It is the year of our internet 2023, and as surely as the sun rises, an internet celebrity has an apology to make. So here I am, sitting in James Charles’s Encino mansion like a pop culture priest, ready to take his confession.
Let us begin: “I don’t want to sit here and fucking mope and whine and cry, because nobody wants to hear it,” says Charles, sinking into a plush couch in his casual open living room. “I had to do a lot of thinking. Like, Okay, babe, this is your fault. No, you’re not a pedophile. No, you’re not a fucking groomer. No, you’re not a predator. But you made a big mistake.”
At this point, you’re likely familiar with the specific quid pro quo inherent in celebrity profiles like this—the ones that come together post-cancellation, after a respectable amount of time has passed post–cancelable sin. It’s no surprise that a star’s willingness to answer intimate questions about a catastrophic stretch of their lives increases dramatically when they have a project to promote. In today’s case, that’s ostensibly Charles’s new makeup line, Painted. But it’s also Charles himself—a warier, acceptably contrite but still just a little extra Charles. This very interview is to be a trial balloon, its reception the answer to the question both of us—and maybe you, too, if what autopopulates in Google Search can be believed—are here to ask: “Is James Charles still canceled?”
After all, would a still-ousted person be allowed to pose for red carpet cameras at the People’s Choice Awards or chat amiably with paparazzi while out and about in Hollywood? Would a still-banished person have hundreds of thousands of fans enthusiastically engage with his YouTube beauty tutorials? Would a truly exiled person be 24 years old and living in a reportedly $7 million farmhouse that looks like a cross between the homes featured in the later seasons of Vanderpump Rules and any season of all iterations of The Kardashians? (You know: black-and-white modern exteriors, hyperorganized interiors. When I arrived, I noticed Oreos decanted into glass jars on a pristine marble kitchen island, a display technique first popularized by Khloé Kardashian back when Charles was still in high school. Charles’s two dogs, also black and white, were playing nearby.)
There’s a lot riding on the answer. Painted—a solo venture four years in the making—launches in just a few weeks. “People have speculated that I have partners or investors, which I don’t know how that rumor got started,” Charles says. “This line is fully self-funded. Every single dollar that has gone into the brand has been from my personal savings and checking accounts. I have no investors, no partners, no billion-dollar backers behind me.”
That neither of us knows how it will go is due to the murky nature of cancel culture and its crisscrossing trip wires of implied and loosely enforced rules. And because of a hungry and fickle internet that doles out forgiveness (or maybe just forgetfulness) seemingly at whim. It’s a landscape—hellscape, some would say—in which all comebacks are tentative and where the conversation around an offense often ends up obscuring the offense itself. When I polled friends and colleagues about Charles in the run-up to this day, the general consensus was that he had done something bad, but no one was clear on exactly what.
As a Very Online millennial, I had long been ambiently aware of Charles while also knowing next to nothing about him—the influencer’s platonic ideal. Bored at home during the pandemic, I watched the Dramageddon “feud” he had with another YouTuber whose name I can never remember, a hilariously non-scandal scandal that possibly had something to do with hair vitamins? Anecdotally, it seems like everyone in my life under the age of 25 considers Charles an internet celebrity, and no one over 45 has ever heard of him (unless they have kids). Those in the former group know that he’s been famous since his teen years, although his storylines, so to speak, are all self-produced.
Charles first went viral in 2016 after he brought in a ring light and used glossy highlighter to accentuate his cheekbones for his high school yearbook photo. Suddenly, he was everywhere—the first male spokesperson for CoverGirl, a guest on Ellen. He did a commercial with Katy Perry, filmed with the Kardashians, and hosted a YouTube reality competition show aptly titled Instant Influencer. The combination of his fresh-faced, youthful earnestness and bold, maximalist aesthetic made him one of the most financially successful beauty YouTubers of all time, with a rumored annual income of more than $10 million in 2020. At one point, he was so popular that a reported 30-second appearance he made at a British mall drew thousands of teenagers, helping create a traffic gridlock so extreme that some drivers apparently abandoned their cars overnight.
In a corner of the internet known for constant sniping, backstabbing, and hopelessly convoluted rivalries, the same lack of guile and perma-logged-on status that drew viewers to Charles also made him a magnet for drama. There he was, posting regular apologies for things like insensitive tweets about Africa and Ebola or for asking Shawn Mendes to “juggle me like that” during an IG livestream in which Shawn (literally) juggled. Charles developed a reputation for a kind of over-the-top thirstiness, a quality that could be interpreted as refreshingly candid or slightly cringe, depending on who you asked. (At least one rival, it should be said, interpreted it differently—his Dramageddon opponent initially accused Charles of using his fame to “manipulate” straight men. True to influencer form, she retracted the claim and apologized a year later.) Yet all the drama seemed to ultimately earn him one thing: more followers. At his peak, Charles had nearly 26 million YouTube subscribers, on top of tens of millions more on TikTok and Instagram.
That was all before though.
In February 2021, at age 21, Charles confronted a career crisis he couldn’t quickly apologize for or capitalize on. He was publicly accused of sending lewd photographs and inappropriate sexual messages to a then-16-year-old fan. Charles says he was misled into believing the boy was 18 and that he blocked him as soon as he learned the truth. “I’ve never been more disgusted in my life than when I found out that that kid was 16 years old,” Charles says now. “I was mortified, absolutely mortified.” (The fan did not return Cosmopolitan’s request for comment.)
The allegation triggered more complaints against Charles. They were primarily disseminated in the form of TikToks filled with screenshots of flirtatious conversations Charles had allegedly conducted with a number of male fans. A few of the reported accusations, like the initial one, were serious and claimed to detail inappropriate online interactions between Charles and minors. Other claims, including an incident in which Charles allegedly called someone “Daddy,” felt muddier. Almost all of them were eventually rounded up into viral Twitter threads by a controversial poster who keeps track of internet scandals, now under fire himself (yes, even the chronicling of this saga has been surreal and convoluted and Cosmopolitan could not independently verify these messages, many of which have since been deleted).
In the end, substantiated or not, multiple media reports indicated that at least 15 boys and men had accused Charles of inappropriate behavior. Charles says now about the breadth of the allegations, “The source of where the list came from was not doing any sort of research, no fact-checking.” Some of the screenshots depicted consensual conversations between adults, he says; others were “completely fake” and “never even happened.” Charles has never been legally charged with engaging inappropriately with a minor, let alone proven to have knowingly done so. Nevertheless, that April, Charles uploaded a 14-minute YouTube video titled “Holding Myself Accountable,” where he admitted to inadvertently exchanging messages with two 16-year-old boys he said he was led to believe were 18, and he apologized for his “desperate” behavior.
Cosmopolitan reached out to multiple people who said they were minors at the time of their exchanges with Charles. One asked if we would be willing to pay and did not reply again when told our publication does not compensate sources for interviews. But another former accuser wrote back via Instagram DM with a new revelation: He had, he said, already privately apologized to Charles a few months ago for “telling him I was 18 a few years ago & the TikTok I made that blew the situation up.” (When asked to elaborate, the person did not reply. Charles’s team says someone did message Charles this spring admitting he lied about his age.)
If a celebrity with tens of millions of followers came sliding into your DMs, would you respond? I probably would. Charles says he recognizes the power imbalance at play in his interactions online. He should have verified everyone’s ages, he says, and been more sensitive to how his fame could color the way others responded to him.
“Oh, I absolutely did fuck up,” he says. But he denies that he ever engaged in grooming, a practice defined by the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN as “manipulative behaviors that an abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” Charles continues, “I feel like that word is a very popular buzzword right now, especially in politics and stuff. But the actual meaning of it has been so misconstrued.” Referring to the first allegation against him, he adds, “The conversation lasted one hour. I don’t know this person; I’ve never met this person. Nothing happened between me and this actual person, so to use that word is so categorically incorrect.”
In the absence of hard evidence, hordes of commenters and bystanders glommed onto the idea that Charles was creepy, irresponsible at best, possibly predatory at worst. His apology—one in a burgeoning and much-mocked genre of YouTube influencer mea culpas—was full-throated, but it did nothing to quell the furor. After years of benefiting from online controversies, Charles had officially become too toxic for the internet.
His YouTube page was demonetized, he did not return as the host of Instant Influencer, and his other business ventures languished. He and Morphe, an influencer-focused beauty brand with which he’d partnered on an eyeshadow palette and brushes, cut ties. (Charles’s team says this was done at their own request after they saw Morphe getting backlash for associating with Charles. Charles told me he pocketed “a small amount” from the deal that allowed him to buy his house and pay off his parents’ mortgage.) One estimate put his total loss of income in the millions.
“I can’t even begin to explain to you how bad that week of my life was,” Charles remembers as he looks out at his backyard. “I was crying myself to sleep every single night. I was sitting there in bed staring at my phone. I wanted to kill myself. I wasn’t talking to anybody.” People threw food into his yard and spray-painted his property’s fence, prompting him to hire security.
“I think I’ve always been somebody who’s been able to cope,” he continues. “I’ve been able to turn my phone off, to go see my family, to have friends over. Go to an escape room, watch a fun movie, play Mario Kart, play Minecraft, build a Lego set. With this situation, it was really scary because my coping mechanisms weren’t coping. It was the first time where I was like, Oh, fuck. I actually don’t know what to do here.…I eventually got to a point where I was like, This is not healthy. This is not good. This is getting to a really fucking dark place.” The fallout became deeply personal when his younger brother, who works as a model in New York City, stopped talking to him because of the allegations. It’s now been two years since they last spoke, Charles says.
Treading a well-worn post-scandal path, Charles spent the next few months mostly offline, doing “a lot of self-reflection” and conferring with mental health professionals. And while a couple of months may seem like a laughably short time for a break, to Charles, having no stage felt like an endless punishment. “I absolutely fucking hated it,” he says. “I am somebody who likes to be busy at all times. I love filming. Having nothing to do drove me insane.”
In the summer of 2021, Charles prepared a comeback video, a 30-minute YouTube post titled “An Open Conversation,” which began with the acknowledgement that it would be “ridiculous and irresponsible to try to just come back to social media and pretend like nothing happened.”
It quickly became YouTube’s most disliked video of the week, according to Forbes, although it’s been watched more than 6 million times to date. His next post, about a TikTok cookie trend, was only the third most disliked video of the week. So Charles kept posting, driven by what I’d armchair-therapist-diagnose as a compulsive need for online interaction. It’s not just his brand—it’s been his entire personality since grade school.
As the only out gay kid in school in a small town outside Albany, New York, Charles found his community on social media, he says. First on Tumblr and then on Twitter and Instagram—“we Liked each other’s blogs and would talk back and forth and Skype call on school nights to just chitchat and hang out.” When he was 13, he’d travel to New York City to meet the “girlies” he’d met on the internet.
Romantic relationships would become a whole other challenge, one that ultimately led to The Incidents, he says. Finding dating prospects in the rarefied influencer-celebrity strata he eventually vaulted into was tough. “Quickly, please name five famous male gay celebrities from the ages of 20 to 25,” he says. “You can’t because they don’t exist.” So the internet, once again, he says, became an avenue for exploration. He started using TikTok’s For You and Instagram’s Explore pages as dating apps, as many people his age do, but admittedly ignored the pitfalls.
His biggest mistakes, he now thinks, were making himself too available and recklessly hitting on anyone he thought might be showing him interest. His intention was never to prey on minors, he says. He tried to explain all this in “Holding Myself Accountable,” but it just didn’t come across right, he reflects. “I’ve been fucked over by men so many different times. At this point, I just want a fucking boyfriend, somebody that’s going to love me, that’s going to care for me. So a lot of times, I go into just talking to somebody with rose-colored glasses.”
I still have to ask though: Why didn’t he just stick to actual adult dating apps? He tells me he previously had accounts on Raya, Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble, and while he did go on dates with people he met there, he ultimately felt too exposed, like anyone he swiped right on was going to take screenshots of their conversations or brag to their friends about it. (He doesn’t fully address that anyone on any social media platform could do the same.)
I know, you know, and he knows that Charles is on a mission to rehabilitate his reputation. But—and even though we’ve already established he’s very good at his job—I have to tell you that his regret doesn’t come across, in person, as the opportunistic artifice so many celebrities begrudgingly wade through. It’s more that he just seems…young. (Not that everyone in his position would have the luxury of being perceived as naive or guileless. This comeback would look a lot different if Charles were not a physically beautiful white man.)
I sometimes wonder what I would do if I blew up my professional life in a public, self-immolating way, and the answer is I’d hide away in a surf shack on a remote island swaddling myself in caftans until my money ran out. But I’m no James Charles. The traits that made him so famous in the first place—the instinct and ability to constantly seek out the light—are the same that have pushed him to endure the backlash and pain.
He’s more cautious now, although not so much that he’s given up on the DM sliding completely. Instead, he’s started requiring potential romantic interests to provide IDs before he’ll engage. “I’m a club bouncer at this point,” he says, which even still hasn’t stopped the occasional breach of trust. Earlier this year, a TikTok user shared snippets of a flirtatious conversation he had with Charles in which Charles outlines his requirements for a boyfriend. Charles also tells me he recently caught a 17-year-old trying to lie about his age by taking out a digit on his ID.
More than anything, Charles seems focused on his goal, which is, really, to reclaim his spot in the cultural mainstream. “I see a lot of people saying, ‘Oh my god, nothing even happened to him, he got away from this scot-free with no sort of repercussions,’” he says. “That is so far from the truth. It certainly wasn’t an overnight thing where now I’m slaying again.” But he is trying. Hard.
Eventually, he hired a PR firm to help. “They were trying to get me into every single event and premiere and red carpet and show, and every single one of them was a no,” he says. But ultimately, the gatekeepers, by some mysterious but increasingly common mixture of alchemy and time, softened. Charles started making significant appearances—the Grammys, the Scream 6 movie premiere, a Young Hollywood night hosted by Vanity Fair and TikTok. (He also, I should note, appeared at a Cosmopolitan party in L.A.)
And now there’s Painted, his biggest business swing yet. The first product, Create Paint, is a set of cream colors in 10 shades, encased in tubes to look like art supplies. Designed for use on the eyes, face, and body, the paints are made from a “wet lipstick-esque” formula that dries matte, Charles explains. “You could use them in a billion different ways,” he says. “They can be used by different people of different skill levels no matter how long you’ve been doing makeup for, no matter what you look like, no matter what your skin tone is.” He takes me to his basement, which he converted from an indoor pool into the studio where he films most of his videos, and dabs some on my hand so I can feel the silky texture for myself. He begins expertly brushing some hot-pink paint onto his eyelids, describing each step like he’s filming a Get Ready With Me, and suddenly I feel as if I’m inside the algorithm. Charles tells me he has labored over every part of this project himself, from the formulation to the packaging to the price, and that pouring his creativity into it has been a reprieve from everything else.
Whether his efforts will be rewarded remains to be seen. For his part, Charles seems to believe in absolution—and not just for himself. I wonder why he didn’t publicly post a screenshot of that purported apology note he got. Wasn’t he mad? Didn’t he want to give his haters at least one big fat “I told you so”? Possibly. But if anyone knows what it feels like to have the full wrath of the internet bearing down on you, it’s Charles. “Everybody makes mistakes, everybody fucks up,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong—I definitely don’t think people should be able to do whatever they want and not be held responsible for it. It’s important that people be held accountable. But I think it’s important that we allow people to grow and to learn. The idea that somebody fucks up and then their entire life and career and everything that they’ve ever worked for should be swept out from under their feet is just horrifying.”
These days, it feels like our culture at large, for better or for worse, is haltingly reaching the same conclusion. After all, don’t the medium-canceled now walk among us? This fall, while you perhaps wear a James Charles Painted eyelid, you may find yourself baking out of Alison Roman’s new cookbook, following Tinx on your Instagram feed, or thinking about reading Caroline Calloway’s memoir.
In our own messy, imperfect way, maybe we’re starting to calibrate our responses to the severity of an offender’s offense. Maybe we’ve arrived at the point where we’re doling out appropriate levels of social censure. Or maybe we’re just tired of keeping score and ready to succumb to the path of least resistance: letting our feeds figure it out for us.
Gabrielle Bluestone is a journalist and attorney from New York whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, and Gawker, among others. She is the Emmy-nominated executive producer of Netflix’s Fyre and the associate producer of Different Flowers, winner of the 2017 Kansas City FilmFest Festival Prize. Her first book, Hype, was published in 2021.
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