‘I Guess A Lot of People See Me as a Big Sister or a Friend’: the role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers

Abstract

With an impressive 11 million subscribers, Zoe ‘Zoella’ Sugg is among the most popular of the young adults who have recently obtained fame (and fortune) by posting videos to YouTube. She figures prominently in the beauty group, one of the fastest-growing and most overtly feminized subsets of the YouTube community, creating videos on lifestyle, fashion and beauty-related topics. However, to a greater extent than many of her peers, Sugg supports her product-oriented videos with vlogs that offer behind-the-scenes, intimate access to her life(style). In so doing, Zoe’s videos encourage intimacy not simply between her viewers and the ‘big sister’ persona she adopts on-screen, but also between her audience and the commodities she associates herself with. This article argues that the success of the YouTube ‘influencer’ economy, both in terms of its gender predispositions and celebrity effects, depends on processes of commodification through intimacy, which Zoe Sugg mobilizes in exemplary fashion.

Keywords:

• YouTube
• beauty vlogs
• intimacy
• celebrity
• influencers
• Zoe Sugg

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rachel Berryman is a Masters student studying Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland. She is currently researching the intersection of narrative, social media and celebrity in literary adaptation web series, and spends her spare time tweeting about popular culture.

Misha Kavka is an associate professor of Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Reality TV (Edinburgh UP, 2012), and the co-editor of Gothic New Zealand (Otago UP, 2006) and of Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (Columbia UP, 2001).

Notes

1. Subscriptions to the Kim Kardashian West website cost $2.99 USD per month (to the chagrin of some commentators, who note that this means paying Kim KW for the privilege of buying products from her site), but there are likely more hidden revenue streams related to the collection of subscriber information as permitted by the privacy terms of the website, which allow using ‘information we collect to display advertisements to our advertisers’ target audiences’ and ‘disclos[ing] aggregated and de-identified information about our users without restriction’ (‘Legal’, n.d.).

2. It is worth noting that vlogging’s popularity on YouTube has increased immensely in recent years. In his 2010 book, Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People, Michael Strangelove recounts that ‘a search for the term vlog (video blog) on YouTube renders 310,000 hits’ (70). At the time of writing, the same search garners around 42,800,000 results, highlighting an unprecedented explosion of interest in vlogging during the last half-decade.

3. This video can be accessed at https://youtu.be/tdIFAYA933o

4. This video can be accessed at https://youtu.be/5y2KgohrVTw.

5. This video can be accessed at https://youtu.be/CrOAVLICvhw

6. Zoe has received wide praise for vocalizing her struggles with anxiety and panic attacks, as well as the strain her burgeoning celebrity has added to them (see Alexander, 2015; Cliff, 2015). In addition to authoring a number of blog posts on the topic, Zoe has created many videos detailing her experiences with anxiety and offering advice to similarly afflicted fans, including Dealing with Panic Attacks & Anxiety (https://youtu.be/7-iNOFD27G4) and Anxiety Q&A (https://youtu.be/Sjuk3WMZByo), which each have more than 2.5 million views.

7. These videos can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6-axi3jprE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maRVcLtV28E respectively. Joe’s channel also boasts a similar video, My Sister Does My Makeup, which was uploaded in March 2013 and has since received over 12 million views.

8. This video can be accessed at https://youtu.be/HXbR2GMwQ9A.

9. In January 2016, Zoe started a second Twitter account, @Zozeebo, promoted as a ‘Follow Back’ account allowing her to have more interactions with fans. However, the infancy of this account at the time of writing has precluded its inclusion from the present analysis.