LOS ANGELES — On a Tuesday night not long ago, the YouTube star known as Gigi Gorgeous walked into the Nice Guy, the type of restaurant that prides itself on being frequented by Justin Bieber and the Kardashian family.
After a brief conversation by the bar with her publicist and a male companion — a guy named Nick who wore a white Chanel baseball cap — she strode back to the kitchen, where amid canned tomatoes and clanging pots was a candlelit table for six.
“Got to have my mafia table,” she trilled, flipping her long, blond hair.
While Gigi Lazzarato may not be a household name, she receives the It Girl treatment at the Nice Guy and many other places in this town. Last year, she caught the eye of James Goldstein, an art collector and basketball buff, at a party he hosted for the designer Jeremy Scott and Longchamp, the French handbag company.
“Blond is usually his type,” Ms. Lazzarato, 23, said of Mr. Goldstein. “That’s what he told me.”
A few weeks later, she turned heads on the arm of August Getty, another fashion designer, at a showing of his latest collection in the back lot of Universal Studios.
Towering over much of the crowd in a skintight white calfskin garment with strategic cutouts — at 5 feet 8 inches, she favors heels four inches or higher — Ms. Lazzarato looked like a Bond Girl.
“You can’t even imagine how many people I saw that day,” she said. “It was a whirlwind. Hundreds of faces.”
Ms. Lazzarato’s own face, while not quite yet her fortune, has been earning her a very nice living thanks to partnerships with companies including Too Faced Cosmetics, Pantene and Crest for reviewing beauty products online. This would not be unusual, except Ms. Lazarrato is transgender.
She started her YouTube channel in 2008, from her home in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, when she was known as Gregory Gorgeous. She now has more than two million fans.
Ms. Lazzarato talks to them about not just makeup, but her transition from male to female and — more snappily than sappily — its consequent joys and challenges.
“Relationship advice from Gigi,” she said, midway through her second pink vodka cocktail at the Nice Guy. “Worst advice ever, probably: The only way I’ve ever been able to get over a guy is to get under a new one.”
A tablemate’s eyebrow cocked. Ms. Lazzarato was just getting started.
“I’ve worked too hard to be where I’m at to not have fun with my life,” she said. “So if something isn’t working, I’m a change that, girl!”
Ms. Lazzarato was raised Catholic, the middle of three brothers. As a child, she recalled, she always felt more like a girl than the boy named Gregory. She wore her mother’s makeup as early as she could and faked long hair by fixing a dishcloth to her head with an elastic band, she said.
Around 9, she “got obsessed” with diving after spending a summer at gymnastics camp. In 2005, she placed first for her age group in a national competition for springboard and platform diving, but she stopped when she was 15.
“I didn’t know how to socialize,” Ms. Lazzarato said. “I wasn’t able to date, I felt like I was missing out on life. When I stopped diving, I started living.”
Inspired by a friend who pointed out the newfangled makeup how-to videos on YouTube, she began creating some herself. She also told her parents she was gay. Ms. Lazzarato’s father, David Lazzarato, a media company executive who is now retired, was supportive, she said, and her mother, Judy, a homemaker, even more so.
“My mom, when I started wearing makeup, was very protective of me,” Ms. Lazzarato said. “I would post a video, obviously I wouldn’t announce that I was posting a video, and I’d come downstairs 30 minutes later, and she’d say, ‘I love that video you just did.’ She’d be on top of it. She had no shame.”
The makeup got heavier, but her mother didn’t interfere.
“Once I started doing my eyebrows and my mascara and different lip colors, my mom would be like, ‘I don’t want you to be called names; I don’t want you to go through a hard time,’” Ms. Lazzarato said. “But she never told me to go take it off. Never. I think she knew that I could handle myself. I think she knew.”
When Ms. Lazzarato was 19, her mother died of leukemia. She had enrolled in fashion school but dropped out to further her YouTube career and was living on her own in Toronto: acting out, hooking up and exploring her sexuality.
A chance meeting in New York with the transgender performer Amanda Lepore helped persuade her to come to terms with her desire to be a woman and to start pursuing hormone therapy, she said. She worried about losing her budding following, which at the time was hovering just over 500,000.
“I had my viewers at the time that were like: ‘You’re amazing. You’re my idol,’” Ms. Lazzarato said. “I didn’t want to let them down. I didn’t want to let anybody down. I wanted to keep being the person that they loved.”
She came out as transgender to the Internet in 2013, in a video that included an apology for not posting anything very personal online for the last year. An outpouring of support followed.
And so did some surprisingly mainstream endorsement deals, including the ad campaign with Crest in Canada: “Because of her beautiful, white smile and because she reaches consumers looking for new beauty solutions,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email.
In 2014, Gigi moved to Los Angeles, in part to pursue acting, and befriended Miley Cyrus after a wild night at Bootsy Bellows, the West Hollywood nightclub. (“We both don’t remember what we talked about, but we have a brief recollection of seeing each other,” Ms. Lazzarato said.)
Ms. Cyrus shot Ms. Lazzarato for a social media campaign to promote L.G.B.T. awareness and asked Ms. Lazzarato to introduce her performance at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. A photo from Ms. Cyrus’s shoot, of Ms. Lazzarato in a strappy dress with the red lip revived by the erstwhile Hannah Montana, hangs on a wall in Ms. Lazzarato’s bedroom. (Also in her apartment: a portrait of Jesus that she sometimes kisses on her way out the door.)
For kicks, she’s recorded videos with Kylie Jenner, whom she met at a Fourth of July party after Ms. Jenner reached out over Instagram. One, in which they close their eyes and put foods like pickled green beans and pig’s feet in each other’s mouths, has more than eight million views (for what that’s worth).
Ms. Lazzarato collaborates with Mr. Getty on his fashion line, serving as muse, model and moral support. “It was like a brother and a sister; it reminded me of Gianni and Donatella, standing on a runway,” Mr. Getty said, referring to the Versaces, of Ms. Lazzarato accompanying him to his Universal Studios show.
“I value her mind so much when it comes to asking about hemlines,” Mr. Getty said. “For me, she’s the ideal woman. She has such a feminine soul.”
Ms. Lazzarato remains wedded to the Internet, posting new videos every week or so. She edits them herself in a style that’s signature Gigi Gorgeous: quick cuts, rapid speech, face immaculate in a mask of makeup, finishing them with a lip print.
On a recent Monday morning at her West Hollywood apartment, clad in a magenta silk dressing gown and ignoring her phone’s intermittent dings, she contoured her face and filled in her brows with the ease of Bob Ross painting little happy trees.
Ms. Lazzarrato is transparent about her looks — in a 2014 video, she rattled off five surgical procedures she’d had done as if they were sundries picked up at Trader Joe’s — but more circumspect about medical treatment. Asked whether she plans to get more plastic surgeries, she said, “I think right now I’m totally good.”
For every confessional she posts about becoming a woman, there are a half-dozen videos about her diet, recent dates or the contents of her handbag. She is taking acting classes and said she is looking forward to the day when a director casts a transgender actor in a movie and doesn’t make a big deal about it.
In the meantime, a documentary crew is following her, shooting footage for a film about Ms. Lazzarato that it hopes to enter into the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
What could people possibly not know about someone who has chronicled the last eight years of her life online?
“I haven’t said a lot of this stuff to the camera yet,” Ms. Lazzarato said. “Personal stuff. People are going to have to wait to see.”
The YouTube show will go on, for her sake as much as her fans’. “I feel like it’s been something different every day, and if I don’t film and I don’t record, I’ll forget,” she said. “I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that happened.’”
Asked whether she ever gets lonely, given that few people have transitioned genders so publicly, Ms. Lazzarato said, in the fine tradition of Hollywood, that her manager knows her deepest, darkest thoughts.
But also, “at the end of the day, I have everybody online, honestly,” she said. “I could go on Twitter, Instagram, and literally, my soul will be lifted by things that I see. It just makes me really happy.”
