Makeup ramblings (on Dramageddon)

Поскольку эта площадка для всего подряд,  сделаю-ка сюда кросс-пост своего фейсбучного статуса на английском о разворачивающемся на ютьюбе Драмагеддоне (это будет мой второй или третий англоязычный пост). Поскольку  макияж и все, связанное с косметикой, всегда занимали довольно большую часть моей жизни, пройти мимо текущей ситуации и борьбы драма-фандомов я не могла.

Всю историю вопроса можно узнать, пройдя по ссылке.

So, here we go.

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Boy oh boy. As many of you presumably know, I have a guilty pleasure: I love watching beauty YouTube videos (makeup tutorials) in my spare time. A certain part of them can be genuinely educational, but mostly it’s fun to see young and pretty people’s random ramblings, while they are doing their makeup. 

Recently a whole new thing has evolved on the YouTube platform, which is broadly called a ‘drama community.’ The main purpose of their very existence is to ‘spill the hot tea, sis’ (which means to gossip about famous/not too famous beauty bloggers and their wrongdoings in the past or currently). Until now, that was a pretty minor thing: some individuals were dragged for their reckless and stupid remarks, and the high court of a Twitter/YouTube crowd judged/condemned them. It was called ‘cancel culture’: a disgraced person was put into oblivion and lost a certain amount of their subscribers.

A few days ago, a famous YouTuber (they are also called ‘YouTube gurus’, or beauty influencers) Tati Westbrook made a video, where she exposed another fellow YouTuber, her then friend James Charles (he calls himself ‘sister James’), whose platform at the time was the largest in the beauty community and counted more than 16 mln subscribers.

And here things are getting murky. Apparently, the main reason that Tati made her 40-minute long video, was JC’s lack of loyalty to her personally and to her vitamin brand ‘Halo beauty’ (TL;DR: during recent Coachella fest JC promoted on Snapchat Tati’s main rival, Sugar Bear Hair pills), whilst they were friends and she supported him wholeheartedly (based on her own words), so afterwards she felt betrayed. But then, later in the same video she made a statement, which transformed this whole silly thing into something much more serious: she blamed 19 year-old JC, who is openly gay, for stalking and grooming young straight men. She has mentioned in particular, how JC unsuccessfully tried to seduce a young waiter on her birthday party, and when she pointed out that the guy was straight, JC allegedly replied, that ‘it doesn’t matter, I am a celebrity.’

After Tati’s video has been released, within 3 days JC lost 3 million subscribers (and is still losing huge numbers of them), and this is an absolute record in the history of YouTube as a platform. Basically, JC has turned from a highly successful young millionaire, who had lots of collaborations with mega-makeup brands (such as ‘Covergirl’ and ‘Morphe’), into a disgraced pariah, and his allegedly questionable behaviour towards straight men is heavily discussed pretty much everywhere, including so-called ‘mainstream media’ (among them are the BBC, The Times, and The New Your Times). After everything happened, the case was called ‘Dramageddon’ and is a headline in all style/fashion news on all social media and news sources.

My take on it. I am shocked by the *real* influence of the social media here and also by the speed, with which different groups of people, young and mature, are ready to form a mob and to linch a random person, whom they had no clue about even a day or a week ago. It’s creepy and fascinating at the same time. I am watching this situation ‘live’ and I have to say: boy, do I want to be on the place of a ‘social influencer’! No, thank you. It’s damned.