Make-up and making a difference combine in content creator and disability activist Lucy Edwards' 'Get Ready With Me' routine

Who are your role models? Do you see yourself represented online? The online content creator Lucy Edwards is an author, an award-winning journalist and broadcaster, a make-up brand founder and a disability activist. Sharing her experiences online, celebrating diversity and showing that disability is a normal part of life, Lucy’s motto is “Blind Not Broken”. She is an advocate of the social model of disability that believes it is society who needs to adapt, remove barriers and become more inclusive. Her ‘How does a blind person...’ series is a strand within all her content that provides representation, dispels myths, and fosters greater understanding.

A classic ‘Get Ready with Me’ or ‘GRWM’ video, this popular online form illustrates a daily make-up or beauty routine, providing intimacy between creator and consumer. Punching above its weight, beyond just a routine, Lucy tells her own story while championing confidence and independence. Her advocacy resonates with her ever-growing audience, a combined social media following of over 2.8 million. This engagement has enabled Lucy to influence positive change and innovation in the cosmetic industry more widely, bringing about more inclusive practices in the wider beauty space. Her collaboration with Proctor and Gamble and Pantene informed an ‘Inclusivity Social Code of Conduct’ and resulted in product development around a QR code for making packaging more accessible. As a brand owner of Etia with cosmetics company Estée Lauder, Lucy is also making make-up product design more inclusive globally and showing that social influencing can be a force for good.

YouTube Shorts are a shortform vertical video of up to three minutes (originally sixty seconds) that first began appearing on the YouTube homepage in 2019. Intended for viewing on smartphones, Shorts offered an alternative to YouTube’s competitors TikTok and Instagram Reels. It may be brief, but its messaging is no less powerful, and creators like Lucy have distilled their advocacy to great effect in this concise format.

Blind content creator Lucy Edwards-Cave shows how she does her own make up as a blind person.