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Vice sent intrepid reporter Megan Koester into the bowels of LA's BeautyCon, a one-day media extravaganza where all the biggest beauty bloggers and vloggers converge to meet fans and host panels titled things like "Hi Haters, Bye Haters" and "How Do You Wear Your Inner Beauty?" Not many attendees were over the age of 15.
Koester compared the scene inside BeautyCon to a Beatles concert (what an old), minus the instruments (or the Beatles): "Beautybaby44, a celebrity anyone of legal drinking age had never heard of, implored the girls to shriek en mass. They stood before her, taking pictures of her taking pictures of herself. The scene could have been considered Beatlemania-esque, but at least the Beatles played instruments." She also overheard one tween wishing she was in a wheelchair so she could cut to the front of a line.
Image via Vice
"Indeed, everyone in a position of power over these girls, regardless of the topic of conversation or question posed to them, had the same advice—to do what makes them happy," Koester observed. "To live your dreams; your dreams inevitably being alerting your young, impressionable fan base to the existence of whatever hot, disposable new product or service was currently paying you to pretend as though you liked."
At the end of the day, event organizers congratulated the crowd on a job well done—#BeautyConLA had trended worldwide on Twitter and the convention had garnered more than 139 million impressions.
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