I Followed My 100 Year Old Grandma’s Favorite Makeup Tutorial
Jeffree Star traded his usual glam playbook for his grandmother’s 70-year-old blush technique — and it actually worked.
In early September 2019, Jeffree Star uploaded “I Followed My 100 Year Old Grandma’s Favorite Makeup Tutorial” to his YouTube channel, ditching the contouring-heavy looks his audience expects for something a lot older and a lot simpler. The video centers on his maternal grandmother, Mary Steininger — “Grandma Mary” — who had just turned 100 and had been wearing the same signature bright red blush for more than five decades. Instead of chasing a trending technique, Star pulled up a vintage tutorial from her era and followed it step by step, on camera, with his own products in hand.
- Star’s grandmother, Mary Steininger, turned 100 in 2019 and has worn bright red blush as her signature look for over 50 years.
- Star recreated a vintage tutorial reflecting his grandmother’s preferred mid-20th-century glam era rather than a modern influencer technique.
- He blended his own Jeffree Star Cosmetics products with drugstore and specialty items, including Morphe setting mist and concealer, to execute the vintage steps.
A Tutorial Frozen in Time
Star framed the whole video as a tribute, not a comedy bit. Grandma Mary has been a self-described makeup lover her entire adult life, and according to Star, her application never really changed — heavy blush placed high and wide across the cheeks, sharply defined brows, and a finish built for the powder-and-pencil era rather than the blended, airbrushed look that dominates 2019 beauty content. He walked through her steps in order, narrating what each one was for as he went, rather than modernizing the technique on the fly.
That heavy blush placement is the whole hook of the video. Where contemporary tutorials tend to treat blush as a subtle finishing touch, Star noted that his grandmother’s generation used it as a statement — bright, visible color meant to read from across a room. It’s the kind of technique detailed in older beauty guides but rarely revived by mainstream creators, which is part of why the video stood out against the rest of his usual catalog.
Mixing Eras With His Own Product Line
Star didn’t limit himself to vintage-era tools to pull off a vintage-era face. He reached for pieces from his own Jeffree Star Cosmetics line alongside drugstore staples, using Morphe setting mist and concealer to lock the look in place before layering on the blush and brow work his grandmother favored. The combination let him honor the technique without pretending 2019 formulas didn’t exist — a modern concealer and setting spray doing the prep work, then decades-old application rules taking over from there.
Grandma Mary has worn the same bright red blush for more than 50 years — and Jeffree Star built an entire tutorial around proving it still works.
The Personal Stakes Behind the Bit
What separates this video from a typical trend-chasing tutorial is the personal thread running through it. Star repeatedly tied the makeup steps back to his own history, crediting his grandmother’s lifelong love of cosmetics with sparking his early fascination with the craft. He used the video to draw a direct line between her mid-century beauty philosophy — simple products, repeated for decades, worn with total confidence — and the influencer-driven, product-stacked approach that built his career and his brand.
That contrast is really the point of the whole exercise. Star, whose channel is built on innovation, contouring precision, and constantly shifting trend cycles, spent the video arguing that his grandmother’s one unchanging red-blush routine holds up just as well as anything currently circulating on beauty YouTube — a theme that echoes the kind of hard-won, decades-tested wisdom covered in 45 Life Lessons Written By A 90 Year Old.
Enduring Relevance of the Technique
Star’s takeaway wasn’t nostalgia for its own sake — he treated the tutorial as a legitimate technique worth revisiting, not a novelty. Viewers looking to actually apply any of it can find the same kind of no-nonsense, tested application advice in 8 Beauty Tips / Hacks I ACTUALLY Swear By!, which lines up with the video’s broader point: some techniques get repeated for 50 years because they simply work, not because nobody’s told the person wearing them otherwise.
Grandma Mary’s blush placement isn’t going anywhere — she’d been doing it since roughly the Eisenhower administration and had zero plans to stop at 100. Star closed the video the way he opened it: still wearing her red blush, still crediting her for teaching him to love makeup in the first place, no modern update required.
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