Thursday 7 November 2013

What Happens When a "Makeup Guru" Gains a Bit of Weight?


For anyone who hasn't spent the last year tumbling down the YouTube rabbit hole of makeup "gurus" — a somewhat nebulous term to describe lifestyle and cosmetic vloggers, some of whom are actual artists, but most of whom are just rich girls with good cameras — this is Tanya Burr. Tanya is the future sister-in-law of the Pixiwoo sisters (MUAs and vloggers) who started her own channel a while back, focusing more on a tween marketplace by doing Twilight tutorials and endless "I love hot chocolate and scarves!" videos.
She's cute. She's not quite my speed, between the hot chocolate addiction and the baby voice, but I can appreciate what she's trying to do and I appreciate that it's not really for my benefit.
With that said, she came back onto my radar in the last year because there was suddenly an enormous amount of online nastiness about her appearance. Tanya, an obviously gorgeous girl, gained a little bit of weight over the last year.
The photo above is pretty much the heaviest she's been, so that should give you some idea of the kind of bullshit we're already about to embark upon.
From Guru Gossip, a nasty corner of the internet where people gather to talk shit about girls who post YouTube videos of themselves putting on makeup, here are some of the comments that haven't yet been deleted by moderators:
Pigeonski:
From Tanya's new chocolate cookie blog post:

"Use your hands to separate the mixture into 10 blobs (I think "blob" is the perfect word for them!)"

Hilarious- when I saw the title I was thinking blob is becoming the perfect word for her...
Biba girl:
Actually she called herself "a little stumpy blob" once already. At least she's realistic....
There are more, but it's a bit depressing to sift through them, honestly.
I suppose my point is this: these girls aren't celebrities. Tanya occasionally gets to attend premieres and she teams up with other artists, but ultimately she could be better described as a businesswoman trying to sell her talents as a makeup artist and is very likely making a decent salary just from her videos alone. But apparently when your business is beauty, you must constantly be both the entrepreneur and the model. And you can't age or gain weight or go through any kind of emotional distress.
What really disgusts me are the kind of comments that suggest people are only pointing out her weight as a kind of public service: "Oh, what if young girls see her and think it's okay to be fat?" What is this logic? Who in the Western World is currently confused about the present beauty standard?
And what's the benefit of bullying her? I understand, again, that she's in a beauty industry, but part of the point of "gurus" is that they're meant to seem like ordinary people showing you how to do every-day makeup. They aren't really supposed to be models or professionals (even though Tanya claims she is a professional MUA). If you don't like her, if her slightly patronizing tone or uninspired beauty videos do nothing for you, then why are you watching at all? I hate the "Don't like it? Don't watch!" comment, but in this case it seems warranted. Especially when it comes to her appearance, why should it matter? A tutorial is allowing you to see how you can apply makeup to your own face, so the canvas should be somewhat irrelevant, shouldn't it?