I uh... this is an interesting question for me. I started doing YouTube videos VERY early on, in the first wave in 2007. I had a nice hefty amount of subscribers and the free shit was ENDLESS! I quit because of school and my Dad being ill, plus you couldn't really live off of it at the time though I did have a PR person contact me. Being all of like, 20 at the time and having no clue it would turn into what it was, I said yes and basically all that meant is companies contacted her and they sent me things. People assume it is just brands that send you stuff and that's so not true. A magazine sent us out these giant boxes with probably a grand worth of stuff inside. One of the items was a $90 bottle of perfume, a $200 face serum. Many brands sent us their entire lines, like Anastasia Beverly Hills before she got big and Hard Candy for their relaunch at Walmart. I got offered $100 just to mention a jewelry company in a blog post.

At that point some of my "friends" (ONE of them continued talking to me after I quit) started taking a lot of the bribes. I'll say this, Coastal Scents would be nothing without YouTubers and honestly good for them for getting in on the ground floor and seeing YT for a cheap vehicle for advertisement! Same with Sigma, I received an entire set of brushes. This is when the viewership started to notice and question things, and people got smarter about the things they included in their videos. It is also when the FCC started regulating things and requiring that we state explicitly if we were being compensated for a review or received the product for free. That made a lot of seemingly honest YouTubers seem very greedy but I'll be honest it was an easy thing to get into and get carried away with. I still have my free Chi flat iron and use it everyday lol!

I will admit to being human and being incredibly jealous and bitter sometimes when I see the things that some of the women I started doing videos with have achieved. Like being flown to Paris or San Francisco for launches or getting free iPads from L'Oreal. However, it has not been good for most of their personalities, in my opinion, with a few exceptions of course. The ones that start vlogging (on the regular, I can understand it for interesting events or vacations) and selling people their life is where I stop feeling jealous and start feeling embarrassed for them. I hate how judgmental that sounds but you can very easily see how some of them are pretty deluded into thinking they're celebrities and hundreds of thousands of people care SO much what they buy at Trader Joe's. Okay, Skippy.

If you're going to watch makeup on YouTube, watch gossmakeupartist Wayne is a friggin genius, patrilude (Josh is an OG from the LiveJournal communities where all this YT stuff spawned and doesn't make videos much anymore but knows his shit, although a bit cocky haha), Lisa Eldridge (though I think her foundation routines take entirely too long and are unnecessary) , and glamlifeguru does awesome drugstore reviews and comparisons and I really trust her opinion even if her skills aren't 100%