Are you familiar with Laura Lee?
If not, then you just need to know that she’s a YouTuber known for doing makeup reviews and tutorials, and she also has her own makeup line.
And she’s in a whole, whole bunch of hot water right now.
To give a little bit of background, Laura was recently on a trip with some other beauty gurus, and they all posed for a photo together with their middle fingers up.
The person who shared the photo on Twitter captioned it “Bitch is bitter because without him, we’re better.”
Most people took it as a dig at Jeffree Star, a former friend of all the people in the photo, including Laura.
But the thing is that Jeffree’s fanbase is really, really intense, so even though none of those people went after him directly, his fans still took it upon themselves to dig up any dirt they could on them.
They succeeded.
Some screenshots of tweets that Laura made several years ago have been going around, and they’re pretty awful.
And by “pretty awful,” we mean super racist.
“Tip for all black people,” one of the tweets reads, “if you pull ur pants up you can run from the police faster.. #yourwelcome.”
In another, she wrote “Ni**as in Paris? Whaaaaat I thought they couldn’t afford to leave Compton! LOL!”
In one last tweet, just in case you weren’t disgusted enough, she asked “How do you blindfold a Chinese person? Put floss over their eyes!”
If you can even believe it, she actually added “#dumbgook” to the end of that one.
Because she is garbage.
When it became clear that her old tweets were becoming a big deal, Laura deactivated her Twitter, then came back after deleting several tweets.
She also posted a lengthy apology, explaining that “the girl who tweeted that isn’t who I am today.”
Her story was that she’s just “a small town girl from Alabama” so she didn’t know any better, but she was 24 years old when she wrote all of those tweets.
Most 24 year olds, even ones from small towns in Alabama, understand racism.
Laura also said in her apology that she planned on “getting involved with foundations that focus on educating the importance of equality and social justice.”
To wrap things up, she said that she hoped she’d be able to earn her fans’ respect back.
It did not work out like that.
Her followers weren’t happy with the apology because it didn’t feel sincere, and also how dumb is it that she tried to act like she didn’t know any better because she’s from the south?
So Laura took a few days and then posted an apology video on her YouTube account.
And it is insane:
It doesn’t really matter what she said, because it’s mostly the same stuff she said in her written apology — that she’s way sorry and she’s not really a racist.
Interestingly though, she said several times in the video that she retweeted those racist things, when the screenshots clearly show that she wrote them herself.
But it’s strange because even though she’s sobbing through the whole thing, there aren’t any tears, and even though she’s clearly very emotional, she made a lot of edits to what’s supposed to be a raw video.
So yeah, most people think she’s being fake here, too, and that she’s not actually sorry for tweeting those awful things, she’s just sorry she got caught.
She’s probably extremely sorry now, since it’s starting to look like her career is over.
A few weeks ago, Laura celebrated reaching five million subscribers on YouTube, but now she’s down to about 4.5 million, which is a pretty extreme drop.
Her cosmetics company is also suffering — Ulta recently announced that they’d be carrying her products on their site and in stores, but it doesn’t look like that’s happening anymore.
A spokesperson for Ulta spoke with The Blast, saying “We have decided not to move forward with the launch of Laura Lee Los Angeles. Ulta Beauty values equality and inclusivity in all that we do.”
In addition to Ulta cutting ties with her, Laura has also been cut loose by Boxycharm, a beauty subscription service that carried her products, and Morphe and Colourpop, cosmetics companies that have worked with her in the past.
Things really, really aren’t looking good for her right now.
And that’s one of the many, many reasons why you don’t want to be a racist!
