Hyram Yarbro is currently one of the most influential skinfluencers across multiple social media platforms, but especially on TikTok. Beauty News caught up with the influencer and founder of Selfless by Hyram about his entry into the world of beauty and skin care, collaborating with The INKEY List, and building his beauty brand.

Hyram Yarbro is one of the most followed skinfluencers across multiple social media platforms with more than 6.2 million TikTok followers, 4.5 million YouTube subscribers, and 1 million Instagram followers. With a platform as competitive and as saturated with content creators as TikTok, what is it about this 26-year-old influencer that stands out? After a conversation with the skin care expert, it seems his popularity stems from a combination of breaking down beauty product formulations in a way that makes sense to the average skin care consumer as well as his genuine desire to help followers with their dermatological concerns.

Hyram recounted that growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona in a conservative environment meant that he didn’t have much access to information on skin care. Even if he did, Hyram said, it wasn’t socially acceptable for him as a male to be concerned with skin care or other beauty products. It wasn’t until he attended college at Brigham Young University, where he majored in International Cultural Peacebuilding, Intercultural Peacebuilding, Anthropology, and Entrepreneurship, that Hyram was able to experiment with makeup products for the first time –and become fascinated with beauty. After seeing makeup boosted his sense of confidence, Hyram went on to become a makeup artist, which led him to research how makeup and skin care products were formulated and how they could affect a person’s skin texture. He quickly realized that there weren’t many accessible or relatable sources of information on the skin care industry, and he wanted to fill the whitespace in the content creator market.

“Cosmetics as a whole has the incredible ability to unlock the power to see yourself in a more confident light. As much as makeup is super fun, I was just instantly infatuated with the endless amount of information around skin care and the constant technological and scientific developments that were being made in the skin care world. Similarly, I felt that there wasn’t a lot of easily accessible skin care information out there to help consumers choose products best for their skin. With makeup, you can instantly watch product swatches and know if the color payoff is good, but with skin care there is an innate trust that you have to put into the product. I really just wanted to make it easier for people to make better purchasing decisions when it comes to skincare products and use ingredients and formulas that are really best suited to their skin,” said Hyram.

Hyram officially launched his YouTube channel in 2017 and, to his disbelief, his channel rapidly grew in subscriber count towards the end of 2019, from around 10,000 followers to more than million in a few months. With the rush of content creators to TikTok at the height of the pandemic, Hyram’s TikTok follower count grew from 100,000 to four million in about four months.

Hyram was resistant to launching his own line, concerned with what he could offer in a saturated industry and with sustainability top of mind. Initially, Hyram was quietly working on a beauty brand with the help of his assistant and was quickly overwhelmed with the enormity of the workload on top of his day-to-day tasks as a content creator. It wasn’t until Hyram was approached by The Inkey List that he was interested in partnering with a larger company to create a beauty brand.

“I had already begun communication with the Inkey List founders in 2019. I was able to meet Mark [Curry] and Colette [Laxton] and there was this instantaneous connection beyond skin care, where I could see that they were very grounded and wanted to make an impact beyond the skin care space. I had been working on a brand but hadn’t told them anything…They came to me and said, ‘What if we created a brand together where it was focused on social impact, made a difference in the world, and helped alleviate global issues?’ The whole time I was like that’s exactly what I am working on, this is the universe’s sign that it was a meant-to-be partnership.”

Hyram’s prediction was on the money. Since Selfless by Hyram launched June 1, 2021, and globally in Sephora stores and Sephora.com on June 24, 2021, the company has been classified as being beyond carbon net zero, meaning it is not only responsible for zero carbon emissions but is actively working to reduce carbon emissions as well.

Selfless by Hyram has partnered with Thirst Project, a non-profit organization that aims to bring safe drinking water to communities all over the world, and Rainforest Trust, a non-profit environmental organization focused on the purchase and protection of tropical lands to strategically conserve threatened species. From June 24, 2021 to March 31, 2022, the brand has partnered with these organizations to build 15 water wells in Eswatini Africa to provide 8,662 people with access to clean drinking water for 50 years and protected 255,152 acres of Bolivian rainforest from deforestation.

Currently, the brand has six individual SKUs, ranging from $16 to $30, made with sustainably sourced, skin-soothing ingredients like rainbow algae and sea kelp. The products can be purchased via the brand’s website and via retailers including online and brick-and-more retailers including Sephora, Cult Beauty, and more.

As for the future, Hyram said to stand by for the brand’s first sun care product.