A blind makeup vlogger teaches YouTube what beauty’s all about

Doing your makeup can be frustrating. When you accidentally get waterproof mascara on your nose, or when the lighting is bad and you put on a little bit too much blush, or when you do your eyeliner perfectly on one eye and terribly on the other. Ugh. The heightened possibility of these superficial slip ups only account for one of the major reasons we’re totally awestruck by makeup vlogger Lucy Edwards, a 19-year-old girl who went blind two years ago. Lucy didn’t let her loss of eyesight stop her from doing totally amazing makeup tutorials on her YouTube channel, YesterdaysWishes.

Lucy, who’s based in Birmingham, started having issues with her eyes when she was 11 due to a rare disorder called incontinentia pigmenti, which ran on her mother’s side (though both her mother and grandmother don’t suffer from it). “To cut a long story short, I’ve been going to the eye hospital since I was 11,” she told Buzzfeed. She lost her sight in her right eye that year, then six years later in her left eye, rendering her completely blind by 17.

But that was only the beginning for Lucy. “I wanted to stay positive, which is why I’m on YouTube, really,” Lucy explained to Buzzfeed. Even without her sight, Lucy decided to learn to do makeup by herself. Her sister Alice helped her along the way. For the next year, the two worked together to teach Lucy how to do her own makeup, mirror-free.

“At points I’ve been like, ‘I don’t want to do this any more [sic],’ because it’s been so frustrating,” she told Buzzfeed. “Like when I’ve done my eyeliner, and Alice has said, ‘It’s heavier than you would have liked when you were sighted.’” Talk about willpower!

Lucy posted her very first makeup tutorial in April of last year, and she now has got her routine down pat, though she does feel the need to do it more often since she can’t see herself in the mirror. “Because I’m making myself pretty, it makes me feel better about myself on the inside,” Lucy explained to Buzzfeed. “I know the media has a lot of rubbish about whether you need makeup and so on – I don’t think I need it especially, but it’s just a thing that makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel like I’m in control.”

Lucy highlighted that for her, makeup helps her feel beautiful in a totally different way. “[Blind people] are very dependent on other people . . . makeup for me, personally, means that I don’t have to ask anyone about how my face looks any more [sic],” she told Buzzfeed. “. . . I know that my face looks good without looking in the mirror. So I don’t have to ask someone, ‘Do I look good today?’ because I know that I do.”

Blind beauty bloggers are few and far between on YouTube, according to Lucy, “When I was plunged into blindness, there were no resources for this kind of thing [beauty], and it took me hours and hours to learn how to do my makeup . . . I was in a world full of sighted people and in my head I was like, ‘I want to be sighted,’” she told Buzzfeed. “And because of that I felt lonely. Nobody really truly understands you. I mean, people try to, but it’s not the same.”

But for Lucy, YouTube has helped her get support and gain confidence. Plus, her makeup tutorials are seriously top-notch. We also love the videos in which Lucy explains the best and worst things about being blind, myths about blindness, and other life-hacks for people who are blind. You’re doing amazing things, Lucy! Check out her first make-up tutorial here: