Jeffree Star confirms breakup with Nathan Schwandt

YouTube celebrity and cosmetics mogul Jeffree Star broke his recent social-media silence on Saturday to inform his 17.2 million subscribers that he and his longtime boyfriend and video partner, Nathan Schwandt, had ended their relationship last month.

"We broke up …," tweeted Star, born Jeffrey Steininger Jr., with a broken-heart emoji. "Sorry for the silence, I've been trying to heal and it's been really hard."

In an accompanying YouTube video that had garnered more than 26 million views as of 5 p.m. Monday, the 34-year-old Star detailed, "We are a few weeks of me and Nathan no longer being together and I don't even know where to begin. There's no easy way to say this but we did break up. I've used a lot of this time of silence to just try to heal. We're both in a state of shock. I'm devastated."

Explaining that Schwandt had never been comfortable in the spotlight, the beauty influencer added, "I'm grateful for him and I'll be grateful until the day I die because this was the only man that was ever confident enough to love me publicly, to love me for me fully, all my flaws, no-makeup-waking-up-in-bed. … And I've never loved someone like I've loved him."

Star, the fifth highest-earning YouTube celebrity, with an estimated 2019 income of $17 million, according to Forbes magazine, had developed a following for his online makeup tutorials. He founded Jeffree Star Cosmetics in 2014, which by 2018 was grossing an estimated $100 million annually.