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Everyone thought Michelle Phan had died. After ten years, and over a billion views, YouTube's biggest beauty star disappeared abruptly in 2015, leaving her Twitter, Instagram, and video channels silent. Phan arguably invented the entire genre of YouTube beauty. If your fallen asleep to the calming tones of a beauty tutorial or learned how to contour from a video, it's because of her. And now she was gone.

The 9 million people who made up her  For a digitally deceased person, Phan looks very glowy in the flesh. We're sitting together at a conference room at her PR agency's office, picking at egg tarts. Her makeup is remarkably minimal ⁠— no foundation (she hasn't worn it in two years), two slim lines of eyeliner ⁠— which surprises me, since I've watched her use beauty products totransform herself into Daenerys Targaryen. (Four million other people, by the way, also watched that video.) While many beauty YouTubers narrate their videos with the upspeak tones of your most excitable friend, with lots of "likes" and "Oh My Gods," Phan's voice still has the same zen, measured tone that gave her videos a knowledgeable-older-sister quality.

In many ways, Phan was the first to make money as an influencer ⁠— an economy that NPR estimates will reach $10 billion by 2020. When I call her "the world's first influencer," she doesn't correct me. "She was the first to model how this could be an occupation and career," says Emily Hund, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in the influencer industry and social-media consumer culture (that there is someone at an Ivy League university studying influencing shows how far it has come as a career.) An entire generation of people probably wouldn't have jobs without Phan. James Charles wouldn't exist. In 2015, "influencer" appeared 55,000 times in search results on LinkedIn. Now, it appears more than 255,000 times.