Nikkie de Jager’s Next Beauty Move
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Nikkie de Jager is releasing a beauty brand of her own.
The YouTube star, best known to her 13 million subscribers as NikkieTutorials, has worked with a number of beauty brands throughout her career, including Marc Jacobs Beauty, which named de Jager its first global artistry adviser in 2019. For the past three years, de Jager has been building her own company, she told WWD, and on Sept. 23, Nimya by NikkieTutorials will launch via its own website.
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The initial product lineup includes a moisturizer-primer hybrid called Where It All Starts Cream, 25.99 euros, Set It & Forget It Setting Spray, 21.99 euros, License to Glow Serum, 31.99 euros, and Brr Brr Cooling Eye Stick, 18.99 euros.
Nimya, like de Jager, is based in the Netherlands and will be sold throughout Europe, the U.K. and the United States, where the majority of her followers are from. The brand does not have a set launch cadence, and new products will release as de Jager feels confident in them.
Nimya, whose name de Jager declined to elaborate on, marks the influencer’s first solo beauty venture, which she funded with her own earnings from YouTube and beauty partnerships.
Photo courtesy of Nikkietutorials
“I want people to know that this isn’t another cash grab. In fact, I think it’s going to take quite some time before I even earn money from this,” de Jager said in a Zoom interview. “I poured pretty much every cent I had into this just to make sure that I could come up with products that were made by me, funded by me. I wanted this to be a one-woman Nikkie show. This way, people truly know that I poured everything I could into this project.”
Funding and ownership are important to de Jager, who has been the subject of conversations about influencer compensation. In 2017, controversial YouTuber Jeffree Star alleged that de Jager was paid $50,000 for her Too Faced collaboration — despite it raking in more than $10 million for the company.
De Jager went on to collaborate with Ofra Cosmetics and last year, she released an eyeshadow palette with Beauty Bay in the midst of personally trying times. A few weeks before the palette was set to drop, de Jager announced via Instagram that she had been robbed at gunpoint in her Netherlands home. Earlier that year, she came out via Youtube as a transgender woman after receiving threats from people who knew of her transition.
Last week, de Jager made her Met Gala debut in an outfit that paid homage to Marsha P. Johnson. She has simultaneously been working with the United Nations as a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador for the Netherlands.
“I’m trying to educate myself [on] what the human rights for LGBTI people are in the entire world,” de Jager said of her U.N. role. “I know what my bubble looks like in the Netherlands, but I don’t know what’s going on in other places in the world.
“Not even two years ago, I came out — I was blackmailed out,” she continued. “It felt like for a minute, everything would stop. Fast-forward to September 2021, I’m talking to the U.N., and I can be part of change.”
For Nimya, de Jager envisions a customer who is “fierce, confident, boy or girl or anything in between,” she said, while making a larger point about gender-ing beauty products and brands overall.
“This is for anyone and everyone out there,” she said. “I think we have to step away from that — putting a gender to a makeup product. Makeup is for everybody, skin care is for everybody. You don’t have to put a label on that. Screw gender, honestly.”
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