Michelle Phan is a Vietnamese-American self-taught unlicensed make-up instructor and product demonstrator. She has an estimated net worth of $3 million. She earned her net worth by posting make-up, beauty and fashion tutorials on YouTube and sometimes she uses the online alias ricebunny.

Born in Boston, MA to Vietnamese parents, Phan grew up in Massachusetts and California then settled in Tampa, Florida where she attended high school. She originally planned to take up medicine at the request of her mother but she enjoyed art and later convinced her mom to allow her to major in illustration. Her mother, who is a nail technician, was her inspiration. She attended dropped out of Ringling College of Art and Design and Massachusetts College of Arts and Design. As a student, she worked as a part-time waitress at a sushi restaurant.

Michelle Phan’s first post on makeup tutorials were in Xanga under the username Ricebunny. She then started posting on YouTube in 2006 and made around 200 videos. By January 2013, she already has over 3,050,000 subscribers and 706,950,000 video views. Her channel is the most subscribed beauty channel on YouTube. Her popular beauty tutorials include Romantic Valentine Look, Brighter Larger Looking Eyes, Makeup for Glasses, and Mysterious Masquerade Look. Among her video tutorials, the most popular include the Lady Gaga Poker Face Tutorial with more than 33,000,000 million views, Lady Gaga Bad Romance Look with over 34,000,000 views, Romantic Valentine Look with over 8,000,000 and Seductive Vampire with more than 14,000,000 views. Special effects were used in her new Lady Gaga Bad Romance in January and this is the first for a makeup instructor. Buzzfeed profiled her in January 23, 2009 and her video turned into a viral one overnight.

Phan appeared in the Seventeen magazine on August 2009, the St. Petersburg Times on August 23, 2009, the Sun Sentinel on August 24, 2009 and on the popular blog BellaSugar on April 19, 2009. She was also featured in a Chilean newspaper for her Barbie video. She was published in the May 2010 issue of NYLON magazine as well as in OK and Instyle Magazine. She was hired by Lancome in 2010 and since then, her videos included Lancome beauty products.