“The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star,” the first-ever documentary exposing the business and process of creating makeup premiered on the channel of long-time YouTuber, Shane Dawson this past October. With the first episode premiering on Oct. 1 and the last episode on Nov. 22, each episode has over 10 million views.
This isn’t the first time that Dawson has collaborated with Jeffree Star for a series. The YouTubers collaborated last year with a five-episode series called, “The Secret World of Jeffree Star,” uncovering the behind-the-scenes of both Star’s professional and personal life — such as Star reflecting about his MySpace days, where he first became famous — to showing his warehouses and factory for his self-made makeup company, Jeffree Star Cosmetics (JSC), for the first time ever.
Last year’s series ended with Star suggesting to Dawson that he should invest in the makeup community, and possibly make his own eyeshadow palette or other makeup product. A little over one year later, this suggestion became a reality when the duo sold one million eye shadow palettes in mere minutes, while also crashing Shopify, the online shopping service that runs the JSC website.
All the items related to the Shane x Jeffree Conspiracy Collection sold out. The collection included the Conspiracy palette, the Mini Controversy palette, liquid lipsticks, root beer-flavored lip gloss and chapstick, makeup bags and even pig-themed purses and mirrors. The collection is also sold out on Morphe and Beautylish, retailers of JSC.
What’s unique to this collection is that the makeup consumers not only get to play with this creative collaboration and create a number of looks, but they got to see every step of how it was made.
The series started with an idea: to make a collection that was different than anything the beauty community has seen. The following episodes focused on planning a timeline and what products were to be released in the collaboration. Viewers got to see board meetings with the JSC team, listen in on business calls with companies like Morphe and see the process of picking and naming eyeshadow colors.
As the episodes go on, viewers see the edits made to the eyeshadows, the failures regarding the planning of the Conspiracy palette’s packaging and — most importantly — the factory making the final product.
The viewers also got a glimpse of Dawson’s personal life as well. They saw him get engaged to his now fiancé, Ryland Adams, and Star gives Shane’s future sister-in-law, Morgan Adams, advice about entering the YouTube world, specifically the beauty community. There is also a part where we see Dawson’s reaction to cancel culture when #shanedawsonisoverparty was trending on Twitter. At this moment, we see a celebrity’s raw reaction in situations like these. We also got to see Dawson switch merch brands over to Killer Merch, another company Star owns.
Since the docu-series is so detailed, viewers and the makeup community feel as if they’re making the collection with Dawson and Star. Also, throughout the series, when customers purchase their products, they have 100% transparency of how the products were made and the amount of effort put into creating them.
Even though throughout the series JSC may have been more transparent than any other makeup company has been with buyers, there was some controversy regarding the content. In the trailer, Dawson teased that the series will address Star’s involvement with the beauty community drama earlier in the year regarding YouTubers and beauty gurus, James Charles and Tati Westbrook. Dawson showed a snippet of him and his fiancé watching Westbrook’s video, now deleted, accusing James Charles of his poor character, including using his fame to manipulate straight men to hook up with him.
Star added fuel to the fire by claiming on Twitter he has receipts to back up Westbrook’s claim, and how Charles was banned from his home. Star, however, did not show these receipts and explained why in a YouTube video.
Although this was teased, we only got 20 minutes of the drama in the hour-long finale. We did not get any of Star’s unfiltered reaction to the situation; we only got Dawson’s. As it is, Dawson was torn about whether to put any of this in the finale because everyone was loving the behind-the-scenes of the makeup business, according to an Instagram Live from Dawson. He was unsure of whether to stick to his gut or expose what he promised.
In the end, Dawson made the best decision for the series. By including more of the drama, he would’ve added more fuel to the fire that was pretty much put out months ago. Dawson wanted the focus of the series to be about the makeup line, the product and the production — rather than the drama within the community.
