit.”
“This is gonna be a disaster.”
“This is so much harder than I had anticipated.”
“This is a fucking mess, a fuckshow of an idea.”
“Goddamnit, this doesn’t work at all!”
“That’s a different email than you gave earlier, and a song.”
“I did it, I’m so proud of myself!”
“Oh my god, you are so mean.”
“If this doesn’t get me in the Guinness Book of World Records, nothing will.”
“Don’t do this, this is a bad idea, but I’m glad I did.”
SEE YOU IN 2017
“I hope you guys are having a great holiday.”
“I want to say thank you so much.”
“We had a really, really wonderful time.”
“Me in all of my beautiful, everyday glory.”
“We got a leak in the ceiling, very dangerous, very fun.”
“I organized my spice cabinet.”
“I went to the grocery store and held hands with my boyfriend, it was great.”
“This dumpster fire of a year is almost over.”
EXTRAS 2016
“I’m gonna pee my pants.”
“Never say that again.”
“I just want everyone to know this video has been the highlight of my life.”
“I can’t feel my eyes.”
“It burns.”
“Nothing like being fully clothed in your bathtub.”
“She looks like she just did a bunch of steroids.”
“I can see your hands in my periphery.”
“It’s like, never not funny.”
BODY MASSAGE
“I want a body massage.”
“Who wants a body massage?”
“Everybody likes a body massage.”
“It doesn’t have to be a sexual massage.”
“I mean, you guys were asking for it.”
“I make shit like this every week.”
CHRISTMAS GLITTER BEARD DIY
“I don’t ever wanna have a goatee.”
“Why are we doing the goatee?”
“We’re having fun, it’s Christmas.”
“If you’re gonna have that kinda attitude here, then get out.”
“Wow, I hate it.”
“I can’t do your makeup when you’re staring into the abyss.”
“You’re putting that on my face?”
“Oh, god, there’s glue on my face.”
“I’m divorcing you.”
“We’re not married…!”
“Maybe we should cross that shitty, stupid bridge when it comes.”
“Where I am on the moisture spectrum is my business and my business alone.”
“Don’t choke me, don’t choke me.”
“Choke me, choke me…!”
“For real though, is this gonna come off?”
“It looks like, all of a sudden, you just started feeling yourself.”
“Who describes their own penis as chunky?”
“Let us write your Grindr profile.”
“No, please no.”
“I look like I just got beat up.”
“You actually just made me Halloween Santa.”
“You look fucking terrifying.”
“This is not what I wanted at all.”
“I made a terrible mistake.”
“You look so festive…!”
“Don’t, you’re gonna make a mess…!”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I look like I just finished killing someone.”
“Meet me outside and kill me please.”
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I Am Writing a Book. And Yes, I’m Freaked Out.
You always hear about people having deep life-realizations that change the course of their lives, but somehow you just don’t expect your biggest epiphany to come upon you in Jerry’s Deli.
When my mom got cancer, I took it personally.
I took the gruesome death sentence that was projected upon my only parent.
I took the nights watching her tossing in a hospital bed doped up on morphine.
I took the fear of death and endings and I tucked them into bed with me every night. I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. To her. To all of us.
I was angry. I was terrified. I felt like I was walking on a very slippery tight-rope that someone had taken the time to oil carefully as a cosmic joke, just to watch how we dealt with it.
The truth is, mom was walking on that tight rope, but I followed her onto it, terrified to lose her in the abyss below, knowing all the while that I did not actually have the power to stop that from happening.
There was a night early on in our cancer journey when my boyfriend insisted I leave the hospital to eat dinner. I had been sleeping on a cot in a corner of the hideous beige room for over a week and had literally not left the premises once at this point, convinced that my mere presence was helping avert any further disaster.
My sister agreed with him and unceremoniously shoved me out the door. The restaurant in question was just across the street, but that was of zero comfort to me. I told my sister to call me if anything changed during the 90 minutes I would be gone. (It is possible that I am the ultimate control freak.)
I sat at dinner. I didn’t eat. My leg kept twitching. This had been happening for a while now, but I had been too preoccupied to analyze what that meant.
I moved the food around on my plate. I went down my mental list of worries. And then… I looked around, finally noticing the fact that there were other people scattered around the tables in the restaurant.
It was just after Christmas. That time of year in LA when people are still aimlessly hanging out in different bars and restaurants and getting together with their friends. It’s almost New Year. A new beginning is coming. Most industries here are still closed down. People are happy…ish. They are laughing in their black leather jackets. Twinkle lights are hanging in random nooks and crannies looking mildly drunk, much like the people who are sitting next to them, people congratulating themselves on surviving another holiday season chockfull of dysfunctional families.
And there I was, watching them from a red leather booth, feeling like I was 100,000 miles away, wondering if I would ever feel “normal” again.
Nothing felt like it mattered.
Not really.
The things I was usually preoccupied with were the usual sort of things. Career stresses suddenly seemed like they were from another lifetime.
Money, which had always been a particularly sore subject for me during the best and worst of times was almost a joke at this point, seeing as our stay in the hospital was sure to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that my family simply did not have. (Fun fact: The bills added up to well over a million.)
All my noisiest concerns were slipping down some faraway river and I was watching them drift by with mild interest.
It all seemed so irrelevant.
It was almost funny.
You always hear about people having deep life-realizations that change the course of their lives, but somehow you just don’t expect your biggest epiphany to come upon you in Jerry’s Deli. But there it was, and I was watching the stressed-out waitress absent-mindedly pour me some terrible coffee when my epiphany arrived:
Nothing mattered.
It felt a bit more like a balloon deflating, and a bit less like the clash of thunder I would have expected for such a moment.
All sound effects aside, the bottom line was that I suddenly realized that absolutely nothing mattered if the people I cared about were alive and healthy.
Everything else that had ever weighed on me in my entire life suddenly seemed so fixable.
Possible. Tiny. Idiotic.
It was like I had just learned the punchline to some horrible universal joke, and the other side was empty.
So I laughed.
Out loud.
You know… like a crazy person.
My boyfriend gave me a nervous look. The poor guy hadn’t gotten a tutorial for this situation anymore than I did. He had remained silent to most of my knee-jerk reactions lately. I didn’t blame him.
The rest of the night is a blur, but I vaguely remember hoping that the Deli Epiphany of 2013 would not leave me, and that I would be able to maintain this grand evolutionary perspective, and take on the rest of my life without fear.
My gut, in its own nonchalant kind of way was telling me that if I could maintain it, and if by some miracle, my mother “stayed ok” that this new way of life would be very freeing of all the anxiety I used to feel over the most menial of issues.
That night was years ago now.
In the past few years, I watched my mom’s cancer return.
I moved to a place where cancer patients go to live and where cancer patients go to die.
I got to know their families and their children, and we laughed together.
I cried with them later, when we lost their people, and I cried with them later, when their people healed from the monster that we all knew so well.
I learned that compassion is not what I thought it was.
When you are literally massaging the physical tumors of someone you have known for three months, and you feel like your heart is going to explode from the amount of pain you feel as you are doing so, you realize that we are all exactly the same.
And really, we are terribly fragile.
Bad fights with my mother have hit harder than ever, and in a different way - because even while we were snapping at each other, I knew that this could be one of the last times I would have the luxury of arguing with my mom.
I watched a very close friend die slowly.
I listened to her as two days before she left this world, despite all the pain she was in and the way her body had shriveled up like a tiny decaying leaf, she whispered to me that she felt so blessed to have people who love her so much around her, trying to help in any way they can.
I held her hand as she told me that she knew it was time to die, and she was ok with it.
I then drove to a different hospital to watch my mom turn uncomfortably in yet another hospital bed, hoping against hope that her next MRI scan would not show us any new “visitors.”
I have given speeches at funerals, without knowing what to say.
I have met 17-year-olds with brain tumors who were just trying to finish their schooling.
I talked with a man as he held his 3-year-old daughter who was suffering from Leukemia and weighed close to nothing. Her bald skull was shiny, her eyes wide in her face. She leaned her head on his shoulder as he spoke calmly with me, throwing out medical terms that we were both too familiar with.
His eyes were screaming. I knew that look. I felt that look.
I took a phone call a month later from someone who told me the little girl was now dead.
I still think of his eyes.
In the past few years, I have thought a lot about the meaning of life and death, and while this would be a perfect time to throw some beautiful words at you from Rumi and the greats, the truth is I have no answers. I don’t know why things are so unfair and impossible.
My mom getting cancer, and then getting “terminal cancer,” changed my life in many ways.
Cancer does that. We know. But it also changed me in a way I could not anticipate.
It made my life better.
I hate saying that.
I literally felt a wave of revulsion pass through me as I typed those words.
But I cannot deny that it is true.
When I decided to write my book, I decided to be honest. And the truth is that I had no idea what was important in life before the monster came knocking on my family’s door. I thought I did. I was awesome at thinking that I did. I could have given you lists, peppered with the right inspirational quotes and clever phrases about what was important.
But I was full of shit.
I thought I was good at losing people. At missing them. I had lost my dad at an early age. I lost one of my best friends to a motorcycle accident when I was a teenager. I lived in a country overrun by terror. I have worn gas masks in bomb shelters and been around a fair share of terrible things that made me appreciate the good things, or so I thought.
Nothing changed my life the way that this did.
So now what?
What do you do when you have this experience? What do you do when you are literally given a miracle?
As of 2017, only 1% of people who are diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer are alive after 5 years.
Bile-Duct cancer sees similar numbers.
What do you do when you are the miracle?
You get overwhelmed, sure. You feel small. You get angry because the others should have a chance as well. You reach out when people fighting the same monster come into your life, because you know that this kind of fear and uncertainty is something no one should have to go through without a support system.
And if you are me, you start noticing a voice in your head that is repeating: Write down the story. Write down the story.
Because it is…. quite the story.
It is the story of how my mom got diagnosed with one of cancer’s most aggressive offerings. It is the story of how we ended up in an excellent hospital on Christmas Eve even though she had no medical insurance. It is the story of how she got an operation that most people are not even eligible for, and it is the story of how after all of this, after we came home and thought we might be lucky enough to experience “normal” again, I got a phone call telling me that I would now have to tell my mother “they” thought she had 6 months left to live.
Most importantly - it is the story of how she lived.
#cancer#pancreatic cancer#alternative#rivi litvin#alternative medicine#bile duct cancer#true story#real life#no chemo#miracles#shadow of cancer#cholangiocarcinoma
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Step Inside the YouTube-Fueled, Teenaged Extravaganza That Is Beautycon
Taylor is 14 but a young 14, with the poreless face of an American Girl doll. Her hair is sandy blond and parted down the middle. She is smart but not savvy beyond her years, with the quiet confidence that educators seek when they speak of getting girls into soccer or STEM. She talks like someone who is certain of what she knows but who hasnt yet realized the vastness of what she doesnt. For this reason, I trust Taylor entirely as she lays out the details of the online beauty scene, a teen subculture as sprawling as it is potentially valuable.
Im into singersSelena Gomez, Taylor Swiftbut YouTube is a different category. Its not something you were hired for, its not something you were born intoits something you do for a passion.
Taylors own passion, at least for now, is YouTube star Tana Mongeau. I first came into contact with Taylor on Twitter last summer when I was looking for teens who could help unpack Tanas appeal. Tana is 18, lives in Las Vegas, has produced more than 130 videos about everything from how she does her makeup in the morning to boyfriends to pumpkin spice to racismand has 2.1 million subscribers on YouTube. The only thing Taylor might love more than Tana is God. Her timeline is one half retweets from The Gospel Daily, the other half pleas for Tanas attention:
RT @The_Gospels: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, & the love of God, & the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. -2Cor 13:14
#ISupportTanaBecause she supports us. everyday. in everything we do. we are family and always got each others back. <3
When I first talked to Taylor she was preparing to start high school near her home in Washington state, though that was hardly the biggest event in her near future. Her mom had booked a trip to Beautycon LA, an event for the online beauty scene, where Tana would soon appear alongside other beauty-scene YouTube stars. These stars respond to myriad namescreators, influencers, beauty gurus, the talenttitles that convey their indeterminate fame, as well their receptiveness to both marketing and being marketed. Most of them produce extensive and often mesmerizing makeup tutorials on YouTube, plus brand-sponsored posts across other social platforms. Taylor was looking forward to meeting Tana face-to-face after months of following her online.
On the morning of Beautycon, Taylor texts me a photo so I will know who to look for in the sea of other teens. When I find her in line for the official Tana meetup, she looks shell-shocked with joyand wears hardly any makeup.
Im going to put the pictures from today on my wall, she explains. So I want to look more like my actual self. Ive heard similar logic applied to weddings, graduations, and other milestones to be photographed for posterity. For teens like Taylor whove made it to Beautycon, it isnt a stretch to say today feels as momentous.
Slide: 1 / of 10. Caption: Caption: Beauty vlogger Alan Macias (@alannized) at Beautycon LA last year.Angie Smith
Slide: 2 / of 10. Caption: Caption: Women sample makeup at Beautycon LA in a space set up to look like a classroom.Angie Smith
Slide: 3 / of 10. Caption: Caption: YouTuber Tana Mongeau and Taylor, at Tana’s first meetup.Angie Smith
Slide: 4 / of 10. Caption: Caption: YouTube star Jenn Im backstage at Beautycon.Angie Smith
Slide: 5 / of 10. Caption: Caption: Beautycon CEO Moj Mahdara (left) with Tyra Banks (center).Angie Smith
Slide: 6 / of 10. Caption: Caption: A woman tests lipstick colors on her wrist Beautycon LA.Joshua Kolden
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Slide: 7 / of 10. Caption: Caption: A make-up artist applies mascara to a Beautycon attendee. Joshua Kolden
Slide: 8 / of 10. Caption: Caption: Naturally, displays of cosmetics are everywhere at Beautycon.Joshua Kolden
Slide: 9 / of 10. Caption: Caption: A make-up artist applies eye shadow at Beautycon LA. Also, green poofs seem to be a thing.Joshua Kolden
Slide: 10 / of 10. Caption: Caption: A line of attendees waiting to enter Beautycon LA on opening day.Joshua Kolden
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Slide: 1 / of 10 Caption: Caption: Beauty vlogger Alan Macias (@alannized) at Beautycon LA last year.Angie Smith
Slide: 2 / of 10 Caption: Caption: Women sample makeup at Beautycon LA in a space set up to look like a classroom.Angie Smith
Slide: 3 / of 10 Caption: Caption: YouTuber Tana Mongeau and Taylor, at Tana’s first meetup.Angie Smith
Slide: 4 / of 10 Caption: Caption: YouTube star Jenn Im backstage at Beautycon.Angie Smith
Slide: 5 / of 10 Caption: Caption: Beautycon CEO Moj Mahdara (left) with Tyra Banks (center).Angie Smith
Slide: 6 / of 10 Caption: Caption: A woman tests lipstick colors on her wrist Beautycon LA.Joshua Kolden
Slide: 7 / of 10 Caption: Caption: A make-up artist applies mascara to a Beautycon attendee. Joshua Kolden
Slide: 8 / of 10 Caption: Caption: Naturally, displays of cosmetics are everywhere at Beautycon.Joshua Kolden
Slide: 9 / of 10 Caption: Caption: A make-up artist applies eye shadow at Beautycon LA. Also, green poofs seem to be a thing.Joshua Kolden
Slide: 10 / of 10 Caption: Caption: A line of attendees waiting to enter Beautycon LA on opening day.Joshua Kolden
Related Galleries
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10
In the beginning, like 2011, Beautycon was launched as a trade show for YouTube creators, though creators back then were mostly one and the same as fans. As growth and legitimacy began separating the groups, the event caught the eye of investor Moj Mahdara, who took a stake in the company in 2013. A year later she transitioned to the role of CEO and saw potential for something bigger than a trade show. In a 2015 interview with Fast Company, she imagined a far-reaching brandVice Media for a 16- to 24-year-old girl. That target market has since stretched to include boys who can contour, gender-fluid teens, women of a certain age, and, as she puts it, anyone who loves to feel great about themselves.
Beautycon Media today is one part Coachella, one part Sephora, and one part (or more) a consulting firm for brands that are thirsty for access to this slippery generation. The enterprise now includes Beautycon Box (a cosmetics service), Beautycon Digital (a social-first editorial platform), and one-day festivals in LA, London, New York, Dallas, and Dubai.
These festivals boast pop-up shops and live tutorials but advertise the creators as the main event. Few of the YouTubers headlining Beautycon LA lay claim to their own Wikipedia page nor a single piece of coverage in a mainstream publication. The only real way to crack their biographies is by stalking their posts across social media or watching hundreds of hours of YouTube. Despite such inscrutability to even an interested adult, Beautycon LA claimed 15,000 guests this year. Thats 8,000 more than in 2015, and 10,000 more than the year before that.
All across the halls, vendors are running schemes to goad guests into online engagement.
In the morning before Beautycon opens to the public, my ride drops me off at the foot of the LA Convention Center. Through the doors, a blush-colored banner portends the tone for the day: You dont need lipstick, lipstick needs you. This years festival is taking place in West Halls A and Baround 200,000 square feet in all. Admission starts at $19.99 and scales quickly to the VIP Total Packagea $299.99 extravaganza with early-entry brunch and professional hair and makeup.
Already the premium ticketholders are milling. All across the halls vendors are running schemes to goad guests into online engagement. The simplest offers a small bribe, like a lip gloss, in exchange for a like or follow. Other brands have arranged Instagrammable backdrops in the hope that fans might pose and post. The booth for Conscious Period organic tampons is decked with pink toilet tissue, a golden toilet, and pink mock graffiti that reads: Dont go with the flow.
On a long pink carpet at the front of the hall, the talent are arriving and granting interviews to YouTube-only outlets like CelebSecretsTV. If they have anything in common, its flawless contour makeup. Diversity happened naturally at Beautycon from the start. YouTube, as a platform, has low barriers to entry, which benefits groups long shunned by old media. Success on the site doesnt demand a certain look or a vast network of well-connected friends. The day before, at Beautycon headquarters in Hollywood, Mahdara had made it clear: Im not trying to change anything. Im just trying to reflect the time in which we live. The gay daughter of Iranian immigrants, she explained, I can relate to feeling like I dont fit in. Not marketed to, written off for being a certain size, shape, gender preferencea million things.
Beautycon is not an IRL event with an incidental web presence, nor is it the offline extension of an online community; its both.
Soon after the festival opens to the public, the lines on the floor grow so knotted that I eventually lose sight of where each ends. Through periodic polling of queued-up teens, I catch wind of free lotion at QVC, free hand massages at the booth for Yes to Carrots, and a meet-and-greet event with Justin Biebers ex-girlfriend hosted by a cotton-ball brand. Bored and lost moms mill about holding skewers, licked clean of the mock chicken being proffered by Gardein.
I pause for a moment at the edge of the music stage to watch the Vine-famous Nebraskan pop-rap duo Jack & Jack. The pit is packed, but the crowd stands still, shooting steady footage with phones in the air. Beautycon plays out on a digital stage as much as it does inside the convention center. When I spoke to Taylor before the festival, she outlined her social media strategy for the daya cross-platform plan of near-professional caliber. Beautycon is not an IRL event with an incidental web presence, nor is it the offline extension of an online community; its both, though the fans seem unbothered by such distinctions.
Leaving the stage, I spot musician Courtney Love walking casually across the floor, unnoticed. Many Beautycon fans were born not only after Kurt died but after the 2002 break-up of Hole. What eludes them isnt just the context of her fame but possibly her category of celebrity in general.
Stephanie Szerlip for WIRED
YouTube creator meetups are scheduled in hour-long blocks throughout the day. Tana is one of the few with two solo meetups, and the line for her first is overflowing its corral. A girl holds a glue-sticked poster: Your superhero wears a cape, mine wears mac honey love lipstick.
Taylor is close to the front, feet from the chair where Tana will sit. As we wait, she shows me a framed poem she wroteentitled An Influencethat includes sweet (if dystopian) couplets like: An environment which provides a positive escape / Through a false world that reality shaped.The poem is signed, God Bless, Taylor.
The online beauty scene, for Taylor, is less about the makeup than following creators as one might General Hospital. Perhaps this is why she loves Tana Mongeau. Tana doesnt claim any beauty expertise (and sometimes she actively rejects it). Her videos take the form of ebullient monologues, looping from silly into serious back to crass. Taylor calls Tana a storytime YouTuber. She communicates with fans like theyre up late at a sleepover, giddy from sugar, swapping racy stories. In I Talk About Drinking and Smoking, for instance, she faces the camera in an oversize T-shirt, mocking the squeaky-clean tone of beauty YouTube, before mocking herself for a former crush on Lil Wayne. She delivers an update on I Dated a Fuckboyan earlier tale of a duplicitous suitor, which unfortunately was shared with the fuckboy himself. She reassures her fans: Im never gonna not tell raw-ass stories from my life. What comes next is an exegesis on the Kylie Jenner Lip Kit, which segues naturally into heartfelt reflection on mass shootings. (Dont you see this pattern?) Over the course of 10 and a half minutes, shes funny and rude and confused and compassionate and the hundred other feelings that tangle the teen brain. She presents herself as wise but still flawed, ever reminding viewers to Like and Subscribe. Together, day by day, theyll untangle adolescence.
Shes created such a positive environment on the internet, Taylor tells me. To the point where the amount of interaction with her following has really made it feel like more of a family.
Stephanie Szerlip for WIRED
To keep tabs on the movement of creators around the festival, Ive switched on Twitter alerts, per Taylors advice. My phone flickers constantly, annotating reality. Phone charging stations, scattered about the hall, overflow with Medusas of commonly used cords. I stop to plug in beside two older women, markedly out of place for their lack of a teen. They tell me they work in high-end cosmetics and have come to Beautycon on an espionage mission to solve their own issues reaching Generation Z.
An entry-level full-time influencer with a few million followers can expect to be paid like a low-level teacher—between $20,000 and $40,000 a year.
With a good deal of eye-rolling, they recount their brands failed attempt at a meetup with a YouTube star at a shopping center. Theyd booked the creator for a Friday afternoon, a time when parents were still at work. Without rides or cash, the teens didnt show. According to the pair of industry spies, the lesson to be learned was that creators cant sell.
In the backstage lounge, some brand reps still have hope as they dump free product on whoever will accept. Creators load up on five brands of mascara; hair extensions and blow-dryers overflow from free totes. An overwhelmed bag-check guy struggles to stow it all, wading through what must be a cool million in makeup. The hope of the reps is free exposure, though a likelier outcome is a deal for sponsored contentpaying a creator to film an endorsement. The past half decade has seen a Wild West of spon-con, with brands throwing money at anyone with followers, a desperate plea to reach the youngest consumers. As this strategy has begun to bear middling returns, the metric of choice has shifted to engagementa creators ability to move fans to interact. Whats called family on the main floor is a target market backstage.
According to Tanas manager, Jordan Worona, an entry-level full-time influencer with a few million followers can expect to be paid like a low-level teacherbetween $20,000 and $40,000 a year. Worona lost interest in managing Hollywood talent when he realized the extent to which YouTube was still in flux. The trajectory of the career is still being developed, he says. Everyone is making the rules up as they go. You could work, right now, with the top influencers in the world. If you were an acting agent, you would have to wait 10, 15, 20 years before you would have some of the top talent.
Tana isnt exactly brand-safe. She swears a lot. Her most-viewed videos have titles like Crazy Bitch in Target and I Got Banged With a Toothbrush.
On YouTube, the top is often still fleeting. Creators rise to fame under viral conditions, then fade into obscurity in the span of a year. Creators who stick around are well poised for big payouts, though hard stats are mythic and can often be misleading. Theres a rumor that PewDiePie, who had the highest number of YouTube subscribers last year, made $12million in 2015.
Thats like Tana times 100, Worona says wistfully (though he wont say specifically what she makes). He watched Tana from afar for two months, waiting for the growth of her audience to slow. It hasnt yet. As her manager, his goal is to prolong that growth and assemble a career path thats sustainable, like personalized merchandise and touring. Besides, Tana isnt exactly what he calls brand-safe. She swears a lot. Her most-viewed videos have titles like Crazy Bitch in Target and I Got Banged With a Toothbrush. She goes eagerly on record in support of Black Lives Matter and other touchy issues that make brands run in fear. In a world of vetted and sanitized teen content, she is frank and plainspoken and what fans always call real. Taylor says it isnt the edgy content that keeps her watching, but Tanas openness and willingness to speak whats on her mind. Shes a role model, for sure, but she isnt a Role Model. When Worona solicits new opportunities, he most often compares her to Chelsea Handler or Joan Rivers. When all else fails, he talks in marketing hyperbole: I mean, this is the girl who, on a monthly basis, is getting views that American Idol got.
Stephanie Szerlip for WIRED
The fans in Tanas meetup line are peeking through the curtain, hoping to glimpse her backstage. A security guard asks me who everyone is here for, and I struggle to explain how and why she is famous. Taylor smooths and resmooths her hair in anticipation, whispering to nobody, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. After a few beats Tana emerges, her minidress laced all the way down the front. The effect is somehow more wholesome than it soundsthink cool best friend of your older sister. Its easy to imagine her climbing out a window to go drink light beer at a party. She waves to the crowd with exuberance, and Im extra-journalistically overcome with a desire for her to like me. As the meetup begins, fans approach one by one, presenting their gifts and posing for photos. You might imagine this as stilted or formal, but Tana makes brace-faced middle schoolers seem positively carefree. She sings Happy Birthday to the camera for their friends, promises to follow them back on Twitter, and ends many of the meetups with an outright I love you. It does not sound like promo-speak when Worona tells me she could do this every day.
Taylor directs her mom on how to shoot video. When its her turn, she rushes Tana with a hug, then carefully steps back to present her with the poem. They establish the fast intimacy of two women in a bar bathroom, all drawn-out vowels and overemphatic gestures. Tana takes the framed poem in her hands, studies the text, and seems authentically touched.
Do you want to be in my vlog? she asks.
They squeeze into the frame of the camera, and Tana speaks naturally to an invisible audience.
Hi, Im here with Taylor and she came all the way from Washington.
Taylor, less practiced, compliments Tana in the third person. Shes so amazing!
The two say I love you, and Taylor exits the stall, retrieving her phone from her mom on the way out. Tana greets her next fan with a familiar Yaaaaas!
Stephanie Szerlip for WIRED
The cheapest read on Tana Mongeaus success is that shes famous for being famous. She doesnt sing or act or dance or otherwise exhibit any nameable skill we traditionally expect to justify stardom. Shes not even all that focused on makeup. In the case of a Hollywood star, fans accumulate as the byproduct of work; fan relations necessarily come second. You and I wont likely meet Brad Pitt, and even if we do, we cant ever truly meet him. Tabloid reputation, casting, PR spin, and velvet rope all help ensure the relationship stays distant. Such distance is likely to improve Pitts career, driving up interest through scarcity of information.
By offering their lives up for constant consumption, and closing the gap between fandom and stardom, a creator attracts and earns trust from their fans.
But even if Pitt did want to get closer, its unlikely hed be able to actually pull it off. Hes busy shooting movies, getting divorced, whatever else. YouTube stars, by contrast, arent busy with anything. They have little real work outside of fan relations, which isnt to suggest that they are without talent. Famous for being famous is a constellation of soft skills not easily described by a single-word title. By offering their lives up for constant consumption, and closing the gap between fandom and stardom, a creator attracts and earns trust from their fans, who rally around them as a communal touchstone. Tanas talent is cultivating an online sense of closeness and managing the flow of interaction to sustain it. Too much interaction and she floods her market; too little and she risks seeming distant.
Stephanie Szerlip for WIRED
Before leaving the festival I visit the main stage to watch Tana appear on the #True2You panel. The YouTube creators strut onstage in a burst of confetti, filming the crowd with their phones as they walk. Taylor is sitting in the very first row, still beaming. The stars discuss everything from ignoring the haters to the importance of love and the best Snapchat filters. The message, in the end, is to always stay positive, live with love, and be true to yourself. Ive forgotten the festival was ever about makeup.
Taylor would later tell me that the best part of Beautycon was during the panel, when Tana mouthed I love you from the stage. In the week after the festival, as she waited to start high school, Taylor would tweet at Tana 570 times. She would also retweet The Gospel Daily:
RT @The_Gospels: Hear my prayer, God. Dont hide from my request. Pay attention to me and respond to me. Psalm 55:1-2
Tana, in the end, would fave two of the tweets.
Jamie Lauren Keiles (@jamiekeiles) is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
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from Step Inside the YouTube-Fueled, Teenaged Extravaganza That Is Beautycon
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