Kesha Launches YouTube Channel, Beauty & BS with Kesha

Leah Prinzivalli
·5 min read

Kesha is becoming a YouTuber. In this unexpected and seemingly unending time at home, many of us are taking on new hobbies or discovering new obsessions. (See also: Puzzles and Animal Crossing.)

For Kesha, the quarantine-era enthusiasm is makeup application. The chart-topping singer already had her own beauty brand, Kesha Rose, but it wasn't until the lockdown and forced isolation that she truly practiced putting it on herself without the help of professional makeup artists. She's followed in the footsteps of thousands of fellow beauty enthusiasts and channeled those new skills into a YouTube channel, called Beauty & BS with Kesha, which launches today, Tuesday, August 11, with her first video.

"There are so many things that have been on my list of what I would love to do, but I've been so over-consumed with writing music, producing music, designing the tour outfits, working on the choreography. All that has obviously been put on hold right now," she tells me. With her tour schedule on pause, she's decided to "use this time in a positive way" and learn how to do her own makeup.

Of all the ways to kill time and find a new outlet for your chart-topping artist's mind, why makeup? "I really feel like makeup can help change your mood, almost like how music can,” she says. "Makeup can tell its own story and set its own mood."

The goal of the channel isn't to show off Kesha's makeup expertise; in fact, it's entirely the opposite. "I wanted to show my fans and people that maybe aren't used to doing makeup all the time," says Kesha. "I'm learning the process by having to film things by myself at my house, so they're learning with me."

We've all had to learn to find our light in the video chat camera and determine what makeup we are (or aren't) interested in wearing on Zoom calls. Kesha's had to go through the same process — with the added pressure of getting glammed up to appear in front of a national audience, as when she appeared on The Tonight Show from home in April. Of course, she's also able to FaceTime her makeup artist, which is exactly what she does in the channel's inaugural video.

<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Kesha</cite>
Courtesy of Kesha

The new video shows Kesha learning how to do "music video-worthy" makeup via video chat with the help of her go-to makeup artist Vittorio Masecchia. I assumed that meant she was recreating a look from a past music video, the "get the look" scenario that we often see with makeup tutorials. Nope. Immediately after their glam session, Kesha put her handiwork to use and filmed the "Since I Was Young" music video.

"That was fully us filming the very real situation, which was me having to do my own hair, makeup, lighting, filming, and set design," she says. "It just felt like an opportunity really capture some of the secrets that [Masecchia] uses for me on videos and share them." As with so much Kesha's done in the past, there's an added layer of vulnerability that makes her art all the more compelling.

Masecchia (who calls Kesha his "muse") has created incredible looks for her, like this tri-colored sunset eye with a rhinestone rainbow and exaggerated contour. But for this video, thanks to both her makeup skill level and the style of the song, they decided on a more pared-down look.

"I usually do a really intense eye with a lot of sparkles and color, but for this more introspective song, I wanted a timeless and classic look," she says, which (if you can believe it) pushed her out of her comfort zone more than the rainbow and glitter. In a nice bit of branding, she uses lipstick and liner from the Kesha Rose collection, but she tells me that won't always be the case.

Aside from her mandate that all products be cruelty-free, she's a fan of many brands besides her own, she says. So can we expect hauls and unboxing videos and a full face of Fenty — all the YouTube tropes we've come to know and love — from Kesha? Yes. "Anything to bring someone a second of escapism in this time of weirdness," she says.

Since this is Beauty YouTube in 2020 we're talking about, I asked Kesha about Dramageddon, the latest clash between some of the channel's biggest stars. She wasn't familiar with the details, but more importantly, she's not worried about wading into a notoriously eruption-prone corner of the internet.

"I have a lot of experience in being completely demolished by strangers online," she says. "It's never pleasant, but if you allow yourself to be too scared to try something, you're inhibiting your artistic reach. I'm expanding my perspective and showing the raw vulnerability of the fact that I'm not an expert and I'm not a makeup artist. But that's not gonna stop me."

Check out Beauty & BS with Kesha, which launches August 11, at youtube.com.

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Originally Appeared on Allure