“I completely disappeared. I just left. I stopped uploading to YouTube. I’m an Aries so I’m either very hot or very cold,” says Michelle Phan, who stopped by the Racked offices on a recent whirlwind press junket to promote the launch of her Em cosmetics line. It’s not the first time she’s launched Em, however.
Phan, who is almost 30, is one of YouTube’s biggest success stories and arguably one of the most popular and recognizable so-called beauty gurus on the platform, with almost 9 million subscribers and well over a billion views of her videos. Then there’s Ipsy, her beauty sampling company, which is worth a reported $500 million.
Phan is successful in her field, if not at the very top of it. At the beginning of 2016, she landed on the covers of both Forbes and Nylon, lauded for her success both online and off. She should have been damn pleased with herself at that point. But that’s not how she felt.
“I peaced out because I think I was going through depression. I don’t know because I didn’t go to a hospital or anything or get diagnosed, but I was taking a few quizzes online and I felt really sad every day,” Phan says. Of her dual covers, she muses: “You would think, This achievement is great. You should be happy. But I wasn’t. I was waking up feeling so broken. I didn’t know why.”
Read more at Racked.