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10 Kids Who Do Makeup BETTER THAN YOU

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A 15-year-old blending foundation on the back of his rose gold iPhone turned into one of the defining beauty clips of 2017.

TheThings Celebrity’s countdown “10 Kids Who Do Makeup BETTER THAN YOU” rounds up the young creators who spent the first half of 2017 outperforming grown adults at contouring, baking, and blending on YouTube and Instagram. The centerpiece is Jake Warden, a 15-year-old from Longmont, Colorado, whose foundation-on-an-iPhone trick made him one of the fastest-rising names in the beauty-vlogger scene. The video frames him alongside a broader class of pre-teen and young-teen artists who spent the year proving age had nothing to do with technique.

• Jake Warden, 15, of Longmont, Colorado, launched his YouTube channel in 2013 and broke into mainstream social media stardom in early 2017.
• In April 2017, Warden went viral for blending foundation directly on the back of his rose gold iPhone instead of a traditional mixing palette.
• The video situates Warden alongside UK creator Jack (@makeuupbyjack), who went viral at age 10, as part of a wider 2017 wave of “beauty boys” challenging age and gender norms in cosmetics content.

The iPhone Moment That Made Jake Warden Famous

Warden’s viral break wasn’t a full face reveal or a jaw-dropping transformation — it was a mixing habit. Instead of reaching for a stainless-steel palette like every professional MUA on Instagram, he blended his foundation right on the back of his phone, camera bump and all. The clip spread fast in April 2017, turning a $600 piece of hardware into an impromptu beauty tool and turning Warden into a name beauty-side social media couldn’t stop talking about.

It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that travels. A technique that unconventional, done cleanly and on camera by someone still in high school, is exactly the sort of clip that gets reposted by bigger beauty accounts, stitched into “kids who do makeup better than you” countdowns, and cited months later as the moment people first heard his name.

From a Longmont Bedroom to a National Spotlight

Warden didn’t appear out of nowhere. He’d been running his YouTube channel since 2013, years before the iPhone clip made him a trending topic. That gap — four years of posting before the breakout — is the part the viral moment tends to erase. By the time most viewers discovered him in early 2017, he already had a body of tutorials behind the single clip that made him famous.

He blended his foundation on the back of a $600 iPhone instead of a palette — and the internet couldn’t stop watching.

The Beauty Boys Redefining Who Gets to Contour

Warden wasn’t operating in isolation. Across the Atlantic, Jack — known online as @makeuupbyjack — had already gone viral at age 10, part of the same cultural shift the video leans on for context. Together they represent a wider 2017 trend TheThings’ countdown taps into: a crop of “beauty boys” and pre-teen artists whose contouring, baking, and blending work was landing on the same feeds as adult professionals, and often outperforming them in shares and comments.

That trend didn’t stay confined to niche beauty corners of the internet. It bled into the same social media ecosystem that turns any unconventional talent into overnight Celebrity news — a 10-year-old with a beauty blender and a good ring light could suddenly out-draw creators twice or three times their age.

Adults Struggle to Maintain Pace

Part of what made these clips land wasn’t just novelty — it was technical. Baking, precision contouring, seamless blending: these are skills that plenty of adult tutorial-makers still fumble on camera. Watching a middle-schooler or young teen execute them cleanly, and then do something as offbeat as skipping the palette entirely, is what pushed these videos beyond the beauty community and into the kind of TRENDING NOW feeds that don’t normally care about makeup content at all.

That crossover appeal is exactly why TheThings built an entire countdown around it in August 2017 — not because kids doing makeup was new, but because a handful of them, Warden chief among them, were doing it well enough to embarrass the adults in the same tab.

Warden’s phone-blending clip was already old news to his own subscribers by the time TheThings put this list together — he’d been posting tutorials since 2013, four full years before most of the internet learned his name off a photo of foundation smeared on a rose gold iPhone. That’s the joke the video keeps making: the techniques are real, the results are real, and the artists pulling them off were still in braces when they started.