Ali Condon
Makeup artist Gabe Adams-Wheatley has overcome more hardships than most to get to where she is today - and now she inspires million with her videos.
The influencer, who recently came out to her fans as transgender, was born with a rare condition called Hanhart Syndrome, which means she has no arms or legs.
As a result, she was abandoned by her birth parents at just nine months old. Thankfully, not long after that, she was adopted by a family in Utah and gained 13 siblings.
Today, she has over 180,000 followers on Instagram and 4.1 million followers on TikTok thanks to her joyful makeup tutorials, beauty challenges, and 'Get Ready With Me' videos:
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And she does it all while serving up some much-needed representation for disabled people within the beauty industry.
Gabe believes her adoptive family are a huge reason for her success, since they've always shown her unconditional love and support, and taught her how to be as independent as possible.
For example, to avoid being labelled as 'the kid in the wheelchair' in high school, Gabe taught herself how to dance so she could perform at her school talent show.
After school, Gabe worked as a motivational speaker for a little while, touring around schools and businesses to try and make a difference in her community. But in the background, she had fallen in love with makeup and beauty.
"I had always been interested in beauty," she told Queerty in a 2021 interview. "I have four sisters, and they're all gorgeous, and my mom is also stunning.
"I always loved just sitting there watching them do their makeup and how each one of them did it so differently - whether that was starting with their eyeshadow first or starting with their foundation first."
Eventually, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Gabe found the courage to quit her job and go all-in on makeup and content creation.
"The first video I ever posted, it was just from the neck up, and there were a bunch of comments saying, 'Why is [she] doing it this way?' and 'What's going on?,' and I was like, 'Oh, I need to show that I actually don't have arms and legs in the beginning of the video to people understand,'" she recalled.
"When I started to do that, the videos skyrocketed. "
Everybody was like, 'Whoa!'"
As well as inspiring millions of fans and subscribers, Gabe is turning the beauty industry on its head, and making sure that major brands are acknowledging and meeting the needs of their disabled customers.
"I was asked by a brand to film a video where I’m holding the product up to show it and I was so stressed because I can hold it up, but it’s not going to look as graceful as somebody else," she told Dazed.
"There needs to be a little more of an open dialogue on how to do things."