Nikkie de Jagar, the Dutch star of NikkieTutorials on YouTube, came out as transgender earlier this week. It’s a secret that de Jagar kept for more than 10 years, deceiving millions of followers along the way.
“I can’t believe I am saying this today to all of you, for the entire world to see, but d— it feels good to finally do it. It’s time to let go and be truly free,” de Jagar said in the video uploaded to YouTube entitled ‘I am Coming Out.’ “When I was younger, I was born in the wrong body, which means that I am transgender.”
The announcement has been met with support by most in the online makeup community and by celebrities like Marc Jacobs, Ariana Grande and Lena Dunham.
Makeup tutorials are definitely a “thing” on YouTube. Some of the men and women who produce these videos make millions and millions of dollars per year producing makeup lines that consistently sell out.
It’s a crazy world, but the recent announcement by de Jagar was particularly shocking since no one in the community or the audience knew about de Jagar’s real biological identity.
NikkieTutorials is one of the most popular channels on the platform with nearly 13 million subscribers.
It must have been strange for Nikkie’s followers, who are mostly teenagers and young women, to learn that the “woman” they’ve followed for years is a biological man, especially since it is a makeup channel. For the audience, it sends an incredibly confusing message about womanhood.
To the unsuspecting eye, de Jagar looks like a woman. It’s only without the makeup that the audience, perhaps, can see the biological reality hiding below the surface. But what difference is there between men and women when a man can seemingly look more beautiful than most women? That puts an enormous amount of pressure on the young audience that watches her channel.
There is no doubt that de Jagar engaged in a staggering amount of deception on NikkieTutorials. Regardless of how anyone feels about transgenderism, de Jagar knowingly misled young women and men for over a decade.
Even Nikkie’s fiancé was unaware of Nikkie’s true biology for a period of time, though it’s unclear how long. (Supposedly, they are working through this revelation quietly.)
Personally, I really enjoy makeup. But over the years I’ve recently developed this philosophy: makeup should enhance your features, but never mask them. If it does, then makeup becomes a mask to hide behind and a way to deceive others about your true self. That’s exactly what de Jagar did, and who knows how it has impacted the young women watching the channel.
If Nikkie de Jagar’s channel was about cooking or perhaps travel, this wouldn’t have been much of a story at all. But that her channel provided makeup tutorials, an almost purely female domain, is problematic. It puts unnecessary and unrealistic pressure on teenagers and young women to reach unnatural standards of beauty.
Photo from Youtube
