Tiffany Ma has made the world just a little less orange.
Ma reviews items sent to her by fashion companies like Nine West for her YouTube channel. If a product proves problematic, like when a tanning lotion turned her inexplicably orange, she sends the company her opinion on how to fix it.
“With my YouTube videos I feel like I’m protecting viewers,” Ma said. “It’s nice to know when I give feedback to makeup companies they take what I have said into consideration.”
Ma, a third-year business economics student, goes by the moniker MissTiffanyMa on YouTube, where she posts videos reviewing fashion and beauty products, and also provides advice about college to younger women.
Her videos have attracted the attention of almost 47,000 subscribers from all over the world, reaching as far as Sweden.
“What draws so many people in is her honesty about the clothing she picks out,” Allyson Bach, a third-year political science student and one of Ma’s close friends, said. “She goes for things that are affordable for the average person.”
Her videos have not escaped the notice of the fashion and beauty world, landing her a feature in Seventeen magazine last May called “The Campus MVPs,”in which she gave advice to girls entering college.
Ma said she has been reading the publication since she was 10, and seeing her face in it felt surreal.
“For a magazine of this magnitude to contact me and want me to write for them is awesome,” Ma said. “If you watched my first video you wouldn’t believe that it was me in the magazine.”
Like many of her subscribers, Ma said she started as just a viewer, voraciously watching every YouTube video on makeup she could find.
She eventually stumbled upon “MissChievous,” a YouTuber that Ma said had amazing videos on how to put on makeup and who inspired her to start playing with makeup herself.
Curious to try her own hand at a Youtube video, Ma said she decided to review NYX Cosmetics in her junior year of high school, but the results were not very promising.
“The lighting in the video was terrible. I wasn’t even staring at the camera and I was not even talking coherently,” Ma said. “All you could see was the product, my nose and my lips, which made me look like a ghost.”
However, much to Ma’s amazement, the video received over 1,000 hits, encouraging her to try again – although she said, out of embarrassment, she has since decided to make her first video private.
She said she decided to call herself MissTiffanyMa because, while many other reviewers had generic names, she wanted to incorporate her true self into the channel.
Tanya Loh, the head of talent recruitment at Markit, an online fashion shopping guide where customers can buy reviewed items, said Ma’s authenticity is one of the draws to her channel and what convinced them to hire Ma to market products on their site.
“In her videos, she’s very sincere and such a relatable role model, so young women turn to her for guidance,” Loh said.
Ma said she maintains this honesty with her viewers because she does not forget that they are the reason she has attained success.
Ma said reminders of this come from random occurrences. At one of her Kappa Delta sorority rushes, a girl mentioned to Ma’s friend that through the videos Ma has been like a big sister to her.
“It still makes me feel warm and fuzzy to know that real people are watching and getting to talk to them face to face makes it seem so real,” Ma said. “I consider them all my friends.”
Most of all, Ma said the videos have given her the ability to convey her personality to strangers.
She said networking with big consulting firms has been useful, because, although she loves to make the videos as a hobby, she does not want to make it a career, fearing that it will take out the enjoyment.
Ma said that making money is not what drives her to continue producing videos, as she prefers to know that she is helping women.
“What drives me is my viewers and I would love to still make videos for them later in my life,” Ma said. “But also when I enter the business world I want to keep my true self and these videos help maintain my self.”