Makeup YouTuber Nikkie Tutorials says her Too Faced deal almost ended her career and made her wary of eyeshadow collaborations

• Nikkie de Jager, better known by her beauty YouTube channel Nikkie Tutorials, announced a new eyeshadow collaboration with Beauty Bay.
• In the product reveal video, De Jager compared the launch to her disastrous Too Faced palette, which Jeffree Star previously revealed De Jager only made $50,000 from, despite him claiming the launch made over $10 million.
• In addition to being underpaid, De Jager now says the product's poor quality "almost cost" her career, and she's been relucant to collaborate on eyeshadow ever since.

Nikkie de Jager, better known by her beauty YouTube channel name Nikkie Tutorials, is one of the biggest personalities in the beauty world, and she just announced a new eyeshadow collaboration with Beauty Bay, a massive cosmetics retailer. The pressed pigment eyeshadow palette will debut August 31, and in the product reveal video De Jager explained that her last brand collaboration left her wary of eyeshadow palettes for years.

"After quite some years I have found trust in a brand again to create an eyeshadow palette," De Jager said. "I haven't collaborated with a brand in years. We all know my first one."

De Jager was one of the first beauty YouTubers to cross over into collaborative marketing and product creation with Estée Lauder's Too Faced brand in 2016, when she announced her wildly popular "Power of Makeup" YouTube series would become a palette and product bundle.

The palette included eyeshadow shades, two blush colors, a bronzer, and a highlighter, and it sold for $56. Drama first cropped up when fans who purchased the palette claimed it was poorer quality than what de Jager's own swatches and reveal suggested.

Then, in 2017, De Jager's beauty YouTube peer Jeffree Star embarked on a public feud with Too Faced CEO Jeremy Johnson. Johnson suggested that other brands were ripping off a "unicorn makeup" trend he started, and Star responded to say that the "unicorn" trend started before Too Faced capitalized on it. Star also claimed that Johnson had given de Jager a bad deal.

At the time, speculation ran wild from anonymous sources that said de Jager only made between $40,000 and $60,000 on the product, which had sold at least 150,000 units – netting over $8 million.

When addressing her Too Faced collaboration on Thursday, De Jager didn't talk about being underpaid, but she did address the quality issues with the palette that she says "almost cost me my career," and she said her team has turned down eyeshadow collaboration offers for years because she was too wary after the Too Faced disaster.

"The answer always was 'No thank you, read what's online,'" De Jager said. "People lost their faith in me, people didn't want to believe a word I said anymore. It still is the most gross, vile thing to know, but we grow from here."

Star also resurfaced the drama about De Jager's Too Faced collaboration in 2019.

Star revived the old drama in his 2019 series with Shane Dawson, causing de Jager to respond to the accusations on Twitter

In "The Secrets of the Beauty World," Star tells Dawson that a fair split of earnings from their makeup collaboration would be giving Dawson 30 percent, due to the size of his audience and how it would impact sales. Star predicts that Dawson could make $5 million from the collaboration.

He goes on to explain that other makeup brands have been less than fair with YouTubers who create and market makeup collaborations. Star's example is Nikkie Tutorials, who he says made a $50,000 flat fee from her Too Faced palette and bundled products, called the "The Too Faced Power of Makeup by Nikkie Tutorials Collaboration."

"I've seen YouTubers and other influencers take dirt because they didn't know," Star said, noting that everything he revealed in Dawson's video was already on the record – when the controversy first emerged, anonymous sources confirmed to drama YouTuber Sanders Kennedy that De Jager only made between $40,000 and $60,000.

"When she told me, I was so horrified," Star continued on to say in the video. "And when I kind of let that secret out it turned really ugly."

De Jager responded to the rehashing of her Too Faced collaboration on Twitter, calling herself "naive" for signing the contract – and suggesting that the real drama at play involved Too Faced changing the quality of the product without her knowledge.

"I signed my contract with TF back then because I was naive & didn't know better," De Jager wrote on Twitter. "At the end of the day, I signed it, it's my own fault – but what I'll never forgive is that 'allegedly' they changed the palette's quality behind my back. 1000's of negative reviews & I was clueless."

She went on to say, "I had to see all these negative reviews, while the palettes I had were outstanding. 'they lying in their videos to get views' is what I was told. I don't care about the money.. but I had to fight YEARS to prove my authenticity and gain your trust again."

Neither Too Faced, its parent company Estée Lauder, nor De Jager responded to Insider's request for comment.

• Read more:
• A timeline of how the internet turned against the top YouTubers Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star
• The mystery man in Jeffree Star's steamy Instagram was identified as a basketball player, and Star insists he's not paying him
• TikTok star Bryce Hall has become a notorious internet menace. Here's how he methodically built his brand, from peeing off a balcony to pandemic partying.
• YouTuber Lohanthony said that he didn't go to conversion therapy and defended 'Christian celibacy' in a new video. Experts say his rhetoric could still be cause for concern.