The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers (Published 2021) (2024)

How social media stars like Addison Rae gave the cosmetics industry a makeover.

March 23, 2021

A little over a year ago, Addison Rae Easterling rode down the boulevards of Beverly Hills in an Uber to meet with Marcelo Camberos, the chief executive officer of Ipsy, the largest beauty subscription service in the United States. Ipsy, named after an intensive pronoun in Latin, ipse, sells small “glam bags” of beauty companies’ products like, say, cheek highlighter in a shade of tiramisù. For $12 and up a month, the company mails those bags to millions of subscribers, many of whom listen to advice from Ipsy’s vast network of vloggers, influencers and stylists. Now, in a new venture called Madeby Collective, the company hoped to manufacture and develop entirely new lines of makeup on its own. What Ipsy needed was a face to help them sell it.

Easterling, 20, professionally known by only her first two names, seemed like an ideal candidate. In 2019, she was a college freshman dejected over not making the Louisiana State University pep squad and had been filming videos of herself doing slithery hip-hop dances that call to mind Max Headroom as a belly dancer. In a surreal turn of events appropriate for our times, cheerleader-ish girls dancing just this way to rap music was the height of entertainment during the pandemic, whether enjoyed genuinely or for laughs. Soon Easterling, or Rae, became the second-most-popular human being on TikTok, Gen-Z’s social media platform of choice. (The most popular, Charli D’Amelio, was also a slithery dancer, this time from Connecticut.) Rae estimated that she had about three million followers on TikTok when she met Camberos, but within a year she amassed 73 million — a population larger than that of the United Kingdom.

Now Rae found herself in a strange and modern predicament: She had become very famous and needed to get paid for it. Rae would start selling merch, making T-shirts with the phrase “I’m a Bad Bleep,” a reference to a viral song by Australian rapper The Kid Laroi (“I need a bad bitch/Addison Rae”), but continuing down that road, the typical influencer-hawking-vitamins-for-your-hair route, may have seemed too small. So Rae followed a new path, recently forged by many social media stars and A-list celebrities (two quantities that seem as if they will eventually merge) like Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga and others who come to mind when you imagine a mistress of the universe beaming her wants and desires at Earth like lasers. She wanted to start her own beauty brand.

At her meeting in Beverly Hills, which took place at Rae’s agent’s office, Camberos pulled out some makeup testers he had brought along: lip gloss, rouge, powder. She turned them over in her palms, considered their colors. Afterward, Rae agreed not to the usual sponsored-content deal of posting thrilled accolades about the products on her social media feeds, nor the 1990s perfume deals in which celebrities branded fragrances with their own names, but rather to putting out her first makeup and skin-care line with Madeby Collective as a co-founder. They called the line Item Beauty, a reference to the way that two people who are in a state of romantic swoon are an “item,” which you would assume meant Rae herself, the icon, and a fan, who would seek to align herself with Rae. But when we spoke, she offered a different meaning. “Me and my makeup are a pair,” she told me. “We’re working together, and we’re together.” In other words, the commercial relationship was the primary one.

Rae’s deal with Ipsy was but a small part of a major shift in the beauty industry, which is nowhere more complex, and profitable, than the United States. People with clout, from celebrities to social media stars to lifestyle influencers, are changing the way the sell works, exploiting the intimate relationships they have with their fans in a way that wasn’t possible before in the industry. And while most of their profits aren’t close to comparable to established brands, at the moment, beauty is big business: Americans have long spent more in aggregate on beauty and personal care than any country in the world, about $92.8 billion in 2019, according to Euromonitor, a consumer-research company. Though revenues dipped during quarantine, over all, global consumers have close to doubled their spending in the past 15 years, as prices of products have risen and beauty has entered a phase of total pop-culture domination, on par with hip-hop and gaming.