A Look Inside Jackie Aina’s Empire: How The Digital Creator Left The Military, Made Millions, And Amassed 3.5M Subscribers On YouTube Alone

By capitalizing on her status as a leading beauty influencer, Jackie Aina has built the foundation for a prosperous business empire.

How It Started

Aina, a Nigerian-American born in California’s San Gabriel Valley, came from humbling beginnings. BuzzFeed News mentions she has six siblings, with an even split between brothers and sisters. She recalls “growing up with nothing” at times, bouncing around shelters with her mother and siblings.

“Growing up, I had no leverage, I had no rich uncle,” she said, per the outlet. “We got kicked out of a shelter, we couldn’t get to another one quick enough. And when you’re a mom of seven, It’s not easy.”

To change her outcome, Aina studied medicine at the California State University, Business Insider reported. That route did not pan out for Aina, and she made the decision to serve in the Army in 2008, after being convinced by her then-boyfriend.

They would marry — although they later divorce — and she moved to Hawaii to live with him where she remained stationed as a reservist. That time taught her to be resourceful with her time and nurtured her leadership skills.

“I learned how to command a group or teach a class and do it with confidence. I learned a lot about challenging myself,” Aina said, per the U.S Department of Defense.

Becoming A Beauty Content Creator On YouTube

Her time in the military would bring her closer to her purpose. Aina became an avid user on YouTube with an interest in beauty.

A year in, she even secured a job working behind the counter at MAC Cosmetics. However she had often received the note by co-workers that “the trends she wanted to try wouldn’t work for her complexion,” Business Insider mentioned.

In 2009, she turned to YouTube and started her own beauty channel, initially under the name LilPumpkinPie05, Refinery29 noted . It grew into a respected platform for users to hear authentic makeup reviews and learn from various beauty tutorials.

The channel was her saving grace as at the time she describes being “extremely unhappy” in a 2017 video that she released as an ode to one of her earliest viral looks on the channel.

“Every time I think about my past and where I’ve come from, not that I’m ashamed or sad about it, I get emotional. I think about how far I’ve come,” Aina expressed. “When I recorded that video, I was not happy at all. It was shortly after I started my YouTube channel, a channel that really I didn’t even — I don’t know, it definitely kind of was something that I accidentally stumbled upon. I remember being embarrassed to turn on the camera and record videos because it was like, ‘What the h-ll are you doing?’ …W hen I first started our channel, I was living in Hawaii. I was married, extremely unhappy … I wasn’t around very positive uplifting people. And at that time YouTube was literally one of the only things, one of the only things that kept me.” She later added, “I just get really choked up when I think about how much I’m [in a] completely different place.”

Building A Community On YouTube

What seemingly served as a safe space and escape from reality for Aina turned into a loyal community that drew others towards her personality, knowledge, and boldness in championing diversity, equity, and inclusion, in the makeup industry. She has never steered away from calling out companies in the industry who failed to consider people of color in their products.

Leaving The Military To Become A Full-Time Content Creator

Her boldness led her to build a loyal following on the platform, and she made the decision to quit the military to focus on content creation full time. “It eventually got to a point where I was like, ‘OK, what’s it gonna be, I’m not quite stable here yet, but I really feel like something’s gonna pop off, so I gotta decide right now, what’s it gonna be,'” she told Business Insider in another interview. “And I just didn’t wanna take the risk though, ’cause once you re-enlist, it’s like, what am I gonna say to my first sergeant, like, ‘First sergeant, Google’s calling me,’ like, you know, he’s gonna be like, ‘Bye, get out my office.'” She continued, “So I decided to walk away because these careers were both kind of growing at the same time, but one started to take off a lot faster than the other. And then after I left, I would say a year later was when I got my first viral video and my channel really took off.”

Following Across Social Media Platforms

That decision has allowed her to pour more into her craft. Today, she boasts 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube alone, and her success has only grown since her foray into sharing her knowledge. Aina’s digital footprint has grown to include Facebook (244,000 followers); Instagram (1.9 million followers); and TikTok (3 million followers, 129.5 million likes) at the time of this writing.

Paid Partnerships

Aina has successfully leveraged social media to secure numerous paid partnerships, primarily in the health and beauty industries. Some of them include sulwhasoo.us, TATCHA Beauty, Clarins U.S.A., The Honey Pot Co., and Valentino Beauty.

Variety notes she has also worked with Google, Dior Beauty, Olay, and Amazon.

And you won’t find her endorsing a product simply because it’s a paid opportunity. She emphasizes her commentary is genuine and she backs the product.

“If I have a business relationship with the brand owner or the person who owns the product that I’m reviewing, I always try to critique it with facts because I would want the same respect given to me, but ultimately, I’m not obligated to lie about a product,” she explained to E! News. “I would never guarantee a positive review. If it’s a favorite of mine and I’m recommending it as a favorite, it’s because I made that decision on my own.”

Product Collaborations

Beyond just endorsing a range of products and brands, over the years Aina scored countless product collaborations, which have paved the way for greater representation in beauty for Black women. In 2018, she worked with Too Faced to expand its Born This Way foundations shades, which included 35 at the time. Aina worked on developing nine of those shades. “I never would’ve thought that a brand would create a partnership that was literally made for me,” she said in a YouTube video at the time. “ I’ve been very vocal about diversity in beauty ever since I started my channel. That was literally why I started my channel, it was because I was just so frustrated in being told what doesn’t look good on me as someone of dark skin.”

She added, “I talked about diversity in beauty when it wasn’t the trendy thing to do. I talked about diversity in beauty when people told me not to, because it wasn’t going to make me mainstream or it was gonna isolate me from the norm. … We didn’t even know what a partnership like this would look like, because no other influencer has really done it, at least on a global level. So, once we started the whole partnership, I was going down to the Too Faced headquarters, talking to them about ‘OK let’s look at what exists. Let’s look at where we can fill the gaps.'”

In addition to Too Faced, her earlier beauty deals also include:

• Artist Couture
• Sigma Beauty
• E.l.f. Cosmetics
• Anastasia Beverly Hills
• Sephora Collection

Pivot To Luxury Content

To no surprise, Aina’s rise in the beauty industry has led her to live a more elevated lifestyle, which has supported her transition into more “luxury content.” This consists of various try-on hauls, breakdowns of her maintenance routine, lavish vacations, as well as how she cleans her home. She even created a separate Instagram page in 2020 named “Lavishly Jackie.”

“Instead of lifestyle stuff being in the background of the makeup content, I switched it… because by that point I feel like I had built the foundation. It’s been over a decade,” she explained on the “Naked Beauty” podcast. “T here’s only so much I can teach… and it’s not even just about that. It’s just like, I want to do something new. I’m not just beauty.” With the pivot in her content, Aina admits she had to learn how to be comfortable with the resistance she felt from some of her audience.

“I definitely feel like people were more resistant to my luxury content even though I made it very clear that I have a different life now than I did just a few years ago,” she told Refinery29. “It took me some time before I started to get comfortable sharing that part of my life. I knew I didn’t want to open the door because I knew what people would say about it, so I was just enjoying it privately. There’s a lot of anxiety, I think, about being a proud and successful Black woman; you should be successful but not that successful. But I had to get over that insecurity.”

FORVR Mood

She has evidently overcome any fear of perceptions while remaining unapologetically herself, even in light of recent controversies over her boundaries online. Nonetheless, she continues to climb, building a brand on her terms.

This led her to become a founder in 2020. Forbes reports she launched fragrance line FORVR Mood alongside her husband, Denis Asamoah, who has an investment banking background. They had self-funded the venture, which had been four years in the making.

“We were funding ourselves but then also trying to activate other products, and when you’re your own investor things just take time, like this is a a quarter of a million dollars,” she revealed while on the show “Elite Talks with DeAndre Brown.” “This cost more money than I probably will ever share, a lot of freaking money… The best freaking money I’ve ever spent, but we just had to, you know, pay for things slowly and then also testing samples being like ‘Love this. C hange that. Love this. Change that. Hate that.'”

The labor of love was worth it. Prior to its launch, there had already been 45,000 customers on a waitlist, notes Variety.

The timing of the launch, which was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, presented difficulty, but the brand reached its finish line, launching with four scents: Hard to Get, I Am Her, NDA, and You Remind Me, all formulated by Aina.

“ I really wanted to center Black women being taken care of at the forefront, because that’s something that I didn’t really see a lot,” she explained on “Elite Talks with DeAndre Brown.”

FORVR Mood also scaled its product lineup to include candles in the year of its initial launch.

Earned $6M In Revenue In Less Than A Year

FORVR Mood faired well among consumers at the start. WWD mentions $700,000 was sold in products within its first four hours of launching in August 2020. In just under a year from its launch, 200,000 candles were sold and the average sale order was $95.

Additionally, FORVR Mood logged $6 million in revenue by that time and was projected to reach $10 million by the end of 2021.

“Starting a business in general is something that poses a lot of challenges, but launching one throughout a pandemic was something we never prepared for,” Aina said, according to Business Insider. “My mom’s generation has never even experienced something like this, let alone mine. So just being able to do that and do it successfully has made me so proud.”

While it is unclear how revenue numbers look today, the brand’s reach has strengthened through its partnerships with retailers including Sephora’s stores in the U.S. and Canada along with Beauty Hut Africa, Aina’s Instagram lists.

“Beauty Hut Africa is a retailer in Nigeria OK, and that was our first international like outside of Canada. That was our first big international launch… that was a big deal to me,” she expressed on “Elite Talks with DeAndre Brown.”

Entertainment

Aina has also made her splash in entertainment. She was featured in the “The Black Beauty Effect” docuseries on Netflix and also served as an executive producer, notes Variety. The three-part docuseries aired in 2022 and centered Black innovation in beauty from editors, celebrity makeup artists, and content creators, filmmaker Andrea Lewis said to The Cut.

Revenue

Considering Aina’s footprint over the years, it’s natural to wonder how much she’s making. In the first five years of becoming a content creator, there was no clear strategy, which she says she knew had to be revised for her to earn a livable wage. Adding room for concern was the fact that her content required her to invest in makeup, equipment, and lighting equipment. “I was like I’ve put too much into this to continue to basically not make livable money,” she mentioned on “Elite Talks with DeAndre Brown.” “So for the first five years I was just kind of vibing like, right, no strategy, no posting schedule… I think had I known, no this is going to really blow for people, in general, not just me, I think I would have been more diligent in the beginning.” Today, Aina appears to have found her footing. In 2022, while speaking on “Pretty Basic Podcast,” she credited Asamoah for providing her with business and finance advice when it comes to major life decisions.

It remains unclear how much she earns through paid partnerships and being a content creator-turned-influencer, but this is intentional. “There’s already so much vanity and glamour associated with what we do — I feel like the moment people found out what they thought we all make, they started doing the absolute most,” Aina told BuzzFeed News. “It’s created a really green-eyed climate.” In 2019, it was projected by Gil Eyal, CEO of the influencer search and discovery directory HYPR Brands, that influencers like her could be charging up to $50,000 for a sponsored video and between $10,000 to $25,000 for a Instagram post, the outlet notes. It is likely those estimates would be higher today. “I would say she is definitely top-notch and that influencers with similar followings but less engaged audiences or less valuable audiences could cost anywhere from a third to half per post,” he told BuzzFeed News. As for her YouTube earnings, it is likely she is earning at least five figures. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, creators receive their compensation through Google’s AdSense and it’s calculated based on revenue per mille (RPM), which is their earnings for every 1,000 page views.

Allyiah Gainer, who shares similar content themes as Jackie Aina and has 848,000 subscribers compared to Aina’s 3.5 million, reportedly earned over $30,000 in August 2024 alone after logging 1.5 million views. She confirmed her own RPM under a recent TikTok post shared by Purposed Brand Management.

In the last year, Aina has raked in at least 870,000 views across her YouTube channel. Assuming her RPM is at least $20, this would have led to her earning minimally $170,800 in the past two years based off estimated page views totaling 8.54 million.

Her net worth remains unknown.