The drama that echoed through the digital world like a thunderclap on YouTube.

Back in May 2019, renowned beauty influencer Tati Westbrook stunned the internet with a video that sent shockwaves through the community. In this now notorious clip, she leveled a series of accusations against her once-close friend and fellow makeup aficionado, James Charles.

The video exploded in popularity, amassing over 30 million views and becoming one of YouTube’s most-watched uploads. As a result, Westbrook’s channel saw an unprecedented surge, gaining over four million new subscribers in a week, while Charles experienced a dramatic downturn, losing over a million followers within just 24 hours.

Fast forward six years, and the tides have turned on Westbrook’s fame. At 43, she has faced significant setbacks, including an exhausting four-year legal saga and the closure of her beauty brand (more on that later).

Adding to her challenges, some of her longtime fans are questioning her recent content shift from beauty advice to the realm of pseudoscience “wellness,” a domain often associated with contentious figures like US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a twist of fate, James Charles has made a remarkable comeback.

The first-ever male ambassador for cosmetics brand CoverGirl at age 17, he was a child star for the modern age who had already turned his YouTube beauty tutorials into a reported $11 million fortune by the time Westbrook released that May 2019 video titled, ‘Bye Sister’. (Charles refers to his followers as ‘sisters’.) 

Now age 26, he owns a $7 million Los Angeles mansion, and last month his own cosmetics brand, Painted, expanded into the UK.

In fact, his makeup products are so popular they were even used by none other than Beyoncé during her Renaissance tour in August 2023.

So what happened to Westbrook? 

Widely considered the ‘OG makeup influencer’ or the ‘mother of beauty YouTube’, she launched her channel all the way back in 2010.

Her warm style, easy-to-follow tutorials and product review videos saw her catapult to success, while the candor with which she shared stories from her personal life earned her the rare status of being considered a genuinely honest influencer.

All of which made her decision to so publicly — and aggressively — go after Charles that much more difficult to stomach.

It likely also didn’t help that she was 37 at the time and nearly a decade into her career, while Charles was just 19. He had been something of a protégé to Westbrook, who had taken him under her wing and supported his fledgling career. The pair were so close that Westbrook even asked Charles to do her makeup for her wedding in 2017.

So in other words, it seemed to some that she was now punching down.

‘She was such a huge pillar within the beauty space,’ Gabriel Zamora, a beauty YouTuber who publicly defended Charles back in 2019, told the Daily Mail this week.

‘To then see her involve herself in drama, it just painted her in such a weird light. For it to kind of blow up in her face just made it even worse. [Her video] left a lot of bad tastes in people’s mouths.’

And blow up it did. Westbrook’s since-deleted ‘Bye Sister’ video was 43-minutes long and started with a business complaint.

In April of that year, while attending Coachella music festival, Charles had posted an Instagram advertisement for SugarBearHair, a vitamin-supplement competitor to Westbrook’s own vitamin brand, Halo Beauty.

She described the advert as a professional betrayal.

The complaints then turned personal, with Westbrook accusing Charles — who is openly gay — of alleged predatory behavior, including ‘seducing straight men’ and ‘tricking them into thinking they are gay’.

The public backlash was huge. Charles, who later called the period ‘the darkest time in my life’, was literally losing hundreds of followers a minute as the story garnered global headlines.

But within days, the narrative suddenly shifted. Charles released his own tell-all video, titled ‘No More Lies’, to address the claims and, most importantly, to refute the allegation that he had ‘manipulated’ heterosexual men into having relationships with him.

‘I have never, and would never, and will never use my “fame”, money or power, to manipulate or get any sexual actions from a guy,’ Charles said in his video, which has now been viewed 58 million times.

‘That is disgusting, it is not me, and the fact that Tati brought this up blows my mind, because she knows the real story.’

The controversy, dubbed ‘Dramageddon’ by fans online, continued with multiple back-and-forth videos between Westbrook and Charles, ultimately ending their friendship forever.

But it was Westbrook who seemed to emerge worse. 

Backtracking, she then issued an apology to Charles and accused veteran YouTubers Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star of ‘manipulating’ her into posting the original ‘Bye Sister’ video, an accusation that both Dawson and Star have denied.

But the damage was seemingly done. 

Beauty industry expert Dwight O’Neal told the Daily Mail he believes the YouTube scandal erupted in part because ‘a lot of egos were involved’.

‘The thing that really caused people to talk about [Dramageddon] is that the drama wasn’t really between the influencers, it was between truth and image,’ said O’Neal, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of beauty consulting agency Rose Neal Collective.

‘It challenged people to realize, “We were kind of tricked. We were fooled. We were bamboozled.” It made people understand that influencers are an image that they’ve created and, unfortunately, so many of us bought into it.’

Following the backlash, Westbrook took a year-long hiatus from YouTube and cut ties with many of the beauty influencers on the platform.

Zamora, now 32, was one of those influencers. ‘I personally believe I deserve an apology,’ he said.

Westbrook’s YouTube following has been in decline since the drama. Dropping from a peak of over 10 million to just under 8 million at the time of this publication.

Charles, meanwhile, has 24 million followers on the platform — up substantially from the 13.8 million he had in the wake of Westbrook’s allegations.

Westbrook’s video views are also down. Whereas she would once regularly achieve over one million views on a single video, this month she averaged just 120,000 views across the last 15 videos posted to her YouTube channel.

And then there have been the bitter legal woes for Westbrook to contend with. 

In 2018, she and husband James Westbrook had co-founded the Halo Beauty vitamin brand alongside business partner Clark Swanson. 

That was soon followed by Westbrook’s own line of cosmetics, Tati Beauty, which she launched five months after her ‘Bye Sister’ video in October 2019.

Just one year later, however, Swanson filed a lawsuit against Westbrook and her husband, accusing them of fraud, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty to Halo Beauty after launching her own makeup brand outside of the company.

At the time, her lawyer called Swanson’s claims ‘meritless’ in a statement to E! News.

But the battle was costly, with Westbrook having to sell both her condo and her $4 million home in Los Angeles to support herself.

‘We sold our house in LA. I moved out of my condo,’ she told fans in a 2021 video. 

‘I have downsized my life in a major way to really be able to go all in and support what’s happening with me through this litigation.’

That same year, Westbrook had to shut down Tati Beauty, blaming both the Covid pandemic and the battle with Swanson.

The legal drama also took a toll on her marriage.

‘During this very, very stressful time in my life, James and I almost got divorced,’ she said in a YouTube video.

‘We could not be around each other; he got his own place, we were separated during the holidays. It was a sad time.’

Westbrook added: ‘I for real thought I had lost everything. I remember being alone and thinking, “This is it for me”.’

After four years, the lawsuit with Swanson was finally settled out of court in August 2024. As part of the settlement, Westbrook and her husband stepped down from Halo Beauty.

Whether it was because of the legal battle, or her soured relationships within LA’s tight-knit YouTube community, Westbrook and her husband also left the influencer-filled city for a more quiet life in Texas.

In February 2022, they purchased a five-bed, five-bath mansion outside of Fort Worth for nearly $2 million with a $1.3 million mortgage, according to Johnson County court records.

Their move to the Lone Star State came after what Westbrook described as a ‘transformative’ year of ‘spiritual awakening’ that has helped guide her through her lawsuit, her marriage struggles and the closure of Tati Beauty.

That ‘transformation’ has also seen her switch to the ‘carnivore diet’ after years of eating plant-based and gluten-free foods. She also started moisturizing with beef tallow, using castor oil ‘for everything’, brushing her teeth with fluoride-free toothpaste, eating ‘raw cheese’, avoiding ‘toxic’ red dye and microplastics, and eliminating ‘inflammatory’ seed oils from her regimen.

This apparent shift in Westbrook’s messaging hasn’t gone unnoticed by fans.

‘She went real weird and fell down the woo-woo pipeline and stopped being relevant to me,’ one former fan wrote on Reddit. ‘I want to hear about how she bakes her under eyes, not a bunch of wide-eyed nonsense about seed oils she learned from a podcast.’

Another commenter claimed Westbrook’s recent videos feel as if they’re backed by ‘pseudoscience’.

Beef tallow, or rendered fat from a cow, has become particularly trendy among some influencers who tout it as an all-natural alternative to chemical-filled beauty products.

Health Secretary RFK Jr. has been a major proponent of cooking with beef tallow instead of seed oils, like sunflower oil, which he claims is ‘one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.’

However, scientists have said the jury is still out on whether replacing seed oils with beef tallow has any lasting positive effects. 

RFK Jr. has also encouraged the removal of fluoride from toothpaste.

According to beauty industry expert O’Neal, Westbrook’s shift in content is simply the sign of an influencer hoping to carve out a space in a now-heavily saturated beauty industry.

‘It feels to me that perhaps she is falling into what she feels is trendy and aligned with how she’s trying to rebuild her brand,’ said O’Neal. ‘I think she’s trying to find her niche. But my advice would be, whatever you’re going to do, you want to make sure it is authentic to who you are.’

Indeed, being authentic was once so central to Westbrook’s continued importance — whether through her honest reviews of makeup products, or by posting a scathing takedown of her former YouTube protégé.

So what a shame that when the Daily Mail contacted Westbrook’s representatives for comment, an emailed response from ‘Team Tati’ described that drama as ‘no longer culturally relevant’.