Do we like Yuya?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent, well-liked creator with no harmful words or acts found, held back by two old disputes and little on record about LGBTQ+ issues.
Yuya is Mariand Castrejón, and she started her YouTube channel at 16 with beauty and hair tutorials. Over a decade on she was among the most-subscribed creators on the platform and one of the highest-paid, and she picked up a star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars.
Her first big stoush was behind the scenes. In 2014 her channel and fellow creator Werevertumorro's went private amid a legal fight with their representative, whose company the article alleged had ended up holding their channels and taking their money. Yuya said she was there “en contra de su voluntad”, which tells you she was a kid being squeezed by the business, not the one squeezing.
The later scandals are small. After she launched her makeup line in late 2017, she was accused of copying designs from Hidalgo artisans, and the report we read doesn't say how that ended. In April 2020 a Twitter user alleged that her cosmetics company, Republic Cosmetics, was keeping staff working through lockdown; its operations director denied it flatly, and Yuya stayed quiet.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up: no anti-vax, climate-denial or culture-war grifting, and no attacks on trans people or any other group in her words. She was named a UN Sustainable Development Change Ambassador in 2017 and promised to push women's empowerment through her channel. The gap is that she has said very little about LGBTQ+ rights either way, so this is a pass on what we found, not a champion's record.
The good stuff is mostly small and human. In 2020 a young couple said she promoted their new sunglasses brand on her Instagram stories for free after they sent her a gift, and fans praised her for it. She also spoke about her influence with some honesty: “Obviamente, sé que tengo responsabilidad, pero soy como soy.”
Nothing new on her lately that we could find. The latest reporting is from 2024, when she posted a craft tutorial after a break from content that she put down to focusing on her personal life. Fans remember her as the person who pushed Mexican YouTube into the big time.