#to teach my mother's 50 year old boyfriend how to take a fucking screenshot.

[rgr-pop]

LONG POST AIRING GRIEVANCES ABOUT DUMB SHIT IN BEAUTY COMMUNITY!! 

oh my GOD. okay, so, small youtuber who is climbing. beloved by many small youtubers because she is a regular girl and very nice and FROM UPSTATE NEW YORK and has social justice interests, she also posts a lot of drama content and some people (including me tbh) really like the way she kind of ~~democratizes drama content. don’t @ me it’s whatever. reddit HATES her because her mother buys her a lot of makeup for her birthday (literally) and she is not into self-punishing no-buys which is the only thing people like right now very coincidentally (going on a no-buy is apparently how you end landfills).

this youtuber is fat and not conventionally pretty--I really hate even saying the latter because it is objectively not true and also an evil thing to say even nicely, but for example she is always talking about how she doesn’t really care that her lips are small and is not interested in overdrawing or “fixing” them, and getting flamed for it. in the community (the respectable arm of it, which is the rddt, where we are ostensibly not allowed to be like “she looks terrible”), where there is smoke there is fire, and “not skilled at makeup” + maybe some nebulous complaints about whininess = she is a fat girl, end her. (”rude” = black youtuber too much power, end her.)

i’m talking about sm*key gl*w whose name is hannah, hannah #1, i think it is interesting to contrast her with the other hannah that i talk about sometimes--i try not to talk about her too much because we sort of teechnically have real world social connections and, also, i just feel bad for her. i feel desperately bad for hannah #2, because she is in her thirties having lived in art communities and global urban centers but for the first time in her life having to reckon with things like--”it is not appropriate to talk about calories at dinner, etc.” that is the second hannah, and while she is sweet and interesting to many in the small youtube community precisely because she is very alien to them (has mfa), it’s very difficult to watch, and sometimes i think she is the most “toxic” youtuber i follow. she is not an originator in any way, but she found herself in the center of a so-called anticonsumerist movement in small beautube that is kind of taking over, which is related to but not exactly minimalism--you have probably heard me talk about this already, at length. a good example of this is that second hannah recently said in a video that she was thinking of doing a shopping “fast.” i don’t know how she became this person, and how she held onto this kind of personality in spite of being in lots of communities that i am also in or have friends in where i know that if you talked this way about dieting etc. at a social event, someone would probably softly scold you. she somehow insulated herself from this kind of learning, i don’t know, then she threw herself into beautube where a woman who maybe sort of likes art and writes poetry and has heard of “fair trade” before is an absolute anomaly, but that community--like literally, where people do liposuction and skinny teas!--has only encouraged this absolutely unreal nasty and BAD behavior. etc. i have a lot of feelings about this.

so first hannah is a fat girl who is not rich--we will get to that!--but spends her money primarily on makeup. people HATE her. second hannah is thin, possibly rich in family origin (i think she is) but basically your average working artist in life. she frames her so-called overconsumption not even precisely as an addiction but specifically as a lack of willpower that she also struggles with when it comes to sometimes eating sugar (really). both of these hannahs consume and talk about quite a lot of luxury makeup--second hannah is very openly committed to luxury purchase as part of her self-conception. second hannah sometimes goes on “shopping diets” though, so people praise her! it is evil. 

above is the shit i hate day in and day out but the points below will have more to do with the screencap +...upstate new york, i guess. henceforth we are only talking about first hannah.

so this girl is from some kind of small town around rochester or syracuse--something up there. iirc she goes to a suny school i had never heard of (i looked it up and it is a “suny comprehensive college,” though i can’t remember if she transferred out of this school to a bigger school. but, as many of you know, sunys are cheap as hell and should be protected at all costs, this school costs well under half what my state school did, for residents anyway.) she is in her mid-twenties and not graduated yet, due to struggles she has had (and spoken openly about) as well as having gone to community college. they LOVE to bring up how she is too old to be a college student! she’s like...idk 24 or something. she is going to school to be a social worker in one of those accelerated programs, which she has found quite difficult (again, spoken openly about this) and which also requires, as many of you know!, lots of extra work, unpaid and paid. she said somewhere that she does not have student loans, but i don’t know if her parents paid for her college or just shouldered loans, or if she paid for it, or if it is all financial aid. (”not having student loans” is something that enrages people, ESPECIALLY when someone doesn’t have loans because they got need-based aid.) again, she probably had some financial catastrophes due to school failures (speaking from experience here), but: sunys is cheap as hell and there are a million reasons why someone could go to one and not be struggling with loans!

where was i...her parents. watching this has fascinated me! her dad was a school teacher and her mom is a social worker--absolutely public servant middle class. i thiiink (could be wrong) that her father retired already and ended up retiring from a principalship, so they were probably extremely comfortable by the time she was in college, but they are definitionally middle class. the biggest controversy around this youtuber is that for birthdays and christmas her mother goes fucking insane--probably spent two to four hundred dollars on her for her birthday. she talks about this all the time: her mother and her are very close and their hobby is shopping. people treat this like the bougiest fucking thing on earth and it is ba nanas. straight up, this girl has probably never even HEARD of anthropologie. listen, i can’t afford to live like her either but i recognize poor shopping when i see it. working class people like to blow their money on bullshit and to take issue with that is demonstrably racist and classist! i will not hear this conversation over again in 2019. for example, hannah made a video about her “high end bag” collection, in which she said she got a bcbg bag on sale for like $30 but had never heard of the brand before. she had once been gifted a kate spade bag and her DREAM was to purchase one on her own. she buys coach at the local coach outlet, which is a regional attraction. THIS GIRL IS NOT BOUGIE! THEY ARE JUST MAD THAT SHE OWNS CLOTHES AND IS ALSO FAT! she did a closet tour where she talked about how she has like 50 crop tops, they were ALL like forever 21. they are just mad about fat girl in crop tops. there is nothing to see here! does she have too much shit, and shop too much? sure. welcome to flyover country you dumb bitches. that is what I think about that!

so, she definitely makes money on youtube, but mostly enough to sustain youtube and makeup buying (possibly some savings? unsure. i know she said this in a video but i forget.) she has lived with this boyfriend of hers for a number of years and they are building a life together that doesn’t immediately include marriage, probably largely for financial reasons. i get the sense that his jobs pay a lot of their bills, but he just finished getting a teaching MA of some kind (i think he is a math teacher? i already forgot) and is entering the regular teaching job market. based on some of the following i think his parents might be wealthier than hers but i think they might also be teachers. as you can see in the screenshot above, people are enraged at this girl for apparently being a gold digger for getting a house with him before they are married! 

people are SO pissed that she was “able to buy a house” at age 25, but they did not watch the video! in which she said that they had been dealing with the death of her bf’s step grandpa all year, and the family had decided that they should take over the step grandpa’s house. (step grandpa’s family does sound “richer” because, according to her, this house had been owned by a GREAT grandparent and paid off decades ago.) her descriptions of this house are confusing to me because she keeps referring to it as both “old” and “from the eighties,”; I think it is an actually old house that had not been “updated” since the eighties. seems like the family did not “gift” it to them as much as sign it over to them in exchange for them being the ones to take out the renovation loans, which allegedly she said are $50k. unclear to me if she and her bf got approved for that loan--probably not, I think it was taken out in the family’s name. ($50k is too much to put into a house in rochester imooo but I am reserving my judgment there! rochester has a very flyover housing economy, much like ours, but with a much higher end, I think?)

so anyway, these vultures are sociopaths. “ Who gives someone a house no matter how much they like them? That seems wild to me” ...p-parents? dead grandparents? is your will gonna be like “my kid has to buy their OWN house like i did!” who are these people

YES SOMETIMES YOU STOP NEEDING YOUR HOUSE, WHEN YOU DIE

anyway I’m done. I just thought this thing would be of interest in particular to the upstate new yorkers. the whole condition of the indebted working-middle class is just like inconceivable to people who consume only ideologically pure content by wealthy west coast whites all day long 

#makeupblogger fandom