Watching the YouTube influencer, known as Patrick Starrr, smack white powder onto the slight hollows under his eyes, it might occur to you that you are witnessing a kind of modern Kabuki.
In one 15-minute makeup video, he transforms his pleasant brown, freckled face into a brightened blank slate that's slimmer, radiant, spellbinding to look at.
A post shared by patrickstarrr(@patrickstarrr) on Feb 9, 2018 at 6:51pm PST
Starrr - who in the real world is a 28-year-old Los Angeles makeup artist named Patrick Simondac - gestures triumphantly at his work. "Now," he announces, "this is what you call snatched." In other words, perfect.
Simondac is one of the internet's many, many makeup gurus, although, with 3.9 million Instagram followers and 3.3 million YouTube subscribers, he's among the most recognizable. What he's known for, besides his woke understanding of gender politics and his sassy humor, is what he calls "the full-beat face."
The full-beat face has become the ubiquitous face of the internet, a strange mirror of Kim Kardashian's visage but also somehow just like internet influencer Huda Kattan's and Kylie Jenner's, too.
A post shared by Kim Kardashian West(@kimkardashian) on Oct 31, 2017 at 7:23am PDT
Instagram is awash in full-beat glory. The indie makeup brand ColourPop regularly shares gauzy selfies of young women wearing their popular matte lipsticks, fingers seductively held up to their mouths. Save for variations in skin color and precise shade of shimmering eye shadow, the women all look uncannily the same.
It's the "Instagram look," says Christen Irias, another Los Angeles-based makeup artist and YouTube star better known to her fans as Christen Dominique. "When you take a picture, you lose the dimension on your face. The light will wash it away." Over time, savvy 'Grammers realized that with a small mountain of makeup - a Patrick Starrr or NikkieTutorials video will regularly feature as many as 20 products - you could replace the shadows and the light and then some.
A post shared by Christen Dominique🖤(@christendominique) on Sep 5, 2017 at 2:18pm PDT
Dominique, who refers to the face as "full-glam," ticks off what it requires: "An elongated eye, lashes, contouring, bronzing, highlighting, and sculpting," she says. A theatrical set of drawn-on brows. And finally, it almost always features a matte lip so overdrawn that it can look like an allergic reaction, if not a syringe full of Juvederm.
Dominique, Simondac and other YouTube makeup artists have made minor fortunes posting makeup tutorials. Just one of Dominique's "full-glam" lessons has 11 million views.
So now, it's likely that even you have seen the face, maybe in your very own home, where your teenage daughters (or sons) lately are lingering too long in front of the bathroom mirror, "bouncing" foundation onto their crease-less cheeks, "baking" banana-colored powder under their eyes, penciling in tiny hair marks above their eyes so carefully that when they're done, their eyebrows are creations on a par with Van Gogh's "The Starry Night."
"It's extreme in person," admits Dominique. "But it looks great in pictures."
And the pictures, of course, are what so much of modern life is about.
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