Do we like Safiya Nygaard?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up and she backed herself over a big employer, but there is little on record about causes.
Safiya Nygaard grew up in the US with an Indian mum and a Danish dad. In a 2015 BuzzFeed video she said “I didn't really know the word race when I was a kid.” She went on to study at Stanford and graduated in 2014.
She was hired by BuzzFeed in April 2015 and made the Ladylike series, where women try beauty rituals and other adventures. In January 2017, aged 24 and with 1.3 million subscribers, she left. She said in a video that she wanted her autonomy, that she'd been discouraged from replying to comments, and that merch with her name on it became a sticky issue over who owned what.
Since then she has built her own channel into a lifestyle and beauty business. By late 2022 it had 9.5 million subscribers and more than 1.6 billion views, and she makes it with her husband, Tyler Williams, on and off camera. She describes the aim of the content as an investigation into something, and she runs her own merch brand, Fiendish Behavior.
On the harm check, we searched for anything she has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet. We found nothing in reputable reporting, good or bad. The work we could verify is brand stuff, like a limited nail polish collection with Holo Taco, so this is an absence of evidence rather than a loud endorsement.
There's nothing new on her lately that turned up in reputable outlets. Searches for court cases, allegations and apologies came back empty, so this card has no scandal to tell. That's honestly the whole list.
The good stuff is thin too: we found no charity drives or causes in the sources we could open. The real mark in her favour is the BuzzFeed exit. She gave up a steady gig to own her work and her name, and it worked out.