YouTube makeup tutorials are extremely popular. New videos are constantly being added to the online library of how-to demos for covering blemishes and attaching false eyelashes. So when a former Los Angeles songwriter-turned-IDF-combat-soldier uploaded her Camo Makeup Tutorial on May 9, her parody could easily have gotten lost in the pile.
But Hannah Laskow Defore and her friend Neta Avitan already have more than 250,000 people chuckling along to the utterly fabulous makeup tutorial that will help you “just blend in.”
Lampooning the unglamorous day-to-day look of an IDF soldier, Defore opens her short tutorial with a message to her friends back in the US: “So, a lot of you guys have been asking me about my daily makeup routine and to be honest it’s changed quite a lot since I’ve moved from LA.”
She goes on to introduce viewers to the “camouflage palette” of green, black, white and beige-colored makeup. Defore tells the camera that her regular MAC or Sephora colors have been put to the side for now and instead she’s got the color palette she has named after her co-collaborator.
She also gives names to each of the colors – black is called “kitchen” because it’s the color of the food she eats on base; olive green is called “how long” referring to how long the olive-green army uniform will be her only fashion choice; and beige is called “Peace in the Middle East” because all she sees is sand.
Her step-by-step dead pan tutorial parodies the worldwide web’s army of makeup artists showing how to paint perfect lips, cheeks and eyes, and instead shows how to perfectly blend in to surrounding shrubbery.
Defore, who is an American volunteer in the army’s Machal program, was quoted in the news as saying she has made parody videos before but never took on the makeup tutorial genre.
When the Pazam Facebook page, a social network popular with IDF conscripts, picked up her video, the English-language, Hebrew-subtitled clip quickly went viral.
And her growing fan base wants more.
“Best makeup tutorial ever,” reads one comment.
“You made me so happy. What pride to have you in Israel,” another commenter writes.
“Please do one on how to wear an IDF uniform,” a commenter requests.
Defore is to be discharged from the army at the end of this summer. We’ll see if other soldiers let her go without making another video.