This 17-year-old used makeup to spread an important message about self-love

Seventeen-year-old Lauren Brocious kicked cyberbullies to the curb in this ultra-emotional and super inspiring video she posted to her YouTube channel earlier in December.

Lauren, a Virginia-based high school senior, saw that one of her friends was on the receiving end of online hate, so she decided to do something amazing about it. “I was on Thanksgiving break and I was laying in bed on Instagram,” Lauren told HelloGiggles over email. “I was scrolling through comments and I saw some terrible comments on a girl’s picture who I was friends with.”

What she did next is absolutely inspiring:

The video, which has already garnered over 30,000 views, shows Lauren writing in eyeliner words of hate on her face, and then wiping them away and replacing them with words of hope and self-love. Through the process, she reveals how important it is to wipe away negative labels in order to create our own identity.

“I created the video and used eyeliner because the makeup represented this sense of a mask that we put on for people,” she tells us. “I want teenagers and especially teenage girls to understand that someone sitting behind a screen typing vulgar and unnecessary comments doesn’t make you any less of a human being.”

If there’s anything she hopes viewers learn from watching her video it’s this:

“Your personal opinion of yourself is the only thing that matters. Other people’s words don’t define you. You define you.”

Thanks for the reminder, Lauren, that our opinions and words are the only ones that matter when it comes to how we identify, and that negativity doesn’t, and shouldn’t, define who we are.

(Image via YouTube)