THE CONTROVERSIAL MAKEUP STAR- JEFFREE STAR

THE CONTROVERSIAL MAKEUP STAR- JEFFREE STAR. Jeffree Star is one of the most controversial influencers on YouTube. He’s also perhaps one of the most authoritative in the evolving and surging makeup industry. 

Star, whose actual name is Jeffrey Lynn Steiniger Jr., has been an internet superstar for more over ten years now and initially rose to famr owing to his singles on Myspace. Now, he’s a tycoon in the cosmetics business with 16 million faithful YouTube followers. 

FROM MUSIC TO MAKEUP

Star’s captivation with makeup began in his teenage years when he fixated on Cosmopolitan magazine and experimented with his mother’s eye shadow on the sly. After finishing high school in 2002, he operated at several makeup counters and landed odd jobs doing makeup work for marriages, superstars, music videos, and fashion shoots.

In 2014, with a gigantic fanbase on YouTube, Star invested his money to fund Jeffree Star Cosmetics as an e-commerce business he today owns and controls.

Star was infamous for uploading personal blogs and vlogs online. He rapidly became an internet luminary, gathering attention in as early as 2003 on MySpace. 

A MAKEUP STAR WITH AN EDGE

He became renowned, in part, by the utter strength of his personality, and his exclusive androgynous demeanor. You’ll see that in old videos and photos, he exhibited a look similar to what he’s now famous for: A mop of colorful hair, a lot of makeup, a body full of tattoos, and a transparent personality.

His larger-than-life image gained him fans, and he was predominantly well-known among castaway teens. 

He elaborates, “I have a lot of youngsters writing to  me with their life  stories lamenting that their father is pounding them just  because they  like to dress differently.’ And I promptly reply to them and let them know that it’s OK to be different!”

A little later, Star transitioned from Myspace to YouTube, where he shared colorful music videos that emphasized his costuming and makeup talents. 

He contracted a record deal with Akon’s label in 2010, but never released a second album. In 2018, interview, Star claimed that personality mismatches with Akon led him to abandon making music in 2013.

Star’s escalation to fame, from his initial music career to becoming a YouTube star.

In  his vlogs, Star often tossed around racist smears and said offensive things about African-Americans and Mexicans. In 2017, after some of those videos reappeared, he spoke of them in a YouTube video and went on a media tour where he expressed regret saying he’d changed.

“It’s disturbing. It’s foul. It makes me sick to my stomach to watch those old videos,” Star famously said. “I’m ashamed as a person because that’s never what I stood for.”

In his more recent makeup vlogs on YouTube, Star has made a point of supporting cosmetics brands that accommodate darker skin tones.

Soon, he rapidly began concentrating his energies somewhere else. Star put all  his life savings into a collection of liquid lipstick he manufactured under his new brand : Jeffree Star Cosmetics.

“I recall being so terrified whether this was going to work out f or was I going to end up back in the mall  at the MAC counter again,” Star told a popular magazine when he began his makeup brand Jeffree Star Cosmetics. “This is perhaps the most frightened I’ve been in my entire life.”

Star endorsed the line a lot through his own YouTube channel. It was an overnight sensation and he was sold out. All thirty thousand units of the original creative line sold out within a few minutes of his launch, in November 2014, according to Cosmopolitan.

A MAKEUP FORCE TO RECKON WITH

Today, Jeffree Star boasts of over fifteen million subscribers on YouTube and thirteen million followers on Instagram. He’s grown from a provocative music star to a strong pillar in the beauty community. Star’s line of cosmetics, including his popular liquid lipsticks, is cruelty-free. According to Forbes, Jeffree Star’s cosmetics company has  made a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars, making him a powerful entity in the beauty industry.

He rose to fame with popular makeup vlogs on YouTube and then kick-started his own cosmetics line.

Before that, Star was an unassumingly successful Myspace musician. He’s one of the original internet personalities.

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