million views

The word skinfluencer is practically synonymous with one person: Hyram Yarbro. His social media following is enormous (more than 12 million across platforms), the products he recommends tend to fly off shelves, and his TikTok reaction videos have amassed upward of 10 million views. So how did a 26-year-old with no formal training as a dermatologist or aesthetician become TikTok’s most trusted—and most followed—skin care authority?

Yarbro was born and raised on a cattle ranch in (his words) “the middle of nowhere,” Arizona. At 18, he moved to Honolulu, where he’s remained ever since. He trained as a makeup artist and started posting videos on YouTube, but pivoted when he developed an interest in helping others look after their skin. “I was fascinated with it, because I saw the potential it had to unlock people’s ability to see themselves in a more confident light,” Yarbro tells BAZAAR.com.

But his YouTube channel was slow to take off. “Over the first two years, I grew to something like 2,000 followers,” he says. That began to change just before the onset of the pandemic. “I started noticing the most significant growth on YouTube at the end of 2019. That’s when I went from, I think, 10,000 followers to over a million within [a few months].”

Yarbro isn’t surprised that his skin care content saw such growth even before we were all stuck at home. “It was something that I kind of predicted. From 2016 to 2018, makeup YouTube was huge. People were using full-coverage foundation and heavy, dramatic makeup, which was awesome,” Yarbro recalls. “But I also realized, if people don’t know how to properly take care of their skin, it’s going to cause some skin concerns. So that motivated me to create the content that I did leading up to