Lauren Kobayashi Riihimaki, also known as LaurDIY, is a 30-year-old Canadian YouTuber. After graduating high school, Lauren attended Toronto Metropolitan University, previously Ryerson University, where she studied graphic communications management and graduated with a Bachelor of Technology. However, Lauren was not a fan of her program because she felt “creativity drained” (“Draw” 4:23-4:24). With a love for arts and crafts and creating from a young age, Lauren decided to create a blog, “Desire and Inspire,” that would be the “creative freedom and liberation,” (5:00-5:02) she was missing. Eventually, this blog became her YouTube channel, and she only grew from there. Now living in LA, Lauren has 8.35 million subscribers just on her main channel alone. Since joining YouTube in 2011, Lauren has branched off to also have a vlog channel, LaurDIY Vlogs with 358K subscribers, a podcast with her fiancée Jeremy Lewis, Wild Til’ 9 with 278K subscribers, and she even hosted two seasons of an HBO Max show, Craftopia. Her career has even allowed her to win the ““House & Home” Shorty Award, and the “Lifestyle” Streamy Award” (“Lauren”).
As mentioned, Lauren has had an extensive career on YouTube. Lauren, as her YouTube handle LaurDIY suggests, started her career making DIY or do-it-yourself videos. She posted everything from “Last Minute Halloween Costumes,” “Trendy Clothes You Can DIY,” “House and Room Décor DIYs,” and so much more. Lauren and her channel became very popular during the years of 2014-2016, an era on YouTube that came to be known, or referred to, as the beauty/lifestyle guru era. To summarize, this era was most known for overly saturated videos, similar content across multiple creators such as “Black Friday or Christmas hauls,” “Back to School videos,” “Morning or Night Routines,” “Vlogmas,” etc., and collabs with the other lifestyle gurus. Although popular at the time, Lauren continued to produce the same set of content for years. Yes, her audience was mostly younger girls and teenagers, but as time went on, not only did Lauren feel that she needed to branch out and make other, more mature content, but her age demographic grew too. In a sense then, this extended period of simple or childlike DIYs which Lauren continued to create slowly became a version of herself that she felt disconnected from. Lauren’s identity, though it was once “situated in relation to context-specific social norms,” (Smith and Watson 242) specifically the social norm of being a lifestyle/DIY guru, wasn’t able to branch away from this label or norm even after its time. Because of this, Lauren was no longer making these videos authentically or because they were her creative outlet: she was making them forcefully, unsure how to go about changing her content to reflect what she actually wanted to do and create. As authors Smith and Watson put, the self we put online is one “that’s packaged to be sold” (237). In this case, LaurDIY was a very specific image that Lauren was trying to maintain, uphold, and even sell to some degree. She was known as the “DIY Queen” for so long that any content she created outside this “package” or “norm” was not “favoured by the Youtube algorithm,” (Kennedy 568) or her fans. The “pressure [for her to continue] to entertain,” (572) and not “let anyone down who valued and looked forward to [her] content,” (574) forced her to continue making the same or similar content she has been making for years, without the opportunity or ability to grow as she aged. Though her identity as LaurDIY was originally “a matter of choice and invention,” (Smith and Watson 242) it left an imprint that would become very hard to change as the years went by.
Even when Lauren switched some of her content to, for example, “Trying Youtuber/Influencer Products,” “Trying Famous Products/Brands,” and “Truth or Drink,” with the occasional DIY here and there, this, as Lauren mentions, did not inspire her creatively: “I am not passionate about trying Youtuber brands and products. They are fun videos to film but that’s not where my passion lies” (“feeling” 5:26-5:36). Again, even with this change in content, Lauren still didn’t feel like she could be truly authentic while still maintaining views because, to reiterate, this is her full-time job. It was around this time when Lauren started her vlog channel and things took a turn for the better. In her video “Goodbye For Now,” Lauren mentions that she will be taking a break from her main channel: “it has been so much easier to authentically transition to being myself over on the vlog channel and podcast” (“Goodbye” 1:55-2:02). The reason for this is because she feels immense “pressure to create a certain style or type of content [on the main channel],” (2:18-2:23) that she does not feel when it comes to the vlog channel or podcast. One important thing to note here about Lauren is that she suffers from a general anxiety disorder. Besides making fun, creative content, even at a time when she felt lost with who she was and what she wanted to create, Lauren has always been very open and honest about her mental health, something which not many people do. She has expressed to her viewers time and time again what anxiety looks like to her, what experiences she’s had, what has and has not helped, etc., and continues to do so. Although Lauren needed a break to find herself and what she was passionate about, especially after being on YouTube for ten years, she made this information abundantly clear and accessible to her viewers: “my goal, from now on, is to make LaurDIY as a brand evolve and represent whatever I want it to” (4:18-4:23).
Understanding Lauren’s history on YouTube and the struggles she has faced with authenticity and identity, one can see, just by looking at her vlog channel or podcast, that Lauren is finally allowing herself to be this authentic self she’s been striving for. For example, Lauren’s vlogs consist of filming a productive day, a regular day, random activities or events, or simply talking to her viewers in the car while she is driving. Yes, these vlogs are still edited, but they differ from the content on her main channel in that she doesn’t feel the need or pressure to maintain an image: she gets to decide when and what she films, without a structure or script. Specifically, in her vlog “feeling stuck, sad, self-sabotaging,” Lauren discusses the career paralysis she is dealing with regarding the main channel. Filming in her car with no extra crew, Lauren, in this unedited 20-minute clip, shares her inner thoughts and raw emotions and even asks for advice: “it feels so inauthentic not sharing this side of my life” (“feeling” 1:08-1:12). She reiterates that the vlog channel is her most authentic self, where she is most comfortable and passionate. She wants to show her viewers that her life isn’t perfect simply because she gets to choose what she puts out online, and she does this by creating vlogs like the one listed above or even vlogs about her day-to-day life. Through the vlog channel, Lauren was finally able to create “a sense of intimacy” (Smith and Watson 232) between her and her viewers, which she couldn’t do on her main channel.
One can also see this change in authenticity, intimacy, and identity on her Instagram. If you scroll far back enough you can see that her posts, just like her old YouTube videos, were saturated or followed a specific theme/editing style, posed, and in a way, innocent too, as she was trying to uphold this image or “performance” (Cover 58). However, with the growth of her vlog channel and podcast, Lauren now posts whatever she wants.
All in all, after a much-needed break from YouTube, “easy” DIY content, and uninspiring videos, Lauren, as of the end of September 2023, came out with a new series on her main channel, “Armature Artist.” In this series, Lauren takes on different, more mature, artistic outlets or activities such as glassblowing, rug tufting, and tattooing. In other words, this series allows Lauren to explore all the niches and mediums she’s been wanting to try, without pinning or applying herself to one specific activity or outlet. Now that her audience has matured, these sorts of videos or DIY’s, are more entertaining for us to watch too. In the end, as Smith and Watson put, “users find online environments potent sites for constructing and trying out versions of self,” (Smith and Watson 231) and Lauren is the perfect example of that. Throughout her career she has been everything from the DIY Queen, a lifestyle guru, vlogger, podcaster, etc., all while trying to find a version of herself which she truly feels connected to, inspired by, and that can connect with her viewers on a more intimate and personal level. The realization that she no longer felt authentic to herself or her viewers when creating DIYs, or doing something she really loves, was the turning point that Lauren needed to help her refresh and start a new journey.
Works Cited
Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, pp. 55-69.
“Draw My Life.” YouTube, uploaded by LaurDIY, 24 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIZmjlhe_5w&t=5s&ab_channel=LaurDIY.
“feeling stuck, sad and self-sabotaging.” YouTube, uploaded by LaurDIY Vlogs, 19 June 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3DXMekrfk&ab_channel=LaurDIYVlogs.
“Goodbye For Now.” YouTube, uploaded by LaurDIY, 20 December 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqnAneq1A4&t=263s&ab_channel=LaurDIY.
Kennedy, Umit. “Arriving on YouTube: Vlogs, Automedia and Autoethnography.” Life Writing, vol. 18, no. 4, 2021, pp. 563-578.
“Lauren Riihimaki.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Riihimaki. Accessed 11 October 2023.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “6. Virtually Me: A Toolbox About Online Self-Presentation (2014).” Life Writing in the Long Run, Michigan Publishing, 2016, pp. 225-258.
Photos: https://www.instagram.com/laurdiy/, https://www.youtube.com/@laurDIYvlogs/videos, https://www.youtube.com/@LaurDIY
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