By Sharif Hodges
Megan Benissan has a big following on social media. Her followers are there for the makeup artistry. For years, Benissan has been perfecting her craft. With the rise of COVID-19 across America, she has had more time than ever before to make her videos.
One night, during the start of COVID-19 in late March, Benissan, 21, decided to do a makeup look incorporating her favorite color, pink. She wanted to incorporate rhinestones and show her audience how creative she could be through her own interests. Benissan didn’t expect much of a reception. That day alone, on Instagram she received over 300,000 views for the first time, and finally realized that makeup could take her to new heights.
“It was so surprising to get that many views in such a short time,” Benissan said. “I couldn’t believe it. It felt amazing to finally get the recognition I deserve.”
After accumulating more than 300,000 views on one video, she saw a steady climb in her average number of views. Some videos reached 100,000 views, but most stayed between 30,000 and 50,000. This was an insane jump compared to the average 1,000-5,000 views she got before COVID-19 started.
With newfound popularity and nothing but time because of the pandemic, Benissan had to make a decision. She either had to get a job to fund her makeup and take it more seriously, or use the products she had and stay home. The issue, however, was COVID-19. Benissan did get the job, but she asked herself whether or not it was worth it to work and risk contracting the virus.
“Overall, I think it was worth it,” Benissan said. “My makeup collection just keeps getting bigger and bigger now, and I can buy so many things that I couldn’t buy before.”
For months on end, Benissan received more of a following on all of her social media platforms, including TikTok, where she even hit a milestone of 50,000 followers that seemed almost unattainable to her before the pandemic started.
“I didn’t think people would actually like my stuff,” Benissan said. “They even started asking me to post more after a while and I really just couldn’t believe it.”
People continued to use social media more consistently than before during the pandemic, considering how many of them were home and doing nothing. With this in mind, Benissan realized she wanted to go all-in with her makeup and start building the framework of her newly desired career.
She did her makeup following the same general routine, but her ideas and looks changed constantly. Benissan wanted to be creative with her videos. It started with skin care. She always wanted her skin to look nice under the makeup because it could start to look bad otherwise. After that she wanted her eyebrows to look exactly the same. Benissan said she wants her eyebrows looking like “twins instead of sisters.” After this comes her full face. She does this because it’s easier for her to do it before her eyes. The eyes come afterwards, and this is where the most detail comes into play. At a glance, an outsider will immediately notice that this is where she sets herself apart from other makeup artists. She does detailed and off-the-wall designs on and around her eyes that set the tone for her makeup look. After this, she picks just the right lipstick, and she finishes with setting powder to top it off and keep it looking fresh for a long time.
“I try to do as many different things and ideas as I can because everybody has the same idea,” Benissan said. “I try to plan out my looks and make sure nobody has done anything like it.”
When Benissan thinks back now, she realizes how far she’s come. She gets so excited and uplifted when people genuinely like her work, and even gets sent free products now. She’s become more confident in her work.
“I want makeup to be a profession that takes me to shows and runways,” Benissan said. “Changing someone’s appearance is just so rewarding cause at first sometimes they aren’t very confident in the way they look. In those people I see a huge confidence boost afterwards, and it makes me feel amazing.”
Benissan has learned just how important makeup is to her life, as well as the invaluable lesson that she can make herself, and others, feel better about themselves.
By Luke Parker
Erik Hamlet, 25, needed groceries.
The list was not long. It never was. Shrimp and French fries were all he ever really needed, sometimes with broccoli and sometimes not. His is the kind of diet that draws two similar reactions: either envy in its simplicity or, as is the case with most people who look at the strapping, 72-inch ox of a man, anger that it works.
The trip to Giant wasn’t far; it was a straight shot through only one intersection. Walking into the store, Hamlet wore a black tank top from the band Mastodon, complete with a fire-breathing goblin on the chest. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for him to find another devout metalhead: a man roughly his age donning a Luciferian face mask.
The ox thought it was awesome.
General COVID-19 paranoia prevented Hamlet from getting up close and saying anything about it the first time he saw him. So when he stepped behind the masked man in the self-checkout line – which had extended deep into the paper towels section – Hamlet finally offered his compliment. A conversation started and stopped.
At least that’s what he thought, until the conversation picked up again in the parking lot.
“I just have to ask,” the specially masked man said through the window of his car. “Are you on TikTok?”
Hamlet smiled, feeling “real cool” about being recognized for the first time.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Yeah, that’s him.
Erik Hamlet – or @iammrham as he’s known to his thousands of followers – is a TikTok star, a celebrity of the latest, fast-growing social media platform. Of course, he’s more than that: He’s a film editor, writer and director, a senior at Morgan State University and the host of a temporarily suspended podcast with his friend (me), as well as a YouTube page with his wife.
But TikTok is where the bulk of his creativity ends up. With videos about strange metal lyrics he’s noticed, weird observations about the genre he’s made (for instance, the large number of bands with bald bassists), or sketches featuring song lyric dialogue, Hamlet’s earned his own army of metalheads.
Tacking TikTok to his ever-growing to-do list was not a part of the plan, however. In the before times, when Hamlet worked as a manager at the local Cinemark and his wife, Simoné, was just his fiancé, his platform of choice was Vine, the short-lived short-form application whose videos and memes live on across YouTube and Twitter.
During the lockdown, with his theater job shut down and a lot more free time on his hands, TikTok, for Hamlet, became a means to an end.
“I wasn’t able to shoot short films anymore,” he said. “And I realized that I could only depend on myself to make anything. [TikTok] was a good way to get short-form content out there to just satisfy myself.”
Hamlet’s first viral video during the pandemic followed a loose caricature of himself peeking around his house, making sure he’s alone. After deciding he is, Erik claps and pounds to the metal jams of Enter Shikari, while his dad – another caricature of Erik aptly captioned by “My Disappointed Father” – sips his coffee and shakes his head, saddened by the loud, rage-inducing sight of his son.
The video shot off like a rocket.
Hamlet’s page went from five followers, a considerable portion of which, he admits, were friends, to over 300 in a matter of days. Seven months later, the number is now 40,000 plus.
“The weird goth kids — these are my people,” he said.
But as he peered through the comments – an activity that grew more and more difficult to maintain as his fan base expanded – Hamlet noticed he was reaching a particularly niche audience, one he was proud of congregating: Black metalheads who, until now, didn’t have anyone to relate to.
“That really struck with me,” he said. “I try to find people like me, who I think would relate to this. It feels very good to know that they’re out there.”
In the time from few to thousands (he hit 30,000 followers last October, just three months after his “Disappointed Father” video), his operation grew. What started as an entirely in-app venture – recording and editing on his phone using TikTok’s software – blossomed into a studio-like production, something more akin to Hamlet’s skill set. 4K footage on Adobe Premiere Pro, the industry-standard editing program, is manipulated using the software’s collection of filmmaking features and exported back to the iPhone for publication.
Some basics stay the same. A collection of shorthand notes compiles Hamlet’s skit ideas and mere Word documents act as scripts.
While the videos are good for the heart and his restlessly creative soul, Hamlet is not sure how TikTok will translate into a career. He’s graduating in May, and while he worked with HBO on the 2017 documentary Baltimore Rising, the pandemic has swallowed a lot of his industry prospects and closed many doors. An internship he had lined up at Adult Swim, for instance, was cancelled.
Acknowledging the “tight-knit circle” COVID-19 has made in Hollywood – “people are going to work with people they already know,” he admitted – Hamlet says the freelance nature of TikTok has taught him an important lesson in independent work.
“I need to try my hardest on my own to get to where I want to go, to get to the things that I want to create,” Hamlet said.
“All I can do is go with the motions and show that it is not going to stop me, that this pandemic isn’t going to keep me from trying to make my career happen or make my abilities grow.”