Beauty YouTube erupts into a scandal about racism
Creators are being abandoned by followers as archived posts emerge of them making offensive – sometimes racist or sexist – remarks in their online pasts
Beauty YouTube has transformed how – and what – cosmetics companies sell. Thanks to YouTubers and Instagram influencers, foundation makers can no longer get away with offering a handful of token darker shades for non-white makeup wearers.
But Beauty YouTube is also home to something else: a web of drama between creators and rival fan groups that, last week, boiled over into a scandal about racism, online archives and to what extent influential creators are responsible for their offensive online pasts.
Laura Lee is a beauty YouTuber with nearly 5 million subscribers. But perhaps not for long: Lee has lost more than 200,000 of her channel’s followers in a single week after fans of one of her ex-friends (who is also a famous beauty YouTuber) uncovered some old, racist and fat-shaming tweets on her account.
Lee quickly deleted all of her tweets, and she did not respond to multiple emailed The Washington Post requests for comments. On Twitter, she has said that two particularly viral racist tweets attributed to her are “fake”, but she has not disputed that she tweeted “tip for all black people if you pull ur pants up you can run from the police faster.. #yourwelcome” in 2012, or posted several fat-shaming tweets in 2013.
She apologised on Twitter for “ignorant tweets that I made back in 2012”, and then apologised again in a video Sunday night, which opens with the beauty guru loudly crying.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry to you guys. I’m so sorry for disappointing you. It hurts me so bad to disappoint you all who have supported me for so many years. I know that I’m better than that person,” she said. In the video apology, which lasts about four minutes, Lee refers repeatedly to making several offensive “retweets”.
The apology was slammed online as insincere and incomplete, even by those who had no stakes in the drama that led to Lee’s old tweets resurfacing. Her words may also be too late: the week-long scandal has made Laura Lee’s name even more famous than it was, but for all the wrong reasons. Her views, her subscribers and her income are already dropping.
This is how we got here.
The context