Success Through Empathy and Story Telling
Mikayla Nogueria is a beauty influencer mainly through Tik Tok with 11.2 million followers and 2 million on Instagram. Mikayla is not what the beauty industry would have normally promoted in the past. She is a short, dark haired, fair skinned, curvier woman with a thick Boston accent. She is quirky and that is precisely why she has become so successful. She went from doing short makeup tutorials in her parents home to fully supporting herself. She became a brand ambassador for some of the biggest names in makeup and beauty, and is now one of the most talked about influencers on Tik Tok. Mikayla has told a story through her videos about her journey in the beauty industry. Her platform provides a place for inclusivity, imagination and challenges. While she paints herself as a beauty guru, Mikayla has not been shy about sharing the details of her personal life on her platform as well. She has built a following loyal to her because the story she portrays is that of a shy girl unsure of herself and the world, who has grown into a woman with love and happiness all around her. This is precisely why I myself also look to her for inspiration.
Mikayla is 23 years old and was born in Massachusetts. She attended Bryant University in Rhode Island and today is living with her Fiancé Cody, back in Massachusetts where she works remotely on her media platforms. Her influence on Tik Tok has grown tremendously after only joining the platform in march of 2020. Over the course of the last two years, she has grown to work with some of the biggest names in beauty from Fenty Beauty by Rhianna to Rare beauty by Selena Gomez. She has promoted for skin care brands such as glow recipe and even became lucky enough to create her own makeup collection with the company Glamlite.
Mikayla’s major following comes from tiktok where she tells the story of her life. Her content provides a variety of things that go beyond simple makeup tutorials. She allows her audience to know her. From her background in makeup and how her interest was sparked to her love life and dating adventures. If you search through her content you can actually see the process of her meeting her now Fiancé and getting engaged. She not only shares the good about her life but also the bad. She speaks out around the issues she has faced like bulimia, depression, anxiety, and much more. Her story is why people fell in love with her as an influencer. She is not only a fierce critique of all makeup brands but she is real and unfiltered with her audience. In the book Media Literacy in Action, Renee Hobbs states that “Sometimes we cannot really understand our actual life experiences until after we have transformed them into a story.” Mikayla has created a narrative that people can follow and because her experiences are so relatable, it is almost as if she is putting other people’s experiences into stories they can listen to and feel connected with.
Mikayla’s story is something many people care about and listening to her words allow for people to connect to the struggles she has encountered. As noted in the video How Stories Shape Our Minds by BBC Ideas, stories are how people connect and how we develop empathy for one another. The story Mikayla has displayed has appealed to the empathy of her vast audience allowing them to see a real, attainable and imperfect side to beauty. “On functional MRI scans, many different areas of the brain light up when someone is listening to a narrative…As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller.” I myself have felt pain or sadness when seeing Mikayla bring her hardships onto her platform. I also have felt empowered by her journey and the work she has done both internally for her mind and externally in her career. Speaking from personal experience, I have continued to be an avid consumer of her content because I feel as though I can relate to her. If I met her, she and I could be friends. She is normal but she has turned her normal and relatable struggles into a place for connection and love on Tik Tok.
Aside from the personal connection Mikayla creates on the app, her advertising strategy is also something quite interesting. Since she began as an unknown girl who simply loved makeup, Mikayla did not have brand deals or free gifts. She was not receiving any compensation for the reviews she made online. Today, while she does now get paid, she continues to use this idea as a strategy to advertise beauty products. She directly will distinguish between when she is paid or when she is simply curious about a product. However, because she has become such an icon in the industry, her word will cause a massive surge in sales for various products. She creates the idea that if you do not use a product she favors, then you are missing out. As written by New York Times journalist John Herrman, “Fear of missing out is a common way to describe how social media can make people feel like everyone else is a part of something.” Mikayla makes people feel a part of the beauty industry by promoting products and causing items to go viral so everyone wants to get their hands on them.
Her tactics in advertising are brilliant, by using her own humility to do the work for her. As she uses these products she speaks about her struggles with acne, her hardships in love, her desire to run away from her problems using makeup. It connects people to the passion she feels for her work and in turn provides a comfortable platform for beauty brands to promote off of. Culturally, Mikayla appeals to the liberal and accepting nature of our American society. The recent generations have become so welcoming of people’s flaws and insecurities, Mikayla appeals to their hopeful nature. In some societies, perfection is expected. Culturally you have to adhere to the boundaries set for you by your peers. Today, our American culture allows for us to come together as a community through shared passions and struggles. Historically that had not been the case.
Since adding Tik Tok to my compilation of social media accounts, I have been heavily affected by all of the influencers on the app. I do however understand the differences my interests were when it came to each influencer. Some I cared about their drama, others their pranks or entertaining videos, some I simply just thought were beautiful and I liked looking at them. Society has built up beautiful people and young women like me have always looked to portray similar qualities to them. My admiration for Mikayla goes beyond the frivolous interests I had in those other creators. She is from my home state, she reminds me of my older sister in many ways, and she is someone I have learned from. I have connected to her stories, been swayed by her influence in beauty products, felt compelled to share in her joy when she got engaged, reached out through comments when she felt alone. Social media and advertising have taken a completely new step in this digital age. We as a society have gone from making beauty unachievable, keeping people fighting for it, to making it relatable and allowing our differences to be what makes us beautiful in the first place. Mikayla does just that. She is an influencer with morals, who cares about the messages she portrays to the world and will only continue to rise in the media, hopefully leading others with her example of moral and effective advertising and media strategies.
Works Cited:
Allaire, C. (2021, May 30). How Mikayla Nogueira became one of TikTok’s favorite makeup artists. Vogue. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://www.vogue.com/article/mikayla-nogueira-tiktok-makeup-artist
Herrman, J. (2019, March 10). How TikTok is rewriting the world. The New York Times. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html
Renken, E. (2020, April 11). How stories connect and persuade us: Unleashing the brain power of narrative. NPR. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/11/815573198/how-stories-connect-and-persuade-us-unleashing-the-brain-power-of-narrative
Hobbs, R. (2021). Why Are We Attracted to Characters and Stories? . In Media Literacy in Action: Questioning the Media (pp. 142–166). essay, Rowman & Littlefield.
