Winged Eyeliner and Wisdom: Growing Up with YouTube’s Beauty Icons

By Kiki Pape

January 2025

Imagine it is, 2014. You sit at your vanity and imagine the artistic landscapes you can create on your adolescent face. The social media influencer Bethany Mota is teaching you a new technique for wing eyeliner, and the makeup guru Jacqueline Hill is teaching you how to cover up a zit for the seventh grade. These names may seem like chatter to ordinary civilians. Still, to pre-teens in the early 2010s, these women and many more social media influencers paved the way for girls to have an older sister type to teach each other the ways of  “womanhood.” 

When I was asked recently who was an influential woman in my life, of course, I thought about my mother, but mostly, I thought about the women who taught me about my passion for beauty and how to live my daily life. The more I expressed this realization, the more I became aware of how influential the YouTube community was for pre-teens in the 2010s. My mom, busy and hardworking, didn’t have the same passion for beauty as I did, so when I became curious about makeup and had no idea how to do it, I resorted to the internet to learn how to apply and create art.

I remember the first YouTube video about makeup I clicked on: Michelle Phan: Barbie Transformation tutorial. At thirteen years old, I discovered a way to create an unnecessary to look like a Barbie, but so did 60 million other people, influencing people to find their passions or learn a simple hygiene task. 

Through my own experiences, I examined how not only one specific marginalized group experienced this, but men, women, children, LQBTQ+, etc., have found a community in expressing their creativity. In 2016, YouTuber James Charles made headlines in the beauty industry as the first male cover model for Covergirl’s makeup brand. Playing on words with a male model opened doors for people everywhere in the beauty industry. 

To this day, the beauty influencers I watched when I was thirteen followed me and showed me the ‘big sister’ tasks I had taken to this day. 

As consumers, we have purchased their product recommendations, tips, and tricks, but their influence has grown into role model relationships for audiences and created parasocial relationships. Whether it was a good role model or a negative role model, as a society, we have followed these influencers in their lives and used them as a resource for a moral compass or a way to know ‘how to apply lipstick.’