The circulation of old beauty vlogs on TikTok has led to collective mourning of simpler times... but were they really that good?
Arguably the big bang of the influencing age, early beauty gurus on YouTube were defined by their commitment to extremely long-form content, DIY beauty tips and excessive morning vlogs. Though the algorithmic overlords have since seen them sacrificed to a landslide of short-form content, over the past few months clips from this era have begun recirculating TikTok, with old viewers collectively mourning a long-gone era of internet history. “It’s like a warm hug from the past,” says 21-year-old Alex, who’s racked up thousands of followers from reposting videos on the account ‘forevernostalgia’. “It’s refreshing to watch videos created before social media was saturated with product placements.”
When revisited within the context of TikTok’s short and speedy content wheel, these clips illuminate the drastic evolution of digital beauty influencing in the past decade. People commenting on Alex’s videos celebrate, and often share surprise in, the level of simplicity they didn’t notice at the time. While large portions of today’s beauty content recommends new cosmetic procedures or expensive anti-ageing products, early YouTube videos offered simple, accessible guidance. Michelle Phan catapulted to internet fame with a slew of DIY facemask videos with pore-clogging ingredients that would make the TikTok aestheticians of 2024 shudder, while Blair Fowler (under the apt 00s screenname Juicystar07) regularly uploaded 15-minute, webcam-quality hair tutorials while monologuing about her life.
This innocence can often seem absent from beauty content today. In these early videos, creators were publicising the girls’ bedroom culture that had previously been private, and viewers were enticed by the concept of seeing somebody like them offer lived advice in real time. “The typically domestic, bedroom settings in which these tutorials were filmed and viewed, as well as the use of filming techniques like close-ups, encouraged strong bonds of intimacy to develop between viewers and creators,” explains Rachel Berryman, digital influencer researcher at Curtin University, Perth. “What was previously a solitary experience – applying make-up in your bedroom – came to feel more like a social activity.”
This emphasis on the social aspect of beauty content, prior to the introduction of brand partnerships, is key to their newfound cult following. “I think beauty content then wasn’t so intrinsically tied to capitalism and consumerism, which it transparently is now,” says 20-year-old Grace, an avid watcher of early 2010s beauty YouTube. “The discourse around beauty trends, feminism and the damaging effects of social media is vast now, and although it’s important and something I engage with regularly, watching Zoella videos at 12 was just about putting up fairy lights and doing the five-minute makeup challenge.” 25-year-old Jonny, who was also a fan of the beauty community at the time, concurs. “It harkens back to a time before content was so focused on views. Videos felt more authentic before the ties between make-up content creation and advertising became clear,” they say.
@forevernostalgiaa The last one is giving lorde #zoella #2013 #nostalgia #ogyoutubers #tumblr #youtube #2014 ♬ original sound - ˚₊‧꒰აForever☆Nostalgia໒꒱ ‧₊˚
So what changed? According to Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, once advertisers realised they could capitalise on the communities surrounding these creators, the game was forever changed. “The seeming professionalisation of this sector owes much to the astonishing growth of influencer marketing. Beauty brands covet a more ‘authentic’ sales force, and people increasingly turn to online personalities for advice, recommendations and lived expertise,” she says.
It means many creators now want to target older audiences with disposable incomes, rather than create relatable content for young girls. “In the 2010s it seemed most videos were aimed towards the tween demographic whereas today it seems there’s a growing gap in content for this age range,” Alex says. Yet the result isn’t that young people are discouraged from consuming beauty content, but that they’re following advice not intended for them. Recent months have seen reports of pre-teens coveting expensive skincare products in place of the drugstore lip balms that dominated the early YouTube era. “Zoella would use a three pound Collection concealer. We could go to the high street and buy those Rimmel lipsticks and recreate her looks,” says Grace. “Now, you need a Dyson Airwrap for £500, the Clinique Black Honey at £25 and a Drunk Elephant moisturiser for £60, and those products will be tossed out tomorrow for the next trend.”
It’s easy then, to be sucked back into the utopian world these older videos seemed to create. Yet perhaps it’s a mistake to adopt such a rose-tinted outlook. The recirculated content also acts as a reminder of how whitewashed the beauty industry was only a few years ago, with the majority of creators fitting into a very specific mould. “The image of beauty that circulated at this time tended to reaffirm traditional representations of beauty and femininity – young, white, thin and conventionally attractive,” says Duffy. This was escalated by the introduction of brand partnerships. “There were exceptions, of course, but advertisers tended to partner with beauty vloggers who weren’t all that different from those in the legacy media industries.”
So perhaps the widespread nostalgia is misplaced, despite how desperate some may be for a return of crackle nail polish. Yet it does seem to point to a collective yearning for a more community-focused internet. While algorithms have worked to curate feeds that show us exactly what we want to see, these videos suggest it may be the very opposite that we truly desire. “Looking back, the experience of YouTube in the early 2010s feels a lot more unified than the social media platforms we use today. There was a sense of a shared experience and community: the homepage promoted videos that other viewers were engaging with, not only those related to your personal viewing habits,” Berryman points out. “The nostalgia we see on TikTok today may not be just for a particular style of content or group of creators, but rather for a missed sense of community.”