It all started with a hilarious tutorial on how to apply makeup while thoroughly intoxicated.
More
than four million hits later and 8.2 million subscribers and 'Jenna
Marbles' - her online persona - is one of the biggest stars on YouTube.
Real
name Jenna Mourey, the 25-year-old shoot her videos out of her
$1.1million Santa Monica town house - a far cry from the $800-a-month
Cambridge, Massachusetts, pad she lived in when she first started out.
Her
total video views have reached more than one billion and she has more
Facebook fans and Twitter followers than some of the biggest celebrities
in Planet Hollywood.
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Star: Jenna Mourey shoots her videos out of her
$1.1million Santa Monica town house - a far cry from the $800-a-month
Cambridge, Massachusetts, pad she lived in when she first started out
Co-stars: Her dogs Marbles and Kermit are also big stars of her videos and often sit inside her top for long periods of time
Fame: Jenna Marbles with Larry King at the third
Annual Streamy Awards at Hollywood Palladium, left, and right, she gets
the James Joyce Award from the UCD L&H Society
VIDEO See a clip of Jenna Marbles' now-famous Youtube tutorial
But what makes her
so popular? What separates her from the thousands of other wannabe
YouTube stars? Her straight-up, funny, no-holds barred, profanity-laced
videos have a huge fan base - mainly in the form of teenage girls all
over America.
They
love her because she speaks directly to them about issues that are
important in their young lives. Issues like - Things Boys Don't
Understand, Things Boys Think About During Sex, How Guys Fall Asleep and
Drunk Christmas Tree Decorating.
Since
that first drunk makeup tutorial, she has had to hire an assistant, a
business manager and take her mother on to deal with her fan mail and
endorsement requests.
Though she would not disclose how much she is making in an interview with the New York Times, industry
experts estimate that a star at Jenna Marbles’s level could make a very
comfortable six figures from advertising revenues that the video
network pays out to members of the YouTube Partner Program.
TubeMogul, a video
ad-buying platform in California, examined traffic on the Jenna Marbles
channel and estimated that she could have earned as much as $346,827.12
in 2012.
She did tell the Times: 'I make more money than I need ever.
'I'm
not completely sold that you ever have to transition to mainstream
media, you know? What I get to do is have fun in my house, by myself,
and put it on the Internet.'
Before and after: Jenna Mourey, a 25-year-old
YouTube personality from Santa Monica, has uploaded a hilarious video of
herself applying make-up while she is 'drunk.' She is shown slurring as
she offers 'tips' to women
When she and her
boyfriend Max - who used to feature heavily on her videos - split up,
the outcry from her fans was akin to that of Robert Pattinson and
Kristen Stewart.
When
she eventually announced the split on YouTube, her fans reacted on
Twitter: 'MY LIFE IS OVER', 'I feel like my parents are getting
divorced,' and 'everything I know about love is a lie.'
In
the summer of 2010, she was making ends meet by bartending, blogging,
go-go dancing at nightclubs and working at a tanning salon, despite
having a degree in sports psychology.
Fame came fast after she posted the drunk makeup tutorial which shows the-then 25-year-old attempting to
apply false eyelashes, liquid eyeliner, lip liner and other cosmetics to her
face in a video that pokes fun at the unpolished make-up often seen on inebriated women.
It first shows the
Boston University graduate present a plastic cup filled with an unspecified liquid
to the camera before getting to work on touching-up her face.
She is seen slurring at the camera: 'Nobody
really talks about how hard it is, if you go, like, day-drinking and then
everyone's like "yeah alright, rally in a few hours and then let's go out"… how
f***ing impossible it is to put make-up on and get ready when you’re drunk.'
What follows is a suspiciously coherent, albeit ridiculous,
demonstration on how to apply common cosmetics.
First, Miss Mourey is shown discussing skin preparation.
Messy: The YouTube star's tutorial has attracted more than one million hits since it was uploaded Wednesday
'Make it look like your skin is not so angry at you for your bad life choices,' she says.
'Make your face look like a different face by piling on, like, the heaviest make-up you can find and do it with some kind of brush that doesn't judge you.
'If you can't move your brush good, just move your face.'
Funny: She advises women not to wash their face in fear that by doing so, 'you might drown'
She says: 'You don’t have time for concealer but you have time for powder for when you start crying later about how some boy doesn’t like you.
'What I like to do is take liquid eyeliner… take a little
baby step and now you’re committed, there’s no turning back.
She then applies eye shadow to her eyelids.
'You’ve got the black and then you want to just put some sh** on your sh**.’
She now does uncanny impressions of famous people including Snooki, Lady Gaga. Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber.
Thorough: She uses powder rather than concealer before attempting to add eye shadow to her eyelids
Struggle: False eyelashes prove difficult to apply but Miss Mourey claims that the job is rather easy
Beauty: She goes so far as to attempt to apply lip liner, telling viewers the colour does not matter
The end: The final result is completely
unflattering, leading viewers to suspect that her techniques are in fact
poking fun at women