THE FACE OF BEAUTY ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE. AND THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING.
In the decades before the rise of social media influencers, the mainstream beauty industry catered and marketed to just a small portion of society. While people from diverse backgrounds and cultures enjoy expressing themselves through the art of makeup, only a handful of skin colors, a handful of body types, and really only one gender had products available to them. When it came to marketing, the scope of people who helped sell those coveted beauty products became even narrower, with only the most conventionally attractive, cisgender, heterosexual, and white faces being the ones most in the spotlight.
But thanks to content creators, particularly those in the queer Asian-American communities, those who once felt invisible and ignored by the makeup and skin care industries — and on a grander scale, by Western society as a whole — are starting to reexamine what it means to be beautiful. Among those changing the face of the beauty industry are queer beauty gurus Patrick Starrr, Patrick Ta, Plastique Tiara, and ally Michelle Phan.
Starrr, the gay 32-year-old Filipino-American social media superstar who started in the early 2010s posting videos of his daily makeup routines and other glam tutorials to YouTube, has
