The INSIDER Summary:
• James Charles is CoverGirl's first male spokesmodel.
• The appointment is a huge win for gender equality.
17-year-old Instagram star James Charles just made history in the cosmetics world: On Tuesday, he was named CoverGirl's first-ever male spokesmodel (a CoverBoy, if you will).
Charles, of Bethlehem, New York, bills himself as an "aspiring makeup artist" on his Instagram page, where he's followed by more than 400,000 fans. He only started working with makeup a year ago — and his talent level is already off the charts:
You might recognize Charles from his senior year portraits, which he insisted on retaking to ensure that his highlighter would appropriately pop. When he shared the resulting photos on Twitter, they went viral:
So I retook my senior photos & brought my ring light with me so my highlight would be poppin. I love being extra 💀 pic.twitter.com/7Qu1yu8U2P
— James Charles (@jcharlesbeauty) September 5, 2016Now, Seventeen reports, he'll be the face of CoverGirl's newest mascara launch, "So Lashy!"and he'll be fully integrated into the brand's print ad campaigns and TV commercials.
And it's about time the world got a male spokesmodel for cosmetics — there are a lot of boys and men who wear makeup on a daily basis and excel in makeup artistry, but they're largely ignored by major makeup companies.
"Brands that don't feature males are excluding [them] from feeling part of the fun of makeup," a male beauty blogger told Mic. earlier this year. "It instantly makes them feel excluded and wrong."
So Charles' appointment as a CoverBoy is a huge win for gender inclusivity.
But it's also a major personal accomplishment for the teen — especially since it was difficult at first for his family to understand his love of makeup as a concept separate from his gender identity.
"My parents started questioning me about whether or not I was transgender — whether or not I was trying to be a woman. It was a big argument,"he told Marie Claire earlier this year. "It took a lot of thorough conversations to explain that it's an art form for me. I'm still confident as a boy and I will always be a boy. I can be confident with bare skin and with a full face."
Charles got to announce the news to world earlier today in this adorable video:
And if those killer high school portraits are a sign of things to come, it looks like we may have the next mega-famous supermodel on our hands.
Follow James Charles on Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram.
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