The Tutorial: Makeup Lessons Move to YouTube

For most of the twentieth century a woman who wanted to be shown how to do her face went to a counter, where someone paid by the maker showed her. By the end of the 2000s she could watch a stranger do it in a bathroom, as often as she liked, and stop the lesson whenever she wanted.

In August 2009 a Florida newspaper went to meet one of those strangers. She was twenty-two, an art student, and, in her own words, “Two hundred thousand people want my advice.”^[1]

Michelle Phan had been blogging since she was sixteen. She made her first makeup video in May 2007, casually, for friends.^[2] Her own later account was that readers of her personal blog had asked for a tutorial on achieving a natural look: “I decided to create a video tutorial instead, and it’s been a hit ever since.”^[3]

She filmed on a JVC camcorder and edited on a MacBook Pro, huddled in her bathroom or sitting on her porch, and her videos covered a purple hazy look, makeup for glasses and a double-winged eyeliner.^[2][3] At the beginning of 2009 she gave up her job at a sushi restaurant to concentrate on them.^[2]

By August 2009 her channel had 230,000 subscribers, 18,000 people followed her on Twitter, and one video, demonstrating the eye makeup of the singer Lady Gaga, had been clicked six million times. She was a YouTube partner, paid for the advertising shown with her videos, and the money supported her and covered her tuition at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.^[4]

Nine months later Vanity Fair counted 95 videos, some 150 million views and more than 690,000 subscribers, and called her the most subscribed makeup guru on YouTube.^[5] Her audience had trebled in nine months.

She was not alone. The newspaper described her as “a mother hen to a burgeoning crew of outlaw makeup tutors — ‘gurus,’ they’re called, popping up in droves this year alone,” and noted that other video bloggers had begun to spoof her.^[6]

What the gurus offered was the lesson and the verdict together. Phan went undercover to drugstores to review makeup and said so when a product made her break out or turn orange; she accepted samples, she said, but never took money to endorse anything. “I buy my own products,” she said. “If I don’t like it, I’m not going to show it.” Her commenters, the paper reported, called her the Bob Ross of makeup.^[6]

A tutorial teaches an order. It shows a whole face made in sequence, at the pace of the person making it, with the products named as they are picked up. Phan’s advice was practical and exact. For eyes drawn after anime, “lining your waterline with white will give you an appearance of larger-looking eyes”; for a look built of small black dots, start at the outer corner and work inwards — “Using Sephora’s liquid eyeliner, do a few practice strokes on the back of your hand.”^[8]

The face she taught was not a single ideal. She told the newspaper that she had once wanted to look “more Caucasian,” and the paper listed “dark black skin with purple tones, snow white cheeks, prominent European noses” among the things she now found beautiful.^[8] The form allowed for that. A counter sold one maker’s products; a tutorial could use anyone’s, on anyone.

The industry noticed. Phan had once applied for a part-time job at a Lancôme counter in a department store and had not got it. In February 2010, after its executives saw videos in which she happened to use the brand’s products, Lancôme signed her as its official video makeup artist.^[9] She was to make one video a month featuring a new look with Lancôme products, and was free to go on making her own with other brands; one fashion site called it “the first contract of its kind for a YouTuber.”^[10]

That is the decade’s change in small. The counter had been where the maker taught the customer. By 2010 the maker was hiring a customer who had taught herself, to teach everyone else on its behalf.

Who made the first makeup tutorial on YouTube is not known, and this account does not nominate anyone. Phan is followed here because reporting at the time followed her; the newspaper that profiled her described a crew of others, and later trade reporting supports only that she began posting tutorials in 2007.^[11][12] The fashion site’s “first contract of its kind” is a claim, not a finding.^[13]

The figures are the platform’s, as reported at the time, and the sources do not even agree on her age: twenty-two in August 2009, and still twenty-two in May 2010.^[11][14] Nor do they say what her viewers did after watching — what they bought, or where.