Beauty YouTuber Chloe Morello has divided viewers in her recent beauty tutorial for Eid, a Muslim religious celebration that marks the end of Ramadan.
Chloe opens the video by mentioning that she has had a lot of requests from Muslim women for an Eid makeup tutorial, following her Eid makeup tutorials over the past few years. At the end of the video, she puts a hijab on, saying “I don’t want to offend anyone when I do this, but it’s purely so that the hijabis know what it will look like with one on.”
However some commenters clearly did not welcome her sentiment.
One commenter complained that she was wearing the hijab like an ‘accessory’, while others said that it was ‘cultural appropriation’ to wear the hijab, as if it’s a costume: “I would never wear a hijab …that’s like wearing a kippah as a decoration….you can’t try on a religion. It’s either your lifestyle or it’s not…any other form of wearing it is disrespectful to other cultures and religions.”
But most Muslim women in the comments came to her defence, saying they loved the tutorial and couldn’t wait to try the look. One commenter suggested that people had misunderstood the intention: “I’m literally so annoyed with the fellow muslim ladies. You come here to spread hate and negativity especially with all the islamaphobia going on in the world. It’s not helping our situation at all. I praise Chloe for doing an eid tutorial as not many youtubers do so. She wore a hijab simply to show everyone how the makeup looks when wearing a hijab. Stop giving us a bad reputation. Love you Chloe ❤️”
We spoke to Muslim fashion blogger Wiwid Howat to get her take on the situation. She grew up in Indonesia and currently lives in Sydney, running wiwidhowat.com.
“Don’t you think she looks gorgeous? She looks gorgeous in the headscarf!” says Wiwid. “I think people are just sensitive. I read all the comments last night…like, who are these idiots?”
She explained that by putting on the hijab, Chloe Morello was simply doing her job as a beauty blogger – for her, it’s an example of what it looks like.
“I think everything we do always comes with pros and cons. There are always haters. There’s nothing we can do for those haters, they still keep hating what we do, they will pick up on small things that are unnecessary.”
As a big fan of Chloe Morello, Wiwid says it’s ‘considerate’ that Chloe realises she’s not just catering to ‘predominately white Australians’, but also to minorities like Muslims who are really into makeup.
And to the haters, she says simply: “I wish she’d just delete those people!”