- Blind social media star Molly Burke opens up about losing friendships at age 14 — and turning to the internet for a sense of community
- After Burke lost the majority of her sight, she listened to makeup reviews by creators and learned what was “trendy” in stores
- Now, after years of trial and error, Burke is showing her followers the “tips and tricks” for doing their makeup in an accessible way
When Molly Burke lost the majority of her sight at 14 years old, she turned to the internet for solace. Now, with over a decade of posting YouTube videos under her belt, the social media star is returning the favor.
“When I went blind, I lost all of my friends and I was really struggling with bullying,” Burke, 30, told PEOPLE exclusively at YouTube’s all-female creator event, celebrating the impact of women in sports and culture.
She continued, “It was really hard because I’ve always been an extrovert. I’ve always been really bubbly and friendly and love going to the mall with my friends on the weekends and having sleepovers and talking about boys and the normal young girl, teen girl things.”
When this happened, Burke — who was born with retinitis pigmentosa — no longer “had friends to do those things with.” She then turned to OG creators like Bethany Mota and Blair Fowler “who paved the path” for influencers like Burke.
Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is “a group of rare eye diseases that affect the retina, the light-sensitive layer of tissue in the back of the eye.” It also causes vision loss over time, per the National Eye Institute.
“I thought that that was such a powerful feeling that… They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know that I existed. I was just another subscriber or comment or review, but to me, they were my friends,” she said, adding that they “made me feel less alone.”
“They helped me rebuild my confidence. And they gave me what felt like an accessible way to enjoy things like beauty and fashion now that I couldn’t see them,” she added.
So, instead of looking at store windows and flipping through magazines, Burke would listen to these creators do makeup reviews and talk about “what’s trendy” in the stores.
“I would hear them describe the shade, the pigment, the undertone, the longevity, all the details. I would be able to envision what that was without being able to swatch it for myself,” she said.
She then realized that the internet and these creators were playing two major roles. One being that they provided an “accessible window to enjoying things that I could no longer enjoy in the way that I used to.” The other being a “sense of community.”
“I just thought those two aspects were so powerful in my own journey as a young girl trying to rebuild her life and find confidence and build connections,” she said. “And so when I was 20, I knew that I wanted to be able to bring that same sense of community and of belonging and of access to other people.”
For Burke, that meant taking everything she learned from these influencers and creating that sense of community for her audience.
“I loved all these beauty lifestyle girls, but they weren’t disabled like me,” she said. “When they did their makeup, they were looking in the mirror. But when I did my makeup, I was doing it all by feel.”
She continued, “So I wanted to take the years of trial and error of trying to teach myself how to do my makeup as a blind woman and be like, here, to the other blind people out there who want to learn how to do their makeup, here are the tips and tricks that I figured out over many years.”
At the creator event — which revealed that sports content uploaded by women creators has grown over 40 percent year-on-year on YouTube — Burke reflected on her history with sports and said that despite her disability, she’s identified as an athlete her entire life.
She grew up playing “almost every sport you can think of” and would go out of her way to find sports with accommodations. To this day, she works out several days a week and does yoga, pilates and traditional weight training.
“There’s no average day in the life, but I try to be as independent as possible,” she said. “And then I seek out accommodations and assistance where needed.”
Meanwhile, YouTube’s Vice President of Marketing, Connected TV and Creative Studio Angela Courtin is aiming to create a blueprint for how the rest of the sports world taps into the power of creators through the partnership with the NFL.
“Women creators have the unique ability to connect with people in a deep and meaningful way,” she said. “They’re not just changing how we consume sports content, they’re redefining who gets to tell the story, proving that audiences are hungry for diverse perspectives and authentic voices. This is an invaluable superpower.”
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