Smash Notes
MIKAYLA NOGUEIRA EXCLUSIVE: The Story She’s Finally Ready to Tell
Jay sits down with beauty creator Mikayla Nogueira to go beyond the online persona and share the real story behind her rise. Mikayla opens up about the struggles that shaped her before finding success, the viral moment that changed her life overnight, and the painful reality of a marriage impacted by addiction and divorce. She also shares how she found her…
Notes
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Jay Shetty introduces Mikayla Nogueira as one of the biggest beauty creators in the world, with more than 20 million followers across social media. He says the conversation will go past the public image to the person, the reality of massive success, and the pressure of living so publicly. She tells him she had stayed private for a long time, and that now is the moment because she is almost thirty and her twenties have been a turning point. She is learning who she is and who she wants to be.
She describes herself as outspoken, loud, and proud of who she is. She says she grew up wanting to be exactly Mikayla rather than someone who fits in. She calls herself curious, a Gemini, and very creative. She grew up in an artistic household: her mom is a professional artist and her dad is an antique appraiser and collector. She says she is known for eclectic, artsy makeup, and that she likes being different.
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Mikayla Nogueira began doing makeup at age ten and created a YouTube channel along with a blog about beauty at age fourteen. She went to school with a full beat on her face by ages fourteen fifteen and sixteen even though people in the conservative area looked down on the style. Classmates commented the worst things on the YouTube channel in hopes she would delete the channel and stop.
She never stopped because she knew she was meant to pursue social media. Mikayla Nogueira feels she is a very insecure person with low self esteem and mental health issues that cause self sabotage. The self awareness about all her issues gives a good sense of who she is and allows confidence about the person she is and who she is becoming.
At the end of the day the insecurities still exist when she lays her head on the pillow but she knows the insecurities are all in her head so she can do great things without letting the insecurities get in the way.
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In high school, Mikayla Nogueira entered a business competition through a program she calls DECA. At 16 she wrote a 50-page business plan on how she could succeed as an influencer, with no idea that influencing would become her life. She presented it to judges about 10 years before the conversation with Jay Shetty. She says influencing existed then but was not a huge thing, and the judges did not believe the plan. She won. She says she was convincing that she could make a business out of the idea.
After the competition, people at school treated the goal as serious. She told teachers and friends she wanted to be a beauty influencer, and she says she already knew that 10 years earlier. Absolutely everyone, she says, told her it was not going to happen.
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Mikayla Nogueira got the job at Ulta after she reapplied as a college senior. The manager gave her the position after she explained how much she needed to work in beauty.
When Mikayla Nogueira turned sixteen she applied to JCPenney Beauty, Nordstrom Beauty, Sephora, Ulta, and everywhere that sold makeup. She lived ten minutes from an Ulta in a small town but heard nothing for years. In college she gave up on her dream and deleted her YouTube channel, her beauty blog, and her beauty pages. As a senior earning a degree in communication media marketing she reapplied to Ulta and received a phone call a week later. She attended the interview with purple eyeshadow in a purple cut crease and told the manager she needed the job because beauty is her life and she would feel empty without working in beauty.
The experience became emotional because the interview was the first time someone believed in her.
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After college, Mikayla Nogueira had a job offer to work in an HR department at a bank. She tells Jay Shetty she would have been miserable there, because a creative person who is not using that creativity has a hard time. Jay Shetty then asks about the jump from her best day at Ulta to her worst day, when 2020 arrived and COVID hit.
She says that day is one nobody will forget. She was working at Ulta Beauty, getting a master's degree, and being onboarded for the HR position, and she felt confident about her future. Then Ulta Beauty shut down across the country, the bank shut down the program because of uncertainty about COVID, and the master's program shut down entirely instead of going remote. She lost everything in one day. She was terrified. Her mom came in and said her student loans had just been delivered. She was 21, crying, and did not know what she would do next.
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Jay Shetty asks how long after that day Mikayla Nogueira joined TikTok. She says the next day, and that a lot of people do not know the full story. Her mom, a school counselor who is now retired, was struggling in COVID because schools went remote. Her parents are older, and her mom knew nothing about technology. She asked Mikayla Nogueira, who knew video, to find a way to teach students virtually.
Mikayla Nogueira did not have TikTok yet. She downloaded it because it was blowing up during COVID, and for a few weeks she filmed and edited lessons of her mom, including a counting lesson with eggs from chickens she grew up with. She says she had no followers, none, zero, and the videos still got thousands of views. She noticed the algorithm immediately: a video could blow up with no followers. She had no job and was no longer in school, and she started asking what she could do with TikTok.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she got severe cystic acne when she turned 20. Her first TikTok transition showed the acne and then flawless makeup. She had written that it was the first time she showed the world her acne. She had never shown it even to people she knew, because makeup covered the texture and smoothed the skin. She says the willingness to show her skin is what caught attention, and she had not expected a large audience.
Her Instagram had about 800 followers, and she says she was not trying to be an influencer. She made a second video in which she talked and showed the technique for covering acne. She says that video blew up the minute she posted it, fifteen million views within a day, after years of trying to become a beauty influencer.
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Mikayla Nogueira says a viral moment is the easy part, and the question is what you do next. She took that seriously because she already had a business mindset. She says many people can make the content and do not know how to make a business, and she did. Once the video went viral she decided to grind.
She posted every single day, a minimum of three videos a day, and changed the format each time: a makeup tutorial, a lifestyle video, a haul, or a vlog, to learn what people wanted. What she found was that the audience did not care about the topic. They liked her personality and who she was. She ties that to growing up with beauty YouTubers she could relate to, which had made her feel less alone, and she hoped viewers felt the same connection.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she will never forget the first day she was cancelled. She calls it a minor cancellation over filter accusations. She says, straight out, that she does not use filters, but she is accused often. Someone made a video claiming she uses filters, the video blew up, and she had not felt that level of hate before. She had signed with a manager the week before and called her crying. When Mikayla Nogueira becomes overwhelmed and anxious, she says she wants to throw up. She was shaking and crying.
Later cancellations taught her that the reaction comes with growth, and she says she has learned to appreciate it. Her manager warned her not to become numb or shut herself off from the hate. She says confidence is what changed the effect: she knows who she is, and what she sees online is not true, so it does not hit the way it used to.
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Jay Shetty brings up a 2023 L'Oreal video about her lashes and says the debate was larger than he expected. Mikayla Nogueira says it was in every magazine and was an explosive conversation, but the moment did not affect her at all. A few months earlier she had been canceled worse for a phrase she is known for, try being an influencer for a day, which she says was taken out of context. Someone commented, try getting a nine to five. She made a response video saying she worked until five nineteen that day, described what the job involves, and said try being an influencer for a day.
She knew in the moment the line was wrong and deleted the video within seconds, but someone saved it. It did not blow up until years later. She had made it in her first year as an influencer, while she was still figuring the work out, and she says she does not agree with the statement anymore. The L'Oreal argument landed lighter because the earlier phrase had already prepared her.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she reached 15 million followers in two or three years, and she calls that pace abnormal for a creator. She says the scale of hate was higher than a new influencer is used to. The first two or three years were devastating from a mental health perspective. She struggled badly, had dark moments, and many times wanted to quit. She asked herself whether she could keep doing it and whether she wanted to.
She says the biggest lesson is that the job is a choice. Posting, and receiving hateful comments every day, is something she chooses. She kept choosing it for everything else: the connections, the love of creating, beauty, makeup, the impact on people's lives, the experiences, the growth, the success, and the joy. She says she still does not have influencer fatigue. She wakes up excited to film and does not run out of ideas.
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Jay Shetty says the accent has always been one of the biggest talking points in Mikayla Nogueira's content. She says viewers will be asking where it is. The first video she posted in which she talked had no accent, and that is the video that changed her life. A few videos later the accent appeared and people were confused. She says she does have an accent, and it can be as strong as in the videos. She studied communication and radio and code-switches. With Jay Shetty she is not using the heavy Boston accent, because she just met him and is not comfortable yet. She says a lot of people cannot understand it. It comes out around friends and family, and when she films alone and is talking to herself.
She has told the audience the same thing many times. Because people make fun of the accent, she sometimes exaggerates it, including a Kim Kardashian meme where she was being a goofball. She says she is an entertainer, and a video can work because people love it or because they are too annoyed to look away.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she and Cody met right as her career began, at massive turning points for both of them, which is why they connected immediately. She was blowing up, had just moved out of her parents' house into a first apartment, and was trying to turn influencing into a job. Fast growth, COVID, and a new world left her longing for companionship. She says she did not want to go through it alone.
Cody had just moved across the country to go to rehab in Massachusetts. She says Cody is an addict. She met him on Tinder as he was coming out of rehab and moving into a sober house with other sober people. He wanted someone to share a new sobriety with. His story of getting sober and moving across the country inspired her, because it reminded her of taking a risk and changing a life. She says the relationship exploded from the start.
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Mikayla Nogueira connected with Cody right away because of similar stories, so their relationship exploded from the get go. Rapid growth during COVID felt unnatural to manage for the couple. Cody struggled with public attention and felt helpless watching her go through immense pain and suffering from online hate, which left her detached and passive for the first three years.
When the pair met, she had just begun her career so neither understood the scale of what was going to be. Because it was also COVID, no one was really going anywhere. She grew so fast both were slapped in the face with a new reality. Cody is from a really really small town in Nevada and is not familiar with the world of influencers. He was along for the ride, growing with her and helping with videos while being very supportive and open to it. Cody very quickly realized the situation was a lot more challenging than he thought because he had to watch the person he cared about the most and loved go through immense pain and suffering from how she was treated online. There were times he did not know what to do and felt so helpless he could not get her through the situation because it got really dark. She was really really depressed and really sad all the time. Because of all the online hate and trying to figure out the new world, for the first three years she became very detached and very passive and was not being a good partner to him.
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Mikayla Nogueira was so scared of what she would see in the next room. She listened at the door in case Cody was playing video games, then opened it and found him hunched over and unconscious. Her first thought was that he might be dead. She started crying, tried to lift him, and could barely do it because he was heavy. She screamed his name and he would not wake up. It was her first time in that situation.
She called his mom, who told her to call 911 and hung up. Mikayla Nogueira told the dispatcher her husband was not waking up and she thought he was overdosing, and that he used drugs and alcohol. The dispatcher told her to slap him as hard as she could. She did. Nothing happened. He kept falling over, with drool and foam, and he still did not wake up. The ambulance was already coming. The ambulance and the police arrived, and she says he was fine. He ended up okay.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she decided she wanted a divorce in January 2025, and Cody was on board. They made the decision while he was in rehab. On Christmas Day in December 2024 she was sitting with him in rehab, and they were serious about it. They got lawyers and started the paperwork. Cody got his own apartment and moved out of the house. At the same time she was about to launch a brand and become a brand founder, and she says nobody knew what she was going through.
A few months later Cody was able to stay sober, and they started marriage counseling. She says it was working until he showed up drunk. She saw a cycle she would either have to accept or leave. He lived on his own and went back and forth on sobriety. They went on dates and gave the marriage one more try. Cody moved back in. She says it did not work, and they realized that quickly.
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Mikayla Nogueira says she dated a guy in high school named Zach, and Zach was her first love. It did not work out. She was a year ahead of him and graduated first. When she left for college he was still in high school. Her feelings stayed strong, but their lives were too different. He joined the Air Force, lived in Nebraska and Texas and other places, and for years asked her to give him a chance. She said no. She would not do that long distance, and she did not want to be with someone in the Air Force while she was busy in college.
They remained close friends. She could talk to him about anything, and she sat next to him in class. He still had feelings for her. When she started dating Cody and then married him, Zach went silent. She calls that respectful: he said goodbye because she was married and he would not get in the way. She did not talk to him for many years.
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Zach wrote to Mikayla Nogueira when he saw that she was getting a divorce, which she had talked about publicly. He said he was there if she needed someone to talk to. She started speaking with him as a friend. She says she did not have feelings for him then, and she did not think he still had feelings for her, because so much time had passed. He was supportive and kind through the divorce.
She says people ask why she started dating during the divorce. Cody and she were fully separated and not together. She knows opinions differ on dating while a divorce is underway. She says the connection with Zach grew so strongly that she would not pass on it. Months into the divorce she asked him to dinner, casual, as friends. They went to the Cheesecake Factory. She knew then that she was meant to be with him, and they talked for three hours. Afterward he texted that he wanted to be with her and would fight for her. She says they have been inseparable since.
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Mikayla Nogueira created a skin prep brand to provide a simple solution for people with skin conditions.
Customers opened up to Mikayla Nogueira at Ulta about acne, being burn victims, skin cancer, rosacea, PCOS, eczema, or any skin condition causing insecurity. Customers believed slapping makeup on a face would cover problems but found makeup did not look very good and said they did not know what they were doing wrong. Mikayla Nogueira had to ask many questions about skin type, skin texture, and skin conditions before realizing no easy solution existed. Mikayla Nogueira wanted to create something simple, straightforward, easy, and approachable and had developed the skin prep idea years earlier while working at Ulta. When approached by investors wanting Mikayla Nogueira to front their brands, Mikayla Nogueira pitched the skin prep idea instead. Investors trusted the skin prep concept along with Mikayla Nogueira vision for the product.
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Mikayla Nogueira says the brand had conversations with both Ulta and Sephora. She chose Sephora because its top brands are founder brands: a founder arrived with a strong vision and built it. She names Makeup by Mario, Patrick Ta, and Charlotte Tilbury. She says Sephora is exceptional at helping founders bring a vision to life, and that if the founder's face and name were removed you could still tell the brands apart. She wanted a brand a stranger could still recognize.
She calls Sephora an exceptional thought partner. While products are in development, Sephora works with the founder in a process she calls In The Kitchen, using trends, analytics, and what sells. People have asked whether she made the right choice now that the brand has been in Sephora for about a month. She says yes, without a doubt. Jay Shetty, in the same stretch, calls the brand POV.