THE COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF YOUTUBE MAKEUP REVIEWS

Resumen

Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using keyword searches in five languages—English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean—associated with diverse cultural contexts. The top 20 videos in each language (n=100) were selected for analysis, producing a group of successful channels. We employed content analysis to compare the videos’ evaluative criteria, using a codebook of ten values. We found that creators across languages employ a shared cultural repertoire to evaluate beauty products, concerned with aesthetics, functionality, pleasure, and, to a lesser extent, distinctiveness and economy. While beauty creators appeal to a consistent set of values, they rarely elaborate on their meaning, focus on positivity, and emphasize the subjectivity of their evaluations. We argue that the approach to evaluation in YouTube makeup reviews challenges previously observed dichotomies between Eastern and Western countries, blending elements of both collectivist and individualist communication styles. Most creators make indirect recommendations even as they use reviews to build a distinctive personal brand. Although further research is necessary to investigate the reach of this practice, our analysis of multi-lingual makeup reviews demonstrates how the homogenization of social media entertainment need not be synonymous with Westernization.