TikTok's Hyram Yarbro Talks Skin Care and Career Evolution
Hyram Yarbro: From Department-Store Makeup Artist to TikTok Fame
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He went on to get a job as a makeup artist for Saks Fifth Avenue. That experience working in the luxury beauty sales environment introduced him to the vast world of skin care, but what intrigued him most was how much money people were willing to spend on their skin. "When I saw people spending thousands of dollars on products, I was thinking to myself, 'What is so amazing about these products that would justify that price point?'" From there, he started doing his own research.
Yarbro began looking up ingredients, watching videos from dermatologists and cosmetic chemists, and reading published articles on the science in skin care — consuming any content he could on the topic. "It really urged me to start sharing what I had been able to learn on a YouTube channel about skin care — to really simplify that information and to show people that you can have good skin just by using simple, affordable products from the drugstore."
When Yarbro started his YouTube channel in 2017, he was posting without the intention of getting many views. "I wasn't bothered by it because I really just enjoyed being able to make videos and the process and building a little community," he says. It took two years to amass 2,000 followers.
Things started to pick up toward the end of 2019, when he created a series of videos reacting to recent TikTok skin-care trends (although he hadn't yet joined the app). Immediately, he saw a spike in his views. "They just started getting a lot of views — hundreds of thousands to over a million views within a few days," Yarbro says. In May 2020, he joined TikTok, and the growth was instantaneous — his first couple of videos accumulated thousands of views overnight. "It was incredible, very exhilarating, and reeling, and confusing, but in the best way."
At first, Yarbro was posting with regularity across all his social media platforms while he continued working as a makeup artist — which meant he was sleeping maybe four hours a night to keep up — until he made the jump to pursue content creation full-time. "I was always like, 'What if it falls apart overnight?'" he says. "I was pretty scared." But when he made the switch and started investing more time in his videos, he could immediately see the change in his content, and the new subscribers came flooding in. In no time, he went from 100,000 followers to the 6.4 million he has today on TikTok alone. Yarbro's decision to make a career out of beauty content creation coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. "I really wanted to push myself to create as much content to help keep my audience distracted from everything that's in the world," he says.