Beauty Vlogger Superfans Trash Their Heroes in This Online Burn Book

Her blush is uneven, the right cheek is darker. Fail. And her skin is always broken out in every video. I don't think she's ever mentioned having acne, but her skin is never clear.

Casually critical yet very particular, the average post on Guru Gossip sets its sights on the "gurus" of YouTube. Selling itself as "the TMZ of YouTube gurus," the forum site offers a forum for viewers to offer their uncensored opinions on the beauty and lifestyle vlogger community.

These makeup artists, reviewers, and "haul girls" are courted by brands and revered by their school-aged fans as glamorous older sisters. Unless you habitually google smoky eye techniques or Kardashian-esque contouring, you might never have encountered them, though the gurus are gradually moving into the mainstream. But with success comes criticism.

The "Rave About a Guru" section of Guru Gossip is popular (4,000+ posts) but "Trash a Guru" is the main draw with over 743,000 posts. It hosts an unusually female form of trolling; an online "burn book" in the Mean Girls mold.

Dating back to 2010, and now more popular than ever, Guru Gossip's posts alternate between feigned concern and outright cruelty, fixating on details like skin conditions, vocal tics, or whether or not the guru's house looks messy.

While many gurus preserve a DIY bedroom aesthetic, YouTube is an increasingly commercial affair. Where once the gurus were seen as a grassroots alternative to beauty editors, they are now more powerful than print media, often at the cost of their independence. By partnering with brands, vloggers complicate the ethics of their reviews.

Guru Gossip exists as a critical underside to the YouTube comment section; it's a platform filled with rumours and bitching and liberal servings of truth tea. The prevailing feeling on its boards is that YouTubers often want to mislead their fans, and that truths suppressed on one platform will come out on another.

The SacconeJoly family, Carli Bybel, and OrganizedLikeJen are favourite targets, as are any vloggers seeking to preserve a "positive environment" by removing negative comments.

Re: Her brown tooth, sorry to double post but doesn't she always drink out of a straw? How come her teeth are stained if she drinks through a straw all the time?

Dig around in Guru Gossip and you'll unearth serious accusations (child neglect is a common theme, as are cheating spouses and secret plastic surgery), but most of all you'll find minor bitching. Like YouTube itself, it commands a global following, which is reflected in the diversity of its voices. Dublin blogger Leanne Woodfull is labelled a "geebag" (which this Irish writer can confirm is a very Irish phrase) while Denver makeup artist TymeTheInfamous is called a "heaux," forum-safe spelling of ho, and more creatively "the Countess Fuckery McDuckery of Bitchpleaseshire."

But the prevailing tone is one of disappointment, with users apparently spending hours, maybe days, watching YouTube videos, only to turn around and demand their time back. Most of what they complain about could not be observed without obsessive attention. Though forum rules discourage it, it's also common to find details listed of where YouTubers apparently live, or to discover unearthed high school pictures of the guru with their old boyfriend, or haircut, or nose.

Vloggers are accused of being selfish and overconfident, of "acting like a prostitute," "acting like a spoiled brat," or even of being overly normal. But most of all, their authenticity is questioned.

The guru critic exists in a constant state of disgust at the artifice of the very form they love; their obsession with authenticity outdoes even the preceding hipster generation's. They are young enough to have grown up online, but old enough to remember back when YouTube videos were genuinely homespun.

They remember when their favourite or least favourite gurus were just starting out, and when less commercial videos were made with love and uniformly judged to be "better." It's not unlike music forums claiming that today's musicians are sellouts, or that everything since the rave era has been a disappointment.

Yes, I read her blog post about people making negative comments towards her. It's obvious she moderates them on her YT account.

It must be confusing to come of age during Web 2.0, to be fed an image of a grassroots, "democratised" media that nonetheless carries a sponsor's name. It's obvious that commenters fail to view YouTube videos as a commercial product: confusion about what authenticity means—#nofilter selfies, candid relationships chats, stylized "realness" versus everyday realness—fuels most of the debate.

Of course a YouTuber moderates her comments, just as she edits her videos. No one believes that the vision of life presented by YouTube, Pinterest or lifestyle blogs is faithful to reality. No one lives on an Instagram diet of pumpkin spice and macaroons. No one actually woke up like this.

As of October 2014, membership figures are the highest in Gossip Guru's history, and there are now 1,022,042 posts in total. Users claim they'll "unsub" but they keep on viewing. The site's existence is baffling not only because of its popularity, but because its demands remain unclear. Users seem to want both a more honest and more polished product, one which appears professional but is still humble and homegrown.

Baudrillard's idea of "simulacra and simulation", that favourite of Redditing laptop philosophers, applies. An image clouds our vision of the truth, then more images proliferate and we forget the truth entirely. The lives presented by YouTube gurus will always seem inauthentic, because they follow a skewed version of what "reality" should look like in the first place.

The online beauty guru "real" is learned from blogs and Instagram and Pinterest, photo-filtered and relentlessly twee. Behind that looms the influence of the beauty and lifestyle industry itself, which was never too concerned with reality in the first place.

Video imitates Pinterest, art imitates artifice, and the burn book of the internet finds yet more to complain about.