People like to scoff at YouTube personalities for their click-bait schemes, but many of us beauty rookies appreciate their vlogging efforts to educate and entertain.

Get past their high-pitched laughs, and you’ll find someone kind enough to share their beauty know-how online. While mystery wraps the pseudo-secret life of the professional makeup artist, the YouTube beauty guru lives an open life, practicing the virtues of personalized looks and resourceful beauty.

Here are tips from YouTubers I didn’t expect to work—but did.

PonyMakeup

Sometimes, I don’t know why Pony hasn’t made it as a celebrity, because with that face and makeup tricks, she might as well come out as a member of SNSD. A makeup artist slash entrepreneur slash YouTube personality, Pony attracts two million subscribers with her offbeat techniques.

She’s notorious for using items beyond their intended purpose. Say, her Eglips Real Color Lipstick doubles as cheek blush; its creamy consistency paints her lips a faint peach and also gives her cheeks a vibrant apricot finish. She reuses her Picasso eye brushes, showing little care for the nuanced correlation between their shapes and application. So far, nothing seems misplaced.

Pony also manages to simultaneously use all possible color-correcting shades to achieve even coverage. By some miracle, she layers all six hues of her Etude House Play 101 Color Contour Duos without looking like a human rainbow.

What would have been a mortal sin to most makeup artists is one of Pony’s most recent makeup breakthroughs; done right, it could really be revolutionary.

SichenMakeupHolic

I appreciate YouTubers who yap less and show more. This is exactly why Sichenmakeupholic’s 514,015 subscribers love her. At first look, the Thai personality looks like a cutout from Vivi magazine brought to life by her vanity kit.

But, despite her short makeup tutorials, she has a list of tricks that keeps her viewers clicking for more.

Mixing lip colors adds great dimension in her book. Even before duo-toned lips came into vogue, she has been improvising with different colors. She even contours her lips by smudging a hint of matte black using pencil liners, which defines her lips rather than makes them look swollen.

Having experienced a face-altering skin condition, Sichen believes in the importance of good skincare and says she trusts her La Roche-Posay Effaclar Duo to prime her skin. Good skincare, indeed, could make you look good as makeup does.

SisselAB

Eighteen-year-old SisselAB surprises us with her cosmetic choices: Rather than piling on bronzers or hoarding Kylie Lip Kits, she uses a modest number of products to achieve the looks she likes.

With this modesty comes her tendency to favor little coverage. While her skin is admittedly not that troublesome, she has blemishes that remind us that she’s still one of us. Sissel simply dabs concealer on her acne and moves on to the next step of her routine.

Not only does this little trick keep her makeup from caking, she also looks more natural in the process. In this age of airbrushed beauty, it’s refreshing to know we don’t have to be porcelain dolls to look pretty. —CONTRIBUTED