Dramageddon is the nickname fans and media gave to the YouTube beauty community’s biggest public feuds. Insider uses it for the 2018 friendship split around Jeffree Star and “Dramageddon 2” for the May 2019 feud between Tati Westbrook and James Charles. Some outlets use the name for the 2019 feud alone.
This page reports what the cited outlets said happened. Claims made by the people involved are attributed to them; none is presented here as established fact.
Origin
August 2018: the first Dramageddon. Tubefilter reported on August 23, 2018 that a rift had opened between five formerly close friends: Jeffree Star on one side, and Manny “MUA” Gutierrez, Laura Lee, Gabriel Zamora and Nikita Dragun on the other. After Zamora tweeted a now-deleted photo of the four with their middle fingers raised and a caption implying they were better off without Star, older posts by the four resurfaced. Insider later described this as the moment the community “self-imploded in what became known as Dramageddon”.
April–May 2019: Dramageddon 2. According to Wikipedia, on April 22, 2019 Tati Westbrook posted an Instagram story about feeling betrayed by the beauty community, a few hours after James Charles posted an advert for SugarBearHair, a competitor to her company Halo Beauty. On May 10, 2019 she posted a 43-minute video titled “Bye Sister…”, in which she said the feud was not only about advertising and made allegations about Charles’s conduct toward heterosexual men. Charles posted a 41-minute response, “No More Lies”, on May 18, 2019 (Wikipedia). This is the feud covered on #JamesCharlesTati.
June 2020: the aftermath. On June 30, 2020 Westbrook posted “Breaking My Silence…”, in which she claimed Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star had manipulated her into making the video against Charles. The video had been set to private by June 2021 (Wikipedia). Capital FM treats this as a continuation of the 2019 Dramageddon.
Timeline
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2018 | Zamora’s photo and caption aimed at Star; old posts by the four resurface | Tubefilter |
| Apr 22, 2019 | Westbrook’s Instagram story, hours after Charles’s SugarBearHair advert | Wikipedia |
| May 10, 2019 | Westbrook posts “Bye Sister…” (43 minutes) | Wikipedia |
| May 18, 2019 | Charles posts “No More Lies” (41 minutes) | Wikipedia |
| Jun 30, 2020 | Westbrook posts “Breaking My Silence…” | Wikipedia |
Subscriber Swings
Each wave showed up immediately in subscriber counts. These are the figures the outlets reported at the time:
| Creator | Reported change | As reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Laura Lee | Lost upwards of 480,000 subscribers from a career high of 5 million on Aug. 12, 2018 (per SocialBlade) | Tubefilter, Aug 23, 2018 |
| Manny MUA | Lost roughly 250,000 subscribers from an Aug. 11, 2018 peak | Tubefilter, Aug 23, 2018 |
| James Charles | Lost more than 3 million subscribers in four days in May 2019 | Wikipedia |
| Tati Westbrook | Gained more than 4 million subscribers in a week, then lost over a million after “No More Lies” | Wikipedia |
How It’s Used
The feuds also built an audience for “tea” channels that recap creator drama. Insider reported in 2023 that commentary creators drew unusually large audiences in May 2019, “the month of Dramageddon 2”: one said he earned $57,000 in AdSense revenue that month, and another, who was topping out at 500,000 views an hour, told Insider “My channel has never done that before.” The same report said tea channels have since seen significant dips in views and revenue as beauty drama has waned.
Sources
- https://ca.news.yahoo.com/beauty-drama-used-rule-youtube-192417223.html
- https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/08/23/scandal-youtube-beauty-manny-mua/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tati_Westbrook
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Charles
- https://www.capitalfm.com/internet/jeffree-star-book-autobiography-dramageddon/