What Happens After Beauty YouTube? | Creativity, Business & Nostalgia with Mikhila

We both started online in the beauty blogging and YouTube era — but neither of us ended up staying in exactly the same place. In this long-form conversation, I’m joined by Mikhila from Smoke & Matches to talk about what happens when years of creating content online eventually turn into completely different kinds of creativity, work and business. We talk about starting out on YouTube and beauty blogs, building an audience online, learning how to create content, developing confidence in our own ideas and taste, and how those skills eventually helped us build something of our own. We also chat about: growing up online old-school beauty YouTube and blogging influencer culture and how it has changed turning creativity into a business starting a small business after years of content creation changing interests and outgrowing your original niche building a brand online the pressure to monetise creativity getting older online and figuring out what comes next For me, that journey has eventually led to creating AltogetherNails. For Mikhila, it led to building Smoke & Matches — and there’s something really interesting about how many creators from that early YouTube era have gone on to build businesses, brands and completely different creative lives. If you grew up watching beauty YouTube, remember the blogging era, have changed careers, started a business or simply feel like you’ve outgrown the version of yourself you once put online, I think you’ll relate to this one. Thanks for watching. 0:00 The Preamble Before the Podcast 0:29 Hair Habits and Beauty Confessions 1:00 Celebrity Lookalikes and Hidden Identities 2:59 Exhausting the Halloween Topic 3:32 The Golden Age of OG Blogging 6:07 From Bloggers to Business Owners 10:27 The Reality of London Event Culture 17:06 The Drive Behind the Creative Hustle 22:16 Navigating the Shift to Short-Form Content #GrowingUpOnline #BeautyYouTube #SmallBusiness #ContentCreator #CreativeBusiness