Crystal Nicole, a former civil engineer turned beauty influencer, credits her 9-to-5 background for the structure and discipline behind her content creator career.
The Dallas-based beauty influencer has built a following of more than 1 million across social media, landed major brand partnerships with Kiehl’s, Olay, Aveeno, SheaMoisture, NYX Cosmetics, and L’Oréal Paris, and spoken at the Sephora Impact Summit. Content creation wasn’t always something she imagined pursuing. Nicole was steered to a civil engineering degree by her mother, who questioned the practicality of fashion and design.
“She said, ‘You have cousins who are engineers, why don’t you look up engineering?’ I also am a math head; I love math. So it wasn’t a terrible idea … And I found the one sector of engineering that felt the most [like] design, and that was
civil,” Nicole told AfroTech. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll be designing buildings or highways instead of clothes.’”While studying at the University of New Orleans, Nicole began documenting her natural hair journey after ditching a relaxer she’d used for more than a decade. As questions about her routine poured in, she recognized a lack of representation and resources, which led her to start a YouTube channel in 2017 to share her experience and help others on their natural hair journeys.
“I wasn’t even an influencer at that time. I was literally just making videos for fun to help other people,” Nicole recalled. “It was never something that I thought would become a career. And I also found so much passion in it because there was so many Black women who didn’t know who they
were naturally or how to even take care of what was given to them, including my mom … It was just something that I was doing to provide education for people and to do for fun while I was still in college.”After graduating, Nicole accepted a full-time civil engineering job. She earned about $70,000 running her YouTube channel on the side. As her content income grew to surpass her roughly $4,000 monthly take-home pay, she decided at the start of the pandemic to pursue content creation full-time.
“I’m making two, three, four times my engineering salary off of three deals, and I’m straight out of college,” Nicole said.
As her platform expanded, Nicole landed major partnerships with brands including Youth to the People, Charlotte Tilbury, CeraVe, Clinique, and Kérastase, while stepping into leadership roles such as moderating CurlyCon, speaking at the Sephora Impact Summit, and keynoting the WEB Who Is She Brunch in Charlotte.
She credits her engineering background with shaping the discipline and structure behind her influencer career. “The structure helps a lot because I still have that structure from my 9-to-5,” Nicole shared. “It allows me to juggle and balance so many different events, and I’m pretty good with time management.”
As she looks to expand her creative footprint through product collaborations, Nicole offers a blunt reminder to aspiring creators: stay organized—because when you work for yourself, it’s all on you, and the IRS is watching.
“That was my reality check when I realized the IRS is gonna be coming for this money … I feel like a lot of influencers don’t understand is, when you’re an
influencer, when you’re your own entity, you have even more of a responsibility than when you were a nine-to-five. There’s no such thing as you getting a tax return. You’re paying taxes and you’re paying them at 30% typically,” she explained.“If you’re not setting money aside, you’re gonna have money piled up, but you’re also gonna have money that is due, and you don’t realize how much is due because you’ve never had to pay taxes, you’ve only had taxes returned to you.”
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