Once the initial buzz died down, however, many brands lost interest. Cosmetic brands saw an opportunity to profit from the excitement and the novelty around the emergence of beauty boys. The industry eventually lost its momentum, though, and the result is a strange dissonance between what we see on privately run social media accounts – a booming community with millions of followers between Instagram and YouTube – and the advertisements run by many legacy cosmetics corporations. In 2019, the actor Ezra Miller appeared in Urban Decay’s “Pretty Different” campaign alongside the musician Lizzo. A chart mapping the shade range of Tarte’s Shape Tape foundation features one male model in a lineup of women’s faces. Since then, legacy brands have taken small but perceptible steps towards inclusivity. Star has his own brand, Jeffree Star Cosmetics, which routinely features male models. In 2018, Bretman Rock, 19 at the time, designed collections with ColourPop and Morphe, which bolstered its 2017 launch by collaborating with male beauty vloggers including Manny MUA, James Charles, and Jeffree Star. The next year, Maybelline partnered with the male makeup artist Manny MUA. The move seemed to signify a dramatic change in the mainstream perception of cosmetics. In 2016, James Charles, at 17, became CoverGirl’s first male model. The cosmetics industry should look much different than it does today. Before the lockdown, a couple of laps around the store wouldn’t yield a single advertisement featuring a male model, not even in the Milk Makeup section, despite the fact that the brand released a pointedly gender-neutral advertisement in 2017. Or take the Sephora at Jersey City’s Newport mall, home to legacy brands such as Dior and Charlotte Tilbury. Harper’s Bazaar featured one male expert in its beauty section - in a small sidebar on hair care. Of the combined 19 beauty editorials and advertisements in the summer 2020 issues of Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar, for instance, not a single one features a male or (out) non-binary model. There’s little evidence that the mainstream beauty community will be supportive, either. Like Ceretti, they cannot be sure their families will be supportive. “We all support each other and lift each other up because it’s rare to get such a response from anyone outside of our community, so we have to take on that role and celebrate what we do for ourselves.”Įven in an era of increasingly progressive views of gender and sexuality, boys who wear makeup fear public ridicule and rejection. “Instagram was and still is the only way for me to talk and share this with others like me,” Ceretti tells me. She was surprised, but supportive, and in June Ceretti started a public Instagram account to showcase his looks. He went on like this for four months, sneaking into the bathroom after lights out to become Ella Souflee, until one day his mother walked into his room while he was in drag.
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