James Charles's Google News Feed Has Now Indexed a 2023 Article About Celebrities Without Makeup

On or around October 27, 2026, James Charles's Google News feed indexed a Nicki Swift gallery from July 2023 titled "Celebs Who Look Totally Different With No Makeup." The same feed also surfaced an obituary for James Charles McMichael, Jr. of Shreveport, Louisiana, published by Osborn Funeral Home and originally dated August 2, 2024, a lag of approximately 26 months, comfortably exceeding the six-month lag documented earlier this month.

The McMichael obituary arrived alongside a separate 2026 entry for a Logan Township, Michigan resident, listed in the feed simply as James Charles "Jim or Griz" Vandefifer. The feed's commitment to covering every James Charles who has ever existed shows no sign of slowing.

What observers are noting

The Nicki Swift piece is receiving the most attention, largely because James Charles built a decade-long career explaining to the internet exactly what people with no makeup look like with makeup on. The feed surfacing an article about the reverse process, three years after that article was published, struck a number of commenters as the most on-brand mistake a broken algorithm could produce. Whether Google's systems recognized the irony is not documented.

The 26-month lag on the McMichael obituary has been called a new benchmark by people tracking the feed's increasingly loose relationship with chronology. For the record, the previous documented lag was a six-month delay on a Tyler, Texas obituary published in April 2026 and surfaced on October 22. The McMichael item more than quadruples that figure.

Some observers have pointed out that the feed is now, functionally, a time capsule. Content from 2023 and 2024 appearing in late 2026 alongside content published last week means the feed presents no coherent sense of when anything happened. One framing circulating online treats this as a kind of archival achievement: James Charles's Google News page now covers multiple years of his namesakes' deaths, a regional makeup controversy, and a three-year-old celebrity gallery, all with equal urgency.

Others have focused on the "Jim or Griz" nickname in the Vandefifer obituary specifically, noting that it is the most memorable alias to surface in the feed to date. The Buresh Funeral Home in Hale, Michigan, which handled arrangements, has not been mentioned in any prior coverage of James Charles.

What happens next

Whether Google's feed will surface older content remains an open question, given that the lag has now reached 26 months with no apparent floor. It is also not established whether the Nicki Swift piece was indexed due to a keyword match on "makeup" or on the name "James Charles" specifically. No statement has been made by James Charles or his representatives about the feed's contents.