Jordan Bone can show you how to do an amazing smoky eye. Her recent tutorial on festival makeup is enviably cool. She had a sizable following as a beauty blogger and was a YouTube fave long before she posted an autobiographical video that blew viewers away. But after she posted "My Beautiful Struggle," a clip that that showed how she applies makeup as a person with quadriplegia, someone without the ability to open or move her hands, she's become an entirely new kind of inspiration.
"Most of the time when I upload a video, I have questions about my hands," Bone says in the clip, which now has more than 5 million views. "Truth is, I can't move them, open them, or close them. And it's all because 10 years ago, I became a tetraplegic after a car accident. So, to be able to do my makeup good enough to show you guys is a massive achievement for me."
She demonstrates how hard it was to learn how to put on mascara after her accident, which happened when she was just 15. Eventually, she learned to use her mouth to reposition her tools in her closed fist, which she can control better than most of us.
Before posting this video, Bone already had a following that included Kylie Jenner, but since it went live and viral, her subscriber count went from 17,000 last July to nearly 182,000 today. They may be coming to see her "struggle," but they're staying to see her success.
"Like contouring and highlighting teaches us, where there is darkness, there is always light," she says in the video. "That is the same with life."