Photos: Aina (2016): Getty Images; Bybel: Kiara Gomez; Perkins: Marco Roman; all other: Courtesy of subjectsSave this storySave this story
The year 2016 is widely considered to be beauty YouTube’s Golden Era. Creators were posting 20- to 30-minute long smoky eye tutorials and dramatic transformations, and keeping us fed with drama as well as brutally honest reviews of the latest product drops. A decade later, we’re feeling nostalgic—body shimmer is trending, Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow is back, and we’re slowly moving away from the clean girl aesthetic to embrace pigmented eyeshadow looks again.
We also seem to be nostalgic for a time when content creation was just a hobby, not one of the more lucrative career paths available to anyone with a ring light. The turn against social media creators seems to have come to a head this summer when a “No Influencers” sign was put up in an antiques and handmade crafts store on Nantucket. The move by the shop owner launched a flurry of online discourse about the tripod-wielding gaggle of usually young, almost always female influencers who parade their phones around in the hopes of building, or nurturing, a gainful following. “People back in the day started creating based off of passion,” Manny Gutierrez, known online as Manny MUA, told Allure. Now, “there's some content creators I watch and I can just see them lying through their teeth.”
The early days of YouTube sure look nice through a pair of AI-free, unfiltered glasses, huh? It makes sense, then, that many people are gazing back at their favorite early creators—the pioneers that paved the way for the influencers of today to fill our feeds with reviews, tutorials, and product hauls alike—with particular fondness these days. Below, we caught up with some of the most popular beauty vloggers of yore to check in and see how they’re doing, what their plans are for the future, and when (or if) they’ll ever truly retire.
