Kylie Jenner Is the Youngest Person on Forbes 100 List, and People Have Mixed Reactions
At 19 years old, Kylie Jenner is the youngest person to be featured on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list, the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s highest-paid entertainers.
The top three spots belong to Sean “Diddy” Combs ($130 million), Beyoncé ($105 million), and J.K. Rowling ($95 million.)
Twitter users were both congratulatory and condemning when it came to Jenner’s inaugural appearance on the list.
wow woke up the youngest entry on the @Forbes 100 list ..
@KylieJenner @Forbes For stealing clothes designs, sending out empty highlighters, lip glosses with broken brushes, half filled lipstick tubes, nice
She ranked No. 59 with $41 million earned pretax in the last 12 months, only 12 spots behind half-sister Kim Kardashian, who earned $45.5 million, by Forbes’s estimation. Obviously Jenner’s fortune, which is generated primarily from reality TV shows and her budding cosmetics and lifestyles brand, according to Forbes, attracts equal parts adulation and derision.
In tandem with the rise of her own manufactured celebrity (and promptly plumped pout), Jenner launched eponymous beauty products, including Kylie Lip Kits (boxes of lip stains, liners, and glosses) following teaser announcements Jenner would make on her social media profiles, primarily Snapchat. Demand for the makeup — and subsequent Kylie-branded clothing and phone cases and apps — skyrocketed, and soon the youngest Jenner-Kardashian exploded beyond any logical limit.
A common criticism is that Jenner’s business success wouldn’t have come if not for the platform her family created for her on the E! reality television series, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the world’s first introduction to Kylie Jenner on an accessible scale. It’s made Jenner’s privilege a lightning rod for criticism, notes Moya Luckett, a media historian and part-time faculty member at New York University.
Jenner’s success can be understood in part if one applies something called the “Matthew Effect,” a concept that means the rich get richer, the famous ever more so. Scientists, for instance, who aren’t necessarily at the forefront of research but are already famous, may attract greater recognition for their work than their lesser-known peers. The same goes for Jenner; it’s not that her lip kits are exceptional — they’re manufactured in the same facility as other brands’ products — but she’s already a well-known name hawking a trendy product, which is a recipe for success.
“It’s quite clear she’s not sitting there as a chemist, mixing up different colors of lip kit formulas and products,” Luckett tells Yahoo Style, referring to how Jenner portrays a hands-on approach to her businesses, which are mostly licensing deals that capitalize on the social media star’s popularity. “For a lot of people, that’s just a fantasy way of living and it’s completely inaccessible.”
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