The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.18 How Kylie Jenner, Jeffree Star, & Social Media Are Changing The Makeup Industry…

Starting point is 00:00:00 Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Thursday. Welcome back to the, not technically, a Philip DeFranco show. As mentioned on the last two videos, this week the PDS is on hiatus, but I didn't wanna leave you completely empty handed, so this is the second of the two solo focus stories

Starting point is 00:00:13 I posted this week. And today we're gonna be talking about an industry that has gone through a massive shift over the past 10 years, and that industry is makeup. Now, before my majority male audience closes this tab, this is not a story about my favorite lipstick palettes. No, it is about money, influence,

Starting point is 00:00:26 and just how much social media has evolved and changed how we interact in the professional world. The introduction of social media created a brand new avenue to build careers online. I mean, when you look to this specific industry, aside from traditional makeup artists, content creators are carving out their own branches, beauty influencers.

Starting point is 00:00:39 And as someone who has built his career online, it's exciting to just see how much the digital space can expand markets, how it can create new opportunities across so many different fields. And so with all that said, to take a kind of deeper look into it, we had Danny Rosenberg from the Rogue Rocket team just jump into it. In order to understand just how much of an impact social media has had, we have to look at how things operated before. The path to working as a traditional makeup artist has typically involved makeup schools, on-the-job experience, and word-of-mouth referrals. It's a difficult field to break into, requiring hard-learned technical skills and long production days. Brett Friedman began his career almost three decades ago.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Hey, I'm Brett Friedman, and I've done makeup for 27 years, and I've done makeup for everyone, from Reba to Taylor Swift to Jodie Foster, basically anyone in Hollywood. I've probably touched their face at some point. Brett studied to be a cartoonist in art school unexpectedly making his way into makeup artistry. When I first started doing makeup in Miami I was advised to learn to do hair even if it's simple hair and people doing hair were advised to learn basic makeup because it's a lot of catalog at that time was a lot of catalog shoots but now it's so interesting with all the social media and all that. You know, there is the feeling of you have to be able to do makeup and be able to talk about makeup on camera.

Starting point is 00:01:53 The definition of a makeup artist is someone who applies cosmetics to a model or performer, specifically someone else. But beauty influencers have changed that by creating a path to build an entire career around doing a tutorial on their own face. If I want to do a quick tip or if I want to do a demonstration of makeup, I have to get a model, someone has to shoot it. It's a whole thing. Whereas, you know, if I'm just a cute girl, I can do it right in the mirror is the computer and I can, you know, do it. Boom. Mikey, also known as Glam and Gore on YouTube, is, quote, one of those cute girls doing makeup on her computer

Starting point is 00:02:28 for her 3.5 million subscribers and 1.8 million Instagram followers. Hi, my name is Mikey from Glam and Gore and I've been doing makeup for about 11 years now. So I actually started at a MAC makeup counter, which is, I think, a way that a lot of people get their foot in the door. I went from counter jobs into, like, haunted house jobs because I also do special effects.

Starting point is 00:02:48 I moved to LA after that, and then I ended up doing work on film sets. I did print work. I did music videos, movies, and eventually social media. While Mikey has professional experience, her videos place her in the category of beauty influencer. I don't think of myself predominantly as a makeup artist anymore. Five years ago, if someone had asked me what I did, even when I started YouTube, I would say makeup artist. And now I don't really think of myself as that.

Starting point is 00:03:14 I truly think of myself as a content creator because the makeup that I sit down and do is such a small fraction of my job. Also known as a beauty vlogger or beauty guru, these content creators use platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch to make beauty-related content like style tutorials. And they've had a massive hand in expanding the culture of makeup as well as its profits through reviews of existing makeup brands. All right, that is impressive. I really, really like that. It did not transfer to my lid. It's giving me a lot of volume. It's giving me a lot of emphasis to my eyes." Collaborations on their own line of

Starting point is 00:03:48 product. I am just so happy to finally be introducing to you here on camera the Champagne Collection Face Palette that I teamed up with Becca Cosmetics to create. And becoming entrepreneurs by launching their own beauty brands themselves, like massive beauty blogger Huda Katan, who owns Huda Beauty, which is valued at more than a billion dollars. And of course, Kylie Jenner's massive brand, Kylie Cosmetics, and their audiences are buying all of those products in bulk. Now, anything that your favorite influencer is wearing, a lot of people feel like they have to

Starting point is 00:04:18 have, even if they have 50 blue eyeshadows already, they're going to want that new one. Beauty influencers aren't the only ones benefiting from the highly engaged beauty audience. Independent makeup brands like Glossier and Milk Makeup have built their entire consumer base online before ever opening a brick and mortar store. And they did this by creating makeup brands designed around minimalism spread by word of mouth online by their highly devoted consumer base. But you have these companies that have gone from nothing to massive and international just through social media and just through utilizing people that are posting with their makeup online. Now they release a new set of concealers, foundations, eyeshadow palettes. It feels like every week. The expanded access to product, combined with the wild popularity of tutorial videos, has given the general public the ability to learn many techniques on their own. Here's

Starting point is 00:05:08 Cindy Crawford talking about learning makeup tips from her daughter, Kaya Gerber. The amazing thing about the young generation is stuff like this. Like, if she wants to learn how to do a cat eye, she learns. She just YouTubes it, and all of a sudden she'll come out and, oh look, I tried this new look today. And then I'll be like, wait, how'd you do that? The level of technical skill in glam makeup is just insane on the internet. You can learn from so many people. With that said, you can get really bad information too from the internet. So going to a traditional school is more of a surefire way to get good information. Cosmetology schools teach various techniques, proper sanitation, tools, and product knowledge. But even here, some schools

Starting point is 00:05:51 have expanded their coursework to include social media training, like Chic Studios, a makeup academy with locations in LA, New York, and Denver. Here's the description for a course they offer called Digital Beauty. In this day and age, it's necessary for makeup artists to master self-promotion through the internet and social media. Our digital makeup course in New York covers essential techniques for pros and influencers to make the most of social media and other digital platforms. Building a career as either a traditional makeup artist or a beauty influencer are, like we've said, two separate career paths. But the rise of influencer culture has begun to affect the traditional field. Take the use of Instagram, for example. Someone had asked me for a hair referral. Like, oh, we need someone to style hair for, you know, the shoot and this and that. I was like,

Starting point is 00:06:32 okay, yeah, I have some names. And they said, okay, we'll just, you know, send their Instagrams. I was like, oh, not their portfolio, not their resume, not their reel, not their agent, their Instagram. What's the first thing I did? I scanned through my Instagram. I was like, oh, me at the movies with my friends. Who cares? It has to be faces. Instagram is your portfolio and also your vibe. When Mikey was struggling to book consistent professional makeup gigs, she created her own personal Instagram challenge back in 2014. And I felt like I had a bigger range that could get me more jobs than I was getting through just

Starting point is 00:07:09 word of mouth alone. So I started to build a portfolio based on what I thought I could do and hold myself accountable. I decided to do 100 consecutive days of 100 different looks. Sometimes it was just lips. Sometimes it was just eyes, sometimes it was a full face. But I did that, took me from my own personal following of friends to a few thousand real followers that just wanted to watch me do more makeup who wanted videos. And that's how I transitioned onto YouTube after that. These two different career paths can, and often do, cross over. Mikey learned her technique through traditional training and on-the-job experience before launching her successful career online. And now professional makeup artists already established in the industry, like Patrick Ta, are crossing over, creating content and building their

Starting point is 00:07:53 own fan bases in the digital space. With that said, the power of social media to elevate someone's career can leave room for knowledge gaps, both with technique and sanitation, and it's created some tensions between the two paths. Not every traditional makeup artist doesn't respect the social media makeup artist, but there seems to be a general push and pull between the two. The idea that because there is this shiny veneer on someone's social media that, you know, it looks elevated, that it is elevated. Sometimes it is just a veneer. It is different to be doing makeup on yourself

Starting point is 00:08:28 and when you're young and everything looks great and you know your face better than everyone. It is much different to approach people of different ages, different types of faces. How makeup wears is a huge thing. A lot of social media makeup artists might not know proper sanitation techniques, safety techniques. That's certainly been an issue in my industry, especially with special effects online, because it can be more dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

Starting point is 00:08:56 But to be perfectly clear, Brett has openly welcomed the new avenues this provides. I often think if I were starting out now, if I was 22, 23, I would nail it. I think that I would have the energy, the interest. I think I would have really taken it by the reins and nailed it. Yeah, I would have been an influencer for sure. While social media has given a leg up for many beauty influencers, it's also presented a couple of its own specific challenges, including creator burnout. The amount of all-nighters I've pulled doing this job as opposed to anything else is insane and it never stops. I mean, I really feel like I've been doing this for five years now. I don't feel like I've had a break in five years. I think it's so much more challenging than just

Starting point is 00:09:43 doing makeup at this point because we are selling ourselves not just our skill set and it's a tricky thing to kind of balance a lot of the time. And I've got to say on a personal note what Mikey said there is pretty relevant to me. Burning yourself out, check. Selling myself and not just my skill set, check. All while trying to gain credibility and expand a traditional field into a digital media space, check. You know with someone trying to grow a new media news company, it sometimes feels like you have to work twice as hard to just kind of prove yourself. And keep in mind, I'm not saying everyone.

Starting point is 00:10:11 You know, I think back to that moment that we shared on a previous show where there was a host on NPR that checked someone from BuzzFeed News when they said, you know, essentially every piece of news on YouTube, we're talking conspiracy theories. If you look across YouTube, the only way to do news in YouTube is to be like Amanda's Austin neighbor, Alex Jones, and just sit there and make stuff up because the economics of doing journalism just don't work on the biggest video platform in the world. They don't work on the biggest social platform in the world.

Starting point is 00:10:40 And I think that's- Well, I don't know that that's true. I think Philip DeFranco would disagree with you. He's found a way to do news and comment before he was acquired by Discovery Communications that wasn't just based on making stuff up. He had a point of view, he did stories, you know, he made a business. Right, and you have people in the know that see the evolution, that they see the reshaping of the mainstream media industry. Also, I'm aware that in part it is a generational change. Every week I see more and more photos and videos of our videos being shown in classrooms.

Starting point is 00:11:07 Every week I get messages from 16 to 20 year olds of people being inspired to become journalists. Something because I don't have the traditional training that I do not call myself. But hearing them talk about kind of this merging of the traditional and the new, it's exciting. And social media and digital platforms like YouTube have forced and facilitated this evolution and expansion,

Starting point is 00:11:22 not only on the makeup world, but in news and so many other industries. But with all of that said, it brings us to the part of the video where I pass the question off to you. Has social media shaped your career field? And if so, how? Does having a social media presence

Starting point is 00:11:33 have any weight for the jobs you currently hold or the career that you're pursuing? Is there any benefit to it? Are there industries where it's appropriate or others where it's not? Let me know what you're thinking in those comments down below. With that said, I'll end on the note of,

Starting point is 00:11:44 knowing me at this point in my small hiatus, I'll end on the note of knowing me at this point in my small hiatus, I'm probably just craving to come back. Miss ya, I love your faces. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, be sure to let us know by hitting that like button. Also, if you're new here and you want more

Starting point is 00:11:54 of what is normally a regular daily occurrence, be sure to hit that subscribe button, maybe ring that bell to turn on notifications. Sometimes it even works. But with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in. I love yo faces and I'll see you next Monday.

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The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 4.18 How Kylie Jenner, Jeffree Star, & Social Media Are Changing The Makeup Industry…

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