Hyram Yarbro, Gen Z’s skincare saviour: ‘YouTube gave me a reason to live’

How did a boy from a Mormon farming family become social media's most powerful skinfluencer'?

Truthfully, I didn't expect to blow up to this scale. And yes, I know this is going to sound cliched, but if you told me, even a year ago, that it was going to be this big, I would not have believed it." Considering the trajectory of Hyram Yarbro, the 25-year-old Gen Z skincare guru set on making skincare accessible", it is easy to believe him.

His success in the past year, driven by a lockdown-fuelled obsession with skincare and social media, has made Yarbro the world's most powerful skinfluencer". His young, captivated, skincare-obsessed disciples - 1.2m on Instagram, 4.5m on YouTube, 6.8m on TikTok (pre-lockdown 1.0, it was 100,000) - all diligently follow his skincare recommendations via his unfiltered, straight-shooting videos. At the beginning of the pandemic, he says he was uploading content on YouTube five to six times a week and posting three TikToks a day. But I've scaled it back a little," he says now, because I was literally not sleeping".