As other beauty-Tubers are watching their stars fall to earth, the über beauty guru and YouTube influencer Jeffree Star has hit 10 million subscribers, according to Social Blade.
It’s a really big deal. When creators on the platform reach 10 million subscribers, they receive the ‘Diamond Creator Award.’
“Once your subscriber count has soared past the population of most major cities, a Diamond Creator Award will recognize you as one of the biggest creators on YouTube,” the video-sharing platform says.
And the landmark breakthrough will undoubtedly make Star even wealthier than he already is. Leading up to the 10 million mark, fans were studying the Social Blade ticker, the Real Time YouTube Subscriber Count page that updates every second, and sharing the news that Star was approaching the milestone.
Ekkk @JeffreeStar OMG girl I’m so excited about this…. #10MILLION_SUBSCRIBERS
Star himself was keeping track and being thankful for his blessings. “Every day I wake up and say thank you for all the blessings. My heart is so full right now ?”
Star is a trail-blazing beauty vlogger, model, and cosmetics company mogul with a global following on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. He started on MySpace and grew his brand from there.
A hard-knock and fearless gay teen in Los Angeles in the late ’90s, Star and his mother had a strained relationship and his father had committed suicide when Star, born Jeffrey Steininger, was in elementary school. Star was a rebel; he wore makeup and had hair pink hair in high school. He started working at make-up counters, and soon learned the art of applying cosmetics and couch-surfed as he went from his retail gigs to doing make-up as a freelancer. And with Star’s early intrepid use of the internet, he found his niche.
CONGRATS @JeffreeStar ON HITTING 10 MILLION SUBS!!!!! WISH U WERE HERE!!!!😭❤️💃🏻
Said to be worth around $20 million, Star, now 32, is an original internet personality and among the earliest social influencers.
Of late he’s been the talk as fellow beauty vlogger Laura Lee, following a racism scandal and a personal attack on Star, has seen her YouTube subscriber numbers plummet; indeed, she’s lost nearly half a million followers in less than two weeks.
Meanwhile, in a video he uploaded Sunday Aug. 19, Star confessed a “dark secret.” He’d told Shane Dawson in a special series that his tattoos cover his many scars from self-harm — cutting his body with razors or knives — from more than a decade ago. But in his new video said that he’d cut in recent years and admitted he had an even bigger secret.
In a video called ‘Revealing My Last Dark Secrets,’ Star shared a shocking revelation about his mother, ‘Laurie’ Steininger.
“It’s all a lie. The imagery that pops up when you Google my mother is a lie. The name and pictures of us, all of it is a lie.”
He and his mother fought often when he was younger and the two became estranged. In fact, Star said he had not seen nor spoken to his other in a decade. “I have been lying to all of you. The woman that I have been posting for the last five years is not my mother.”
“Her name is Laurie and she’s my actual aunt,” on his father’s side by marriage. “I needed something to tell the internet. I was growing, my numbers were growing, I needed to say something but I was just embarrassed. My father was dead. A lot of my family had passed away. I wasn’t close to a lot of my family …”
But by Christmas of 2017, Star wanted to reach out. He and his boyfriend Nathan Schwandt were in Hawaii living it up. Star called her.
He says, “How are you.” She answers, “Homeless.”
She’d been homeless and living out of the trunk of her car for years. “In a hatchback. Sleeping in a trunk for four years.”
They cried “for an hour” on the phone. Since, they have reconnected and he’s helping her get on her feet. And out of the trunk of a car. He said that a house and a car can’t fix what’s happened to her but the process of healing is under way. Starting with a bed, a real bed to sleep in.
So karmaically-speaking, he’s made amends and is in a good place. What’s hot right now is his make-up line Jeffree Star Cosmetics with new products Liquid Frost, Skin Frost and Supreme Frost highlighters and his eye-shadow palettes Beauty Killer, Thirsty, Blood Sugar, and Androgyny, that will help keep the coin coming in.
And with 10 million subscribers, and the counter still clicking upward, who knows where the once-edgy, angsty emo gay kid who drove an old Nissan and lived on nothing, will end up.
The Star’s the limit.
