Lauren Mychal better known as Mykie is a self-taught beauty and special effects makeup artist and YouTuber. She is best known for her YouTube channelGlam&Gore, where she posts beauty and special effects makeup tutorials along with challenges, stories, and ghost-hunting expeditions. She was named Beauty Vlogger of the Year at the 4th Annual NYX Cosmetics Face Awards in 2015.
Mykie started her YouTube channel Glam&Gore in 2014, uploading her first video on April 15, 2014. Between freelance jobs, she posted her makeup and makeup tutorials online to build up a portfolio, through doing this she grew an audience, with 700,000 subscribers in the first year and a half. Mykie uploads regular content to her YouTube channel. One of these was using drug store make up to transform herself into Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants. The difficultly for this challenge was to find cheap items that would her to achieve Squidward's head shape. A trip to Walgreens later, and Mykie had bought $160 worth of items to help her on her way. She proceeded to show items and how she intended to use each item to create a realistic recreation of the character.
Halloween series
Mykie has created many SFX looks which could be used as halloween-related costume ideas and tutorials. In 2017 she created a rainbow zombie tutorial, which used liquid latex, cotton and FX gelatin to create the look. In 2018 she made a tutorial of a glamorous version of the character Pennywise from the movie It. Each year Mykie has created several videos or a full-blown series of videos dedicated to Halloween. In 2018 this involved doing special effects makeup from haunted locations such as Jerome, Arizona and the Queen Mary.
Viral Marketing
In the lead up to the release of the film Suicide Squad, promotional photographs of the characters were released and the tattooed Jared Leto as the Joker raised questions as to where the tattoos had come from. Mykie and Chase Langley created and released photographs of the character Harley Quinn tattooing the Joker with Mykie portraying Harley Quinn in the photographs. Several media outlets picked up the photograph, speculating whether the picture was authentic. Mykie later revealed that the photo was fanart in the video "Harley Quinn Makeup Tutorial from the new Suicide Squad movie & Joker Fan Art". In March 2017 Mykie made a tutorial for a look inspired from the Death Stranding video game. The look was so realistic that when an image from the tutorial was released before the full video tutorial was uploaded, it was believed to be a leaked image of actress Emma Stone joining the all-male cast of Death Stranding. In the comments of the tutorial Mykie responded to the speculation about the blurry picture "We didn't call it Emma Stone or a leak, other did and we didn't add any context, but yes that's a picture from this shoot."
Mykie was named Beauty Vlogger of the Year at the 2015 NYX FACE Awards, more than 2 million votes were cast throughout the competition and 3,000 original entries were made before 30 semifinalists were selected. Each of the semifinalists created looks inspired by three challenge themes and the top 6 finalists were chosen through rounds of public voting.
Controversies
In June 2016 the photo messaging applicationSnapchat appeared to be copying several artist's work, including a make-up look that Mykie had created a year earlier, and using them in Snapchat filters without credit. Following this Mykie became an advocate for other artists faced with similar problems, and attempted to work with Snapchat to sort the issues out. Snapchat added additional layers of review for designs to avoid similar situations in the future. In April 2017 Mykie uploaded a satirical video titled "Re-Accommodated Makeup Tutorial - Inspired by United Airlines," this makeup tutorial received backlash on social media as the tutorial outlined how to achieve a bruised and bloodied look similar to the appearance of the doctor who was dragged off United Airlines flight 3411.
