From small-town Southern girl to YouTube cosmetic guru, Amanda Ensing quickly learned the price she would be asked to pay if she wanted to stand firm on her faith-filled convictions.
Growing up in Tennessee, Ensing remembers the jovial nature of her neighbors, and how being raised in a conservative Christian home was relatively without trial.
“We’re pro-God, pro-family, pro-freedom,” she recalls of her Puerto Rican immigrant family.
After stepping away in college from the godly values she was raised with, Ensing discovered vital facts about her identity: despite her wanderings, she truly identified as a conservative, and she knew what her God-given dream was, even if it went against familial expectations.
She started a YouTube channel focused on cosmetics, and after one viral video, her channel continued to grow. “I’d always talked about faith, but never about politics,” Ensing says. And yet, the sponsors that had been flooding to her account to promote their content slowly fell silent.
Seeing the way the media slants towards certain narratives made doubt to creep into Ensing’s heart, stirring seeds of uncertainty in her faith-based views. But in light of the events that transpired in summer 2020 with racial reconciliation, and a resurgence of conversations centered around growth as a nation, Ensing felt prompted to use her platform to speak out.
Major makeup brand Sephora sponsored Ensing but dropped her after cyberbullies attacked her online.
So Ensing took to her personal Instagram page to tell her story.
“There’s no price on your values, there’s no price on your voice. You can’t pay me to be quiet,” she said when Sephora offered to pay her if she took down the controversial video. “The truth is the truth, and I wanted to share the truth.”
“As a Christian, I only bow down to God, I don’t bow down to what people think of me,” she says. But “nobody can run away from cancel culture” until “next thing you know, there’s nothing left.”
Watch this video to find out what happened when Ensing stood up to the defamation she endured and the accountability she seeks to uphold in the beauty industry.
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