James Charles, a name so chilling
that it requires a trigger warning.
Trigger warning: James Charles.
You can say a lot of things about James Charles.
Most of them are bad.
Like, really bad.
But objectively, he is one of the most well-known
influencers from the last 10 years.
And because of how much exposure
and business success he saw over the years,
James Charles is truly somebody who could have had it all
if only he wasn't a piece of shit.
If you're watching this video, odds are you've heard of James,
or you've at least heard of his infamy.
You may have had the petrifying experience
of seeing his BBL or hearing him say
"Hi sisters!"
This guy's digital footprint has some of the funniest
and grossest shit I have ever seen.
Because as we'll get into, he is a massive creepo, freako,
womp womp.
It is quite a tale.
So allow me to take you on an Unhinged James Charles Deepdive.
James Charles (or James Charles Dickinson)
was born on May 23rd, 1999 in Bethlehem, New York.
And he is Emily Dickinson's third cousin twice removed -
ignore that, it was a lie, I just lied.
In 2010, at the age of 11, he started his
very first YouTube channel called JaysCoding.
This channel mostly consisted of him covering songs like
"Pumped Up Kicks".
♫ "You better run, better run faster than my bullet." ♫
"Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood.
♫ "Carved my name into his leather seats." ♫
But most notably, this "It Will Rain" cover
where he's wearing this wolf hat.
♫ "- morphine at my door." ♫
And although these childhood videos are wholesome,
this would be the start of a very troubling
pattern of him singing unprompted.
Although my personal favorite video that I found on JaysCoding
was this six-second upload of just a image of an eye.
Like, bro really uploaded an image to YouTube,
and that is so of the time.
But in 2015, he would launch his second and main channel
that we know today as James Charles.
And this is where he started uploading makeup tutorials, such as
serpent makeup tutorial and Snapchat Galaxy makeup tutorial.
And as you can see, none of these look particularly good.
In fact, they're pretty bad, but I assure you
everyone's makeup looked really bad in 2015,
so that really means nothing I guess.
But he was gaining a really decent audience from posting these tutorials.
But the inciting incident, the catalyst that would launch
James Charles' career, happened in September of 2016.
And this moment would have irreversible repercussions on society and the Internet.
James was 17 years old at this point,
and he had just taken his senior photos,
which came out fugly according to him.
And so he hired the school photographer to come back
and let him retake the pictures with his ring light.
And as you can see here, his highlight is definitely going off,
his brows have a good Roblox look to them.
However, where I draw the line is that man bun.
What the f**k?
Anyways, his friend convinces him to post these
new glamorous pictures online and they go extremely viral.
Like, this picture of James was being shared
so much that CoverGirl noticed it.
And that is how he became the world's first male CoverGirl.
Now because this was 2016, it stirred controversy amongst conservatives.
And, you know, of course it did
because it's CoverGirl, not "CoverDong".
Seriously, though, I found this old Twitter thread
where people are just bitching about this like there's no tomorrow.
A great example is this one:
reads tweet.
There's also this one where a woman compares
James being on CoverGirl to a white person doing blackface.
Um... Nurse, she's out again!
Anyways, outisde of these randos making a stink out of it,
this opened up a lot of opportunities
for James.
I mean, he went on Ellen, I guess that's not that impressive, though.
As I mentioned in the Jojo Siwa video, you could literally fart into a bucket
and somehow make it on Ellen at this point in time.
And as his fame was escalating,
he did his first-ever fan meet.
Only 50 people showed up to this event,
and one of the videos that was taken there
was turned into a meme because at
some point James just sat down on the ground and started singing.
♫ Bring me a little water now! Bring me little water, Sylvie!♫
I don't know what my favorite part about this meme is. It might be
the Snapchat caption that says "f**k it up"
which insinuates that he's doing a good job singing right now.
Or it could be the fact that he raises
his finger up as if he's hitting those high notes.
This was, of course, the very first time
that he was turned into a meme,
but it's certainly would not be the last.
This same year, James did a CoverGirl promotion with Zendaya,
and oh my God, this has gotta be
one of the most unintentionally funny videos I've ever seen.
So this video that they're doing is a challenge to see what makeup
looks they could come up with in the span of 5 minutes.
And so they're both in a rush and trying to showcase these CoverGirl
products along the way.
And about 30 seconds in, James gets befuddled and just starts
copying Zendaya and then acts like
everything he's doing was his idea.
- "I used it on my inner corner." - "Same."
(Huh??)
- "I used this as a base for the blue." - "Yeah, same."
And not only this, the end result is so bad,
she absolutely ate him up, I can't believe this video exists.
These two people should not exist in the same universe.
James would soon also start doing collabs
with massive YouTubers like Tana Mongeau, Joey Graceffa, and even
non-YouTubers like Maddie Ziegler.
However, he would soon find himself in his
very first controversy, and that is the "Ebola" tweet.
On Febuary 16, 2017, James writes:
reads tweet.
So obviously this is very out of touch
and just kind of assumes that Africa is like a diseased-riddled area,
and so people were not happy about this.
And so the very same day he did his first public apology ever.
He wrote:
reads tweet.
And people definitely still thought James was racist for, like, a good month
after this.
But the discourse got completely overshadowed by the events of
March 5th, 2017, which was the birth of Flashback Mary.
So what happened was that James was at an event
and he had WAY too much powder on his face,
and so when they took this picture of him, it caused a flashback that gave him this,
like, ghostly, ghoulish, sinister SCP look to him.
And the internet was immediately obsessed with this.
Like, this is definitely one of the biggest memes that has hit the Internet.
Ask anyone, ask your grandma, ask your local pastor, they know Flashback Mary.
The main comparison that was being made to James was of this spider from-
what is this show called?
It's called Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends.
Like, I can't express to you how many times I've seen this image against my will,
I wish I could permaban it from my brain.
Something a little disappointing about this meme, though, is that the
widespread image of Flashback Mary is not the real one.
This is the real one, and I will say, the flashback is still really bad,
but whoever edited this picture just made it 70 times worse.
An interesting artifact of the time that I found was this Redbubble page
that just exclusively sells Flashback Mary furniture, such as clocks and pillows.
I really don't understand Redbubble, people will just sell
tych-fck-ehchk-ANYTHING there.
Anyways, though, speaking of James Charles' foundation, he does not
know how to match that shit.
Like, there's entire compilations of him doing just that.
And in this video specifically, he describes himself as having
warm undertones.
"GASP. That looks like it could be such a good match for me,
everyone is convinced that my skintone is like, not warm."
Girl, you are PINK! You are PINK!
I think the funniest part about all of this, though, is that he
literally has a YouTube video trying, like, 40 different foundation shades, and
in the end he still chooses the wrong one.
Side note, though, another James Charles-ism is that he chronically misuses
Facetune, especially in this era.
And to be fair, he's never hid that he uses Facetune, but it just looks so bad
that I don't understand why he continues to do it. Like, when I see these pictures,
I get uncanny valley, Russian Sleep Experiment, creepypasta vibes.
Moving on, though, we have the "It" debacle of 2017.
Now, the It debacle began on September 7th when James tweeted about
how he was gonna go see It, and how excited he was about it.
But literally five minutes into the movie, he started tweeting about how bad
it was, which, of course, is just nutty
because how have you already decided that
you don't like the movie, and it's only been five minutes?
And, like, why are you even on your phone?
About thirty minutes later, James tweets again,
and this time, he says:
reading tweet.
Both of these tweets annoyed people for obvious reasons.
Like, he's just been texting the entire movie.
It doesn't even sound like he's been watching it to know if it's bad!
And so in response to all the people questioning why he's doing this,
he writes:
reads tweet.
But then,
Finn Wolfhard replies to one of these tweets and says:
reads tweet
Granted, at this time, I think Finn was 12 or 13 maybe.
And so James tweets:
reads tweet.
Which sounds like he's accepting the end of this.
Like, this should be the end of the conversation.
But instead, he starts backtracking times 3,000, and he says:
reads tweet.
For the next few hours, people on Twitter would not leave him alone
about why he was texting in the movie theater.
And so he eventually says:
reads tweet.
And this dug his grave in even more.
Because people were like, "What do you mean 'everyone does it,'
like, everyone does not do that!"
Personally, as an AMC Stubs member, this pains me.
Follow me on Letterboxd so I can feel important.
But this caused people to start doing polls about whether or not people
actually texted people during movies.
And the results were, of course, overwhelmingly NO.
No they do not!
And again, this should've been the end of the conversation, but he just keeps
acknowledging it, and he ends up filming an apology video in the backseat
of an Uber.
(James talking:) "I want to personally apologize to Finn and anybody else
involved in the making of the movie It."
And regardless of all of this, a couple days later, he ended up doing an
It makeup tutorial.
(James doing a Pennywise voice:) "Hiya, sisters! James Charles
here, and welcome back to my YouTube channel!"
Which, by the way, the first six seconds of this video
changed my life for the worse, so I'm gonna make you see this too.
(dubstep, intense music)
(scream sound effect)