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10 Kids Who Wear Make Up That Got Bullied

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A ten-year-old with a beauty blender became the flashpoint for one of 2017’s ugliest online pile-ons.

In July 2017, pop-culture outlet TheThings Celebrity published “10 Kids Who Wear Make Up That Got Bullied,” a compilation tracking the wave of young beauty influencers and pre-teens who were harassed — online and in the schoolyard — simply for posting makeup looks. The video centers on two real cases that had already made headlines that summer: a 10-year-old British boy known online as @MakeuupbyJack, and 12-year-old Welsh singer Reuben de Maid, both of whom turned intricate makeup tutorials into a national talking point about who gets to wear cosmetics without getting torn apart for it.

• Jack, the 10-year-old behind @MakeuupbyJack, saw his tutorials go viral in mid-2017, racking up millions of views alongside a torrent of troll comments and, separately, praise from working makeup artists.
• Reuben de Maid, a 12-year-old Welsh singer and makeup prodigy, appeared on both ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ and ‘This Morning’ in May 2017 to describe severe physical and verbal bullying he endured at school before moving up to secondary education.
• The compilation frames both cases as part of a broader spike in pre-teen and male beauty bloggers using Instagram and YouTube, and the backlash — including homophobic attacks and parental disapproval — that followed them there.

Jack’s Viral Rise and the Troll Response

@MakeuupbyJack’s account didn’t creep into virality — it exploded. His technical skill, doing blended eyeshadow and precise winged liner at an age when most kids are still figuring out crayons, drew millions of views and attention from professional makeup artists who publicly defended his talent. That same visibility, though, made him a target. Comment sections under his videos filled with the kind of name-calling and gendered insults that adult influencers deal with, except aimed at a fourth-grader, which is exactly the tension TheThings’ compilation is built around: a kid getting praised by industry professionals with one hand and getting torn apart by anonymous accounts with the other.

Reuben de Maid Takes the Bullying Public

Reuben de Maid didn’t stay quiet about what school was actually like for him. In May 2017, the Welsh singer and makeup prodigy sat down on ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ and later on ITV’s ‘This Morning’ and described enduring both physical and verbal bullying for wearing makeup, well before he’d even reached secondary school. Talking about it on two major shows in the same month turned de Maid into one of the most visible faces of the “boys who wear makeup” conversation in Britain that year, and gave the bullying he faced a specific, on-camera account rather than a vague statistic.

A 10-year-old’s tutorial pulled in millions of views — and just as many trolls.

Gender Norms Colliding With Commercial Beauty Culture

What makes the “10 Kids” compilation land is the contrast it draws out: these kids were succeeding by the beauty industry’s own metrics — views, engagement, professional praise — at the exact moment they were absorbing homophobic slurs and parental disapproval for the same content. That’s not a new dynamic in entertainment, where public visibility and public cruelty tend to arrive together; it echoes the same pattern seen when adult creators find their careers unraveling after a single viral moment, a theme covered in Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media. The difference here is age — these were pre-teens, not adults with publicists, absorbing backlash usually reserved for grown influencers.

The Cost of Going Viral Young

Jack and Reuben de Maid weren’t outliers so much as the most visible examples of a pattern TheThings’ video argues was accelerating through 2017: kids breaking gender norms on Instagram and YouTube, getting real traction, and getting real hate for it in the same scroll. It’s a smaller-scale version of the same social-media minefield that’s derailed careers across entertainment, the kind detailed in Actors Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media — except here the people navigating it were still in primary school.

De Maid’s double appearance on ‘Ellen’ and ‘This Morning’ in May 2017 gave him a platform most bullied kids never get — a chance to describe what happened to him in his own words, on national television, before he’d even started secondary school. Jack, meanwhile, kept posting. Whatever came next for either of them, the clip that TheThings built its compilation around had already made its point: the comment section doesn’t care how old you are.