It was a different video than the usual beauty-product haul. There was no tutorial, no product reviews, just the young, blonde host looking into her camera and deliberately, methodically shedding light on the “influencer industry.” In the video posted last June, titled “Real Talk: SPONSORSHIPS, BRAND TRIPS, FREE PRODUCT,” 25-year-old Samantha Ravndahl discusses the ins and outs of her industry, including brand trips (Ravndahl has gone on trips to Vietnam and Bora Bora, both of which she documented for her channel), free products, sponsorships, and disclosure.

“I think a lot of people are under the impression that if they aren’t seeing disclosed ads that means that that person must not being doing ads,” she says in the video. “I can say to you guys with a very high level of confidence, if you’re following someone that has hundreds of thousands or over millions of followers, they are almost absolutely doing ads, whether or not they are disclosed.”

Last month she fielded questions about the beauty and social-media industry from her Twitter followers and even uploaded an updated video this month answering more questions from her fans about what it is, exactly, that goes into being an influencer.

“There’s a popular company with many popular influencers backing it, and a lot of the higher-earning influencers are making around and over $50 to $75,000 a month off their codes,” she said, explaining the different ways influencers make their money. She then quipped: “But don’t worry . . . it really is the best eye shadow they’ve ever tried.”

“I’ve been pretty adamant about [disclosures] from the beginning because I feel like, to me, that’s kind of what makes social media what it is,” Ravndahl said in a recent conversation with Vanity Fair. “People kind of do get to see behind the scenes a little bit more. They do know what’s going on, they know when money has exchanged hands, and I think that’s sort of what makes it something where the consumer’s a little bit more in control than the business is. I feel like social media really kind of pulled back the curtain on that.”

Like most prominent beauty bloggers, Ravndahl accepts free products, trips, and services from companies in exchange for promoting them on her social platforms, marked—as required by the Federal Trade Commission—with an #ad or #spon at the end of the post. But Ravndahl is one of a handful of influencers who goes the extra mile to be transparent with her audience, which includes 2.3 million followers on Instagram, nearly 830,000 subscribers on YouTube, and 129,000 followers on Twitter. Based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ravndahl is known for her brutally honest product reviews, elaborate makeup tutorials, and dry sense of humor. (In one recent video, in which she describes an eyeshadow palette as “worse than all of my ex-boyfriends in a room with me with depleting oxygen levels,” she asks her subscribers not to judge her broken nails, or “fallen soldiers” because they “tried their best.”)

Ravndahl, who started her beauty influencer career in 2013, isn’t harsh for harsh’s sake, something she’s been accused of. “It’s kind of this weird Catch-22 where sometimes if you are honest, people are like, ‘Well, you didn’t give it a try,’ ‘You could have worn it like this,’ ‘You could have applied it like this,’ ‘You didn’t do it the right way,’ ‘I would have done it like this,’” she said over the phone. “But to me it’s pretty few and far between. I feel like the overwhelming majority of people [are] appreciative of the fact that you’re willing to be upfront about the things that you like, the things that you don’t like as much, and how you make the things that you don’t like work if you need to.”