How teen YouTube sensation Antonio Garza is remixing beauty YouTube for Gen Z, using editing techniques that take 40 hours per video and avoiding drama

• 17-year-old Antonio Garza represents a new generation of YouTube star, one who grew up knowing "it's every teenager's dream to become a YouTuber," she told Insider.
• Inspired by her own short attention span and those of TikTok (formerly Musical.ly) users who engage with content on a second-by-second basis, Garza aimed to make videos that couldn't be boring.
• With Garza's makeup "get ready with me" videos, she developed a frenetic, fast-paced editing style that – in her own words – "blew me up." In two years, Garza has accrued more than 3.5 million subscribers.
• The increasingly hyperactive editing style has since been embraced by the same YouTubers who inspired Garza in the first place, including Emma Chamberlain, James Charles, and Tana Mongeau.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

The first time Antonio Garza was ever recognized in public, she was 15-years-old at a Dunkin Donuts "in the middle of nowhere" with her family. A few months prior, she had posted a "Valantines [sic] heart cut crease makeup look" video to YouTube, and the high school freshman had already begun to attract a fan following.

"People might not know this about me, but prior to YouTube I wasn't a really outgoing person at all, so when people started to recognize me it was like 'Woah, this is weird,'" Garza, now 17, told Insider over the phone from her childhood home in Austin, Texas, where she still lives with her parents and siblings.

"I remember I was at the mall with my friends no later than six months after I started my channel, and I was getting recognized at like every store I went to. That was just mind boggling to me. It was so, so weird. It can be an overwhelming feeling, but it's really satisfying, and it's special to me to meet people who saw what I was doing online."

Two years after posting that first video, shot in her bedroom at home like most of her content, Garza has accrued nearly 3.7 million YouTube subscribers, with additional millions of followers on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. She represents a new generation of famous teenage social media stars, having grown up in an era when "it's every teenager's dream to become a YouTuber."

"In my perfect world I would have been a YouTuber, but it wasn't something I thought was going to happen," Garza said. "When it kind of all happened, I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that people were watching my videos [...] I really just did it because I found it fun, and it was a creative outlet that I really needed at the time."

Most of Garza's videos revolve around makeup, whether she's getting ready for school or making herself look like the cowboy emoji (), but the star of her videos is her editing.

Garza grew up watching what many YouTube consumers consider second generation stars – people like James Charles and Emma Chamberlain, who are just a few years older than her. The first ever videos she edited on iMovie as a tween were makeup product reviews and tutorials, inspired by classic beauty YouTubers like Nikkie Tutorials.

But Garza said her signature fast-paced editing style was provoked by her own boredom watching the long introductions that became standard on the industry once audiences began treating YouTube videos like continuous, personality-driven shows, as opposed to occasional viral moments.

"I knew, like, if that's my problem with YouTube videos, I should then solve that problem in my own videos," Garza said. "I don't want anyone to be bored for even like five seconds during my videos. I feel like the best way to do that is with my editing. So I just kind of played around with it at first and it blew me up, kind of. It's really what helped me develop my own sense of identity on the internet."

Garza wasn't the first YouTuber to experiment with a frenetic editing style, characterized by quick zooms, startling sound effects, and sarcastic commentary and self-referential memes added in throughout the editing process. Each second involves a new surprise, even if the onscreen action is just Garza frowning at her own reflection while sitting in the Tesla she bought at age 16 with her YouTube earnings.

Her sense of humor also appeals to her Gen Z YouTube audience, and it carries over to her conversational tone, too. She's candid, witty, and interjects a self-deprecating comment into most of her answers.

"What I go through editing my videos, it's a whole moment. It's a process. I go through so much mental trauma editing videos," Garza said, quickly adding that it's not actually traumatic to edit YouTube videos. "I'm just so critical of the jokes I make and I'm so critical of making sure every edit that I do is actually pretty strategic."

Like Chamberlain, who Garza cites as a primary influence, this video-editing process has redefined humor on the internet, or at least on YouTube. Comment sections sometimes criticize people like Chamberlain and Charles for appropriating elements of Garza's style, but the need to satisfy short attentions spans has been capitulated to by a wide range of channels across the platform – in terms of her own influence, Garza says she won't take singular credit, but "I'm assuming that if I didn't do it, I don't know if it would be a thing."

The payoff from the hyperactive editing can be huge – other YouTubers who have collaborated with Garza, like Tana Mongeau, have commented dryly on how "rich" she is off just her AdSense earnings from ads on YouTube. But it's also a full-time job, and Garza says it takes her around 40 hours to edit a 25-minute video.

"It takes so long and it's really draining and it's just hard to do something for that long, no matter what it is, for 40 hours. You can't sit and play piano for 40 hours," Garza told Insider. Many YouTubers, including Mongeau and Charles, pay video editors to at least help with the workload. But Garza prefers to do it herself.

"It would make my content flow so much more consistent, which would be so nice, but I just don't think I could do it," she said. "But maybe one day if my content shifts or changes, I could try it out. I'm pretty happy doing it myself – well, I'm not happy. I'm happy with the content I make right now."

Between editing YouTube videos, filming content, planning and coming up with new ideas, and maintaining active profiles across platforms, Garza has more work than many full-time adults do at their jobs. She's also still enrolled in online high school classes, and while she says a lot of hate comments ask why she produces so little content or too much similar content, Garza is balancing two full-time responsibilities at once.

"It was a really big shock at first when I left school, it gave me a lot of stress," she told Insider. "When you grow up and you're thinking or being told that you have to finish high school, at least, and maybe go to college and that's the path your life is going in – and then like you just leave and start doing a whole other thing, it's really crazy. It's also difficult leaving that environment so suddenly, because I really wasn't expecting to leave school so soon."

Unlike some of her beauty YouTube peers, Garza has chosen to stay out of drama and live in Texas with her family, rather than LA.

For many of the second generation YouTubers that inspired Garza, moving from your hometown where you started filming YouTube videos in your bedroom to a big kid apartment (or, if you're lucky, million-dollar mansion) in Los Angeles was a familiar pilgrimage. Most of the YouTube and influencer industry is based in LA, along with other famous faces to collaborate, and get in drama, with, which the beauty community is known for.

But Garza has stayed in Texas with her family – mostly because of her young age, she says. Like other young influencers including TikTok royalty Charli D'Amelio, Garza often spends a few weeks at a time in LA before commuting back home, but she's been self-isolating with her family during quarantine.

"I feel like moving out at 16 or right when I turned 17, that would have been pretty spooky for me, especially since I hadn't even finished school yet, technically, and I also just want to be with my family right now," she said. "I feel like staying home and staying where I grew up, it's kept me kind of grounded and in the right mindset."

Her YouTube ascension was rapid, but perhaps could have been boosted even further with high-profile collaborations. Garza has done a handful of videos with other YouTubers and TikTok stars – notably the TikToker Larray, who is currently part of the TikTok collective the Hype House, and Charles (the two do not follow each other anymore).

"I don't really talk to almost anyone who is in the beauty community anymore because I have just had, like, just a few negative experiences," Garza said. "The community as a whole at least used to be really, really negative. There was a lot of weird competition and just a weird vibe, I would say."

While major scandals have repeatedly rocked the beauty community, causing major subscriber gains and losses in the process, Garza has stuck to the sidelines for the past few years. Her content is more humor-driven than it is makeup-driven, anyways – another genre-defying new YouTube trend among the third wave of creators on the platform.

"I don't even really try my best, I just don't involve myself in it at all," she told Insider. "I never relied on it as part of my brand [...] Getting in drama is part of what can really grow you. And for me, I just never really relied on that, and so I just kind of stay out of it and stay in my own lane, for the most part. It's never failed me."

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