Starrr, 30, is chatting via a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home, wearing a long bronze wig, elaborate faux lashes, caked-on and contoured foundation and full, plump lips. His outsize personality is in full force.
Starrr is a native of Orlando, Florida. His Filipino immigrant parents wanted their son to “get a diploma, get a degree, these are the things that are deemed successful in our society”, he recalls. For a while, he followed their wishes. At 18, he was a nursing student, and worked part-time jobs teaching piano, serving customers in a bakery, doing photography.
He grew up in an era of makeover shows, the rise of America’s Next Top Model, and he harboured a love for Disney princesses, who he says were “all about transformation”.
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“Cinderella and Snow White aspired to be something better than they were,” he said. “In a sense I felt like, early on as an influencer, I had my own version of a Cinderella story, but my glass slipper was a brush in my hand. That’s the core of me and what I love, personifying beauty through transformation.”
In 2013, he launched his YouTube channel, and set himself apart by showing his followers how to pile on foundation and powder for his now signature look.
“I was very consistent and got traction because I was so crazy with smacking powder on my face,” he said. “It was very visual. It was absolutely ludicrous and so eye-catching and I brought that drag queen experience into the mainstream via YouTube.”
His following grew further when he did make-up tutorials for different types of people – mature women, women of colour, light-skinned models, men. The precision of his technique, combined with his exuberant personality, helped garner views. Each video he posted netted another 25,000 followers, and in 2016, he went from 600,000 subscribers to a million.
“My manager said to me, ‘once you hit a million, it will go crazy. I didn’t believe her. But we hit a million subscribers on YouTube, and it went crazy.” By 2017, Starrr was at a “pivotal point in his career”. He was approached to do make-up collaborations with MAC, was called upon to do Kim Kardashian’s and Katy Perry’s make-up, and was part of a glam squad for three seasons of a Snapchat series called Face Forward.“I was a Filipino-American boy who had worked in a bakery in Orlando and now all of my business and social skills were being put to the test in a corporate environment. I was developing more or less my own brand, which foreshadowed my career in being the brand owner that I am now.”
The first two products from One/Size are Go Off, an ingenious make-up remover mist, and large wipes which Starrr guarantees will remove even the thickest make-up. He followed that with Visionary, a series of glittery eye shadows, an eye colour palette and eye pencils. The colours are suitable for everyone, something that has been on his mind since a shopping trip in 2016 when he couldn’t find anything to suit his larger body.
“I couldn’t buy anything, but I could buy make-up. That’s one size fits all. I tweeted that out right away, and it became my mantra. I wanted to spread inclusivity, that make-up is for everybody, and in starting my brand, it was natural to call it One/Size.”
Starrr doesn’t want to lose sight of the original motivation behind his brand – to encourage everyone to feel comfortable in their own skin. He talks frequently about identity, and his desire to hold on to his cultural roots.
“I’m very much connected with my culture,” he says, adding that he speaks some Tagalog as well as Ilonggo.
He often receives messages from people around the world, who “are discriminated [against] where they are at”, and wants to do his part to rectify that.
“If I can showcase me as a man in make-up that is deemed beautiful in a sense, it would be helpful to all those other people, helping them feel confident in the long term. It always comes back to the idea of community, culture and representation,” he said.
“On paper, I’m not the typical cookie-cutter standard of what beauty was in the 1990s. But yet, two decades into the new millennium, I’m a version of a brand of beauty that is now represented.”
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