BY JUSTINE POLANIC
Beauty gurus are among the most popular YouTubers, and one of them held a meet and greet last Saturday at the Toronto Eaton Centre Sephora store.
Welcoming around 500 screaming fans, 22-year-old Nikkie De Jager, of The Netherlands, entered Sephora. De Jager currently has almost 5.5 million subscribers on her NikkieTutorials channel.
Watch De Jager being greeted by her hundreds of fans.
Subscriber Matteo Maddalena was in the crowd on Saturday. “My friend and I arrived and got to the line around 10:30 a.m. I got to meet her at like 2:15 p.m., so I had waited four hours to meet her,” he recalls.
Maddalena says that he appreciated the YouTuber’s genuine personality. “She was so positive and you could tell she wanted to be there,” he says. “She wanted to support her fans and make this meet and greet very special.”
The event was in collaboration with the popular high-end makeup brand Too Faced, to promote De Jager’s new palette, the “Power of Makeup”, named after her most viewed YouTube video, The Power of MAKEUP! which now has more than 30 million views. The video is a turning point in De Jager’s YouTube career, and inspired several other beauty gurus to create their own “Power of Makeup” videos.
The palette includes nine new eye shadows, two blush shades, a bronzer and a highlight. The palette also comes with other products from Too Faced, including its popular Better Than Sex mascara in a limited edition purple shade, a full sized Sketch Marker Liquid Art Liner eyeliner in black, Glamour Dust in a blue shade and their Shadow Insurance 24-Hour Eye Primer. The whole set is $68.
Too Faced helped make Maddalena’s experience positive as well. “Sephora and Too Faced were very organized … they did a lot of PR work like touching up people’s makeup with Nikkie’s palette, giving out Starbucks coffee and even candy.”
Many more fans had positive experiences at the event, including self-taught Toronto based makeup artist Taryn Abramsohn. “She was so sweet and it was cool to see that her make up looked exactly in person how it does on screen,” says Abramsohn, “I definitely admire her skills, but she isn’t someone whose makeup I would want to copy on myself. I just think she’s funny and super talented and I really enjoy watching her and seeing how she does things.”
You can check out Ambramsohn’s work on her Instagram page @tarynbeauty.
Fans say that De Jager stayed past the time she was scheduled leave the event because she wanted to meet more fans.
