Good Design: Makeup Tutorials

     Watching one of Michelle Phan’s makeup tutorials is like looking through a window into a perfect world, where mascara never runs, and foundation never makes anyone look like an oompa-loompa with caked-on makeup. It is no accident then that this YouTube beauty guru is the most subscribed to female on YouTube and the first female to reach 1 million subscribers, for out of the dozens of other self-professed beauty gurus on YouTube she has come out on top, due to her amazing skill, creativity and ability to design makeup looks and video formats that communicate clearly to viewers
    Her videos are like candy, with tutorials like “Seductive Vampire,” “Lady Gaga Pokerface Look,” “Romantic Valentine’s Day Look” and “Makeup For Glasses” one can’t help but keep clicking on the next one. And the next one. You could find a tutorial for any occasion on her YouTube channel, her soothing voice guiding you calmly through the steps to making yourself look beautiful.
    It’s not that she’s just a talented makeup artist and good at designing new makeup looks, it’s also the way her videos are edited that make them so much easier to watch. Her style of video is very slick, professional and edited, with a certain minimalism that includes plain backdrops that reduce distraction, subtitles during and between each step to break down and simplify the process, showing and naming each product clearly up close to the screen, calming electronic/pop/ambient music playing in the background, and a close up point of view with good quality video. Her videos start with a few colorful graphics, then a brief glimpse of what the end result looks like to spark curiosity; however the most important element of her videos is that she uses voiceover, rather than commenting on each step in real time while creating the look on herself.
    This choice in editing is superior to other makeup gurus’ videos that speak instructions to the viewer while putting on makeup. Her style is much more pared down and simple, so that the viewer sees her go through the steps calmly, and confidently, with no facial expressions and getting right to the point. She goes through the exact process you would also go through whilst creating a beautiful makeup look. In this way, she is presenting herself as a blank slate the viewers can project themselves onto rather than allowing moving lips and her individuality to interfere in the viewer’s concentration as they try to create the look themselves.
It is very important that her vides have such a soothing effect because when someone is trying to create a show-stopping makeup look, they want it to be perfect and are likely to be stressing about it on some level.
    All these elements in her videos have helped her become the top YouTube guru, that success leading to her being featured in countless magazines and landing her a makeup deal with the cosmetics giant Lancôme to create videos using their products.
    Phan has taken advantage of today’s technology and social media that makes the tools of design available to everyone, using her Mac computer to shoot and edit her videos, working well within the limitations of the medium of film, combining words and images to make her message clearer, and in a way using her body as a billboard on which to deliver her message to her audience. Phan’s skillful design of her videos democratizes knowledge not previously available to regular people other than professional makeup artists, teaching thousands of women the skills to make themselves feel more beautiful in an age where the amount of information about design on the Internet is becoming more available to millions of people worldwide.