Laura Lee is staging a comeback whether you like it or not

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Laura Lee is staging a comeback whether you like it or not

Are you convinced?

Disgraced beauty guru Laura Lee disappeared off the face of the planet about a month ago after revelations of several extremely racist tweets, and a thoroughly unconvincing apology (fake crying included) to boot.

In her original apology video that has since been deleted but parodied relentlessly, the beauty YouTuber spends about four minutes sitting on the floor, whimpering something that vaguely sounds like an apology, and repeatedly wiping nonexistent tears from her face. People were not impressed and unsubscribed from her channel in droves, plunging her subscriber count from 5 million to 4.4 million at the time of this post.

Amid widespread mockery and the loss of several lucrative brand deals, Lee disappeared from social media completely for about a month. But recently she decided to show her face again.

  • In a 4-minute video entitled "Lets Chat: 9-25-18," Lee is fully made up, sitting upright in a well-lit room, and proceeds to give a very professional statement, with no tears — real or fake — in sight.

    First, she apologizes for her first apology video and explain why she took it down. "In the video, I come off more as a victim," she said. "I am NOT a victim in any way, form, or fashion in this situation. I'm taking it off my channel because it does not represent the human being that I am today."

    Lee also addressed her racist tweets and explained that she has changed as a person. "In the past six and a half years, I have grown so much and have gained so much knowledge and respect," she said. "I know that it's prejudice, and stereotypes are not funny ever. I know that is nothing to joke about."

    She also thanked her fans for supporting her during her hiatus. "When I was gone, the amount of love I received, the amount of DMs, emails, tweets, just everything flooding in with just pure love and kindness coming from people in the beauty community was just crazy," she said.

    Lee also hinted that she had done some non-beauty related work in her absence. "When I was gone, I did some pretty cool things to work with different people that had nothing to really do with makeup and beauty but it just had to do with growing as a human and being a good person," she said.

    While some viewers did seem to accept her apology, many others continued to find her insincere. The video has 63,000 likes and 82,000 dislikes. "This ain't it sis, YouTube isn't your calling anymore," someone commented. Another voiced skepticism of her non-beauty related work: "So you went away to film yourself interacting with other ethnicities? For the footage? Nah sis."

    SocialBlade also shows that her subscriber count has dropped even more dramatically after she released her second apology video. Lee lost over 4,000 subscribers on Tuesday, the day she uploaded her video, and another 3,860 on Wednesday.

    Only time will tell if Laura Lee's career is truly done for. Who knows? Perhaps the videos of herself hanging out with people of color will actually convince viewers that she's not racist anymore and win back subscribers. But it seems far more likely that the double whammy of the racist tweets and the cringeworthy first apology video has already dealt too powerful of a blow.

    @nian_hu