NikkieTutorials scores Eurovision 2021 host gig
Dutch beauty YouTuber Nikkie de Jager, better known to her fan base as NikkieTutorials will co-host the Eurovision Song Contest 2021. The beauty influencer, with around 15 million followers on Instagram, is the first openly transgender person to be one of the main hosts of the show.
NikkieTutorials will host the Eurovision 2021 show to be held in in Rotterdam in the Netherlands along with other regular presenters, TV host Chantal Janzen, and singers Jan Smit and Edsilia Rombley. Participants from 41 countries will compete in the 2021 edition, featuring contestants who were due to appear in the 2020 event that was cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
De Jager was announced as the online host of the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 before it was cancelled. She was later the online host of the replacement Eurovision: Europe Shine a Light event. Later in the year, it was announced that she was confirmed to return, this time as a co-host of the 2021 contest.
Coming Out
De Jager’s career started at the age of 14, when she started uploading makeup tutorial videos to YouTube, which was quickly followed by formal education. She then worked as a professional makeup artist in a freelance capacity from 2014.
De Jager was listed as one of the Top 10 beauty influencers in Forbes magazine in 2017 and was announced as the Global Beauty Advisor for Marc Jacobs Beauty, in a role created especially for her in 2019. She has also collaborated with Maybelline and in December 2019 announced a collaboration with Lady Gaga, promoting her makeup brand, Haus Laboratories.
In January 2020, she uploaded a video to her YouTube channel called I’m Coming Out where she revealed she is transgender. She revealed that she was being blackmailed by someone who had threatened to make her assigned gender public. She underwent her transition in her childhood and teens.
“I have a name!”
The news of De Jager’s appointment as a co-host of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest by a European news outlets headlined the fact that she is transgender, while failing to mention her actual name in the headline. De Jager called out the media organisation over its reporting of the news.
The English translation of the headline read:“The Netherlands chooses a transgender as official host of Eurovision 2021”. De Jager responded on Twitter: “…I have a name?”
media… please be better than this 🥴🤨 *internally ughing* I have a name, you know? @metrobelgie pic.twitter.com/62gDmn6mU5
— NikkieTutorials (@NikkieTutorials) January 5, 2021
Australia at Eurovision
The Eurovision Song Contest has a history of representation of the LGBTQI community with the first openly gay artist, Paul Oscar representing Iceland in 1997. The next year the contest was won by Dana International, the contest’s first transgender performer, who won that year for Israel with the song Diva.
Australia has been participating in Eurovision since 2015 and has been in the top 10 four times.
Kate Miller-Heidke was the most recent representative for Australia in 2019, coming in 9th.
Australia’s 2020’s entry to the contest is Montaigne, who identifies as queer. Montaigne missed out in 2019 due to the cancellation but will be given a second chance to compete in 2021. Australia has been confirmed as a participant in the competition by SBS and the European Broadcasting Union until 2023.
