Catching Up With 7 of The "Golden Era" Beauty YouTubers

09.09.2026, 15:33 allure.com

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.

In this story:

Jaclyn Hill in 2016.

Jaclyn Hill in 2026.

Follower count: 5.38M YouTube subscribers, 8.2M Instagram followers, 1.2M TikTok followersFirst year on YouTube: 2011First video: A Kim Kardashian New Year's Eve look that I had recreated from her cover of Glamour.

On pursuing content creation full-time: I had been on YouTube for over a year when I quit working at MAC. My mom was the only person that said, "I believe in you. If you think that you can do this, you can do this.” At that point I was making between $2,000 to $3,000 a month off of AdSense, which was big money to me. I thought, if I quit MAC, I know that I can throw myself into this community more and I can make more money. Everyone was like, $2,000 or $3,000 a month is not enough to support yourself. The month after I quit, I made $12,000 on YouTube.

On her first viral video: It was a smoky cat-eye tutorial and didn't go viral for three or four months. I think it got 15,000 views, and a few months later I thought, oh my gosh, how did this video get to 70,000 views? Then it was 100,000 and it just kept going. I learned that Kylie Jenner posted a picture of my video on her Tumblr page with a link. This is when she was just known as the Kardashians’ little sister, she hadn't popped off yet, but I thought that she was just so fun and young and cool. I think that video got 20 million views in the first year.

On the 2016 makeup tutorials she still follows: I still do my eyeliner the same exact way. Also, I used to always tell my audience, "do not make the fishy face" when you contour. I've always said you have to follow from the very top of your ear to your mouth. That's where you want the shadow to be.

On how the industry has changed the most: It's become very strategic. Back in the day when a product came out and it wasn't good, all of us OGs would just be like, "This new lip gloss is not good. Don't waste your money. Moving on." Point-blank period. Now, if a really huge brand launches something, no one wants to give their honest, negative feedback because they're like, "well, I want to work with that brand and I don't want that brand to stop sending me PR." I do wish that's something we could really get back to, is people giving honest reviews

On what she misses the most about the early days of beauty YouTube: The love for makeup. I miss going to my subscription page on YouTube and being like, oh my gosh, four of my favorites all uploaded in the last 24 hours. It was like a TV show, because each video was 20 or 30 minutes long. I would be excited all day and I would know that it's going to be absolutely no drama, no negativity, just makeup. I would be going through a lot of hard stuff in my personal life, but when I was watching beauty YouTube, none of that existed.

On what she doesn’t miss about the early days of YouTube: The pressure to post. There was such a small group of us and our audience loved us and it was such a privilege, but if you did not post… people were coming with pitchforks on Twitter. The demand was so intense, which was amazing, but also [high] pressure. I remember being so sick one time with the flu in my apartment and [thinking], I have to film, I have to post, because my audience was so upset with me.

On her last posting break: Recently, I did not post anything for six days. Me and Jordan [Torrey, Jaclyn’s husband], did a group trip up to Idaho together, and I intentionally did not get on social media. I didn't post, I didn't scroll. I truly just unplugged for six days, though I had my phone on me to take pictures and text my family. That's something that I could have never done a few years ago. There was a 10-year period where I would not take one day off. I had to scroll. I had to know what was going on. It's like this obsession.

On separating Jaclyn Hill from Jaclyn Torrey: Jaclyn Hill is my online persona that I allow people to see. In real life, I'm Jaclyn Torrey. I'm the wife to an incredible man, I'm the daughter to a wonderful mother. I'm a sister, I'm an aunt. There's so many different sides to Jaclyn. I've really learned to disconnect the two, so when I see people talking about me on the internet, I'm like, well, they're talking about Jaclyn Hill. They're talking about the girl who launched the makeup palette and they're talking about the girl who launched the lipsticks and the girl who's been canceled, but they're not talking about me because they don't know me.

On what she regrets sharing: My divorce. There's been so many times I've looked back and I'm like, I wish there was a way that I could have just gone through that and not even had to talk about it. I have other friends in the industry [going through their own family issues] and they'll say "Oh my gosh, I don't know how I'm going to address this," and I'm like, don't. We feel so much pressure to share everything, but we don’t have to.

On being a contentious figure: I'm a very polarizing person and it's been that way my entire life. I was bullied when I was younger, before I ever even turned on a camera. My mom pulled me out of my school to homeschool me when I was in third grade because I was physically beaten up in the library. I've always had a very loud, obnoxious personality. I’ve always been a person that people have a lot of opinions about. The people that I have in my life who love me, they love me. They will march into war for me, they will take a bullet for me, but the people who don't like me, they hate me.

On starting and shuttering brands: At this point, I'm like, how many brands have I opened? [Editor’s note: Three, by our count.] I saw the opportunity to start brands and businesses because there was such a high demand. As a successful beauty creator, there was so much money to be made through AdSense, partnerships, and collaborating with beauty brands. That in itself was a business, but we weren't really respected for that, so we were all like, okay, we have to start companies. At the end of the day, nothing about my brand [Jaclyn Cosmetics] worked for me. I rushed into things. I put trust in people that I shouldn't have put trust in. It got to the point where I was no longer posting for the love of posting. I had totally lost touch with my community and was just running brands. I was like, how did I get here? Why am I running brands? I'm miserable. I used to be so happy posting makeup tutorials.

On what’s next: It's a dream and priority of mine to relaunch my lipstick line. I’m having conversations about what it would look like to have my own brand again. It would be done very, very differently than it was in the past. I just feel like it's a box that I need to check for myself. It spiraled so out of control. I need to have my redemption moment.

On the paranoia that comes with posting online: I'll be at Trader Joe's and I'll see someone looking at me out of the corner of their eyes and think, oh my God, do they think that I contaminated my lipsticks? You just put so much of yourself out there on the internet and then you leave and go out in the real world and think, these people could hate me. They could have heard a story or watched a gossip video and they think I'm a terrible person and now they're standing behind me in the checkout line at Trader Joe's. It's just this very scary paranoid feeling.

On when she’ll call it quits: I've thought about this before. I feel like there will come a time, because I do love my audience so much, where I will make a goodbye video. I'll literally get online and whatever platforms are popping at the time and just be like, I love you guys and thank you so much for the last 20 years. I'm retiring.

Desi Perkins in 2019.

Desi Perkins in 2026.

Follower count: 3.11M YouTube subscribers, 4M Instagram followers, 633.2K TikTok followersFirst year on YouTube: 2013First video: A soft, warm, sultry eye makeup tutorial.

On breaking into the beauty world: Doing my husband Steven’s makeup for a work Halloween party snowballed into my taking clients out of my house for $50 for the whole Halloween season. Then someone asked if I did TV makeup and I said yes, and I ended up on a show for ABC Family doing television makeup.

On her “I made it” moment: The