Safiya Nygaard

Safiya Jaffer Nygaard was born on July 16, 1992 in Chicago, Illinois. She is of Indian descent from her mother's side and Danish from her father's side. She attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School from where she completed her graduation in 2011. She then completed higher studies at Stanford University.

She met her boyfriend Tyler Williams while both of them were studying at Stanford University. He is also a YouTuber, as well as the CEO and founder of Nextbeat. He sometimes features on her videos and the two can often be seen hanging out together in videos on their channels.

While at college, Safiya Nygaard worked as a Library intern at Victory Gardens Theatre and as a sales assistant at Abercrombie and Fitch. She appeared on a number of stage productions during her early career, and had posted a compilation of her acting samples in a demo-reel posted in December 2014 on her YouTube channel. However, she gained popularity on the internet thanks to her association with 'BuzzFeed', which hired her back in April 2015.

She began working for the company as a content creator and also starred in many of their videos. In October that year, she teamed up with Fredricka Ransome and co-created the new series 'Ladylike', in which women would try out new beauty and fashion products as well as experiment with various techniques to show viewers the end results so that they do not have to experiment themselves. The first episode of the series was only a segment under the 'Top Knot' show about beauty and fashion, but after that the show became solely about hair tutorials.

Nygaard and Ransome kept the 'Ladylike' series alive with the help of some other interested people at the company. Within a few months, the show began to gain momentum and became a full-fledged show for the 'BuzzFeed' channel with a dedicated team and producers. She worked on the show for fifteen months till January 2017, when she finally decided to leave 'BuzzFeed' to focus on her own YouTube channel so that she gains more independence about the content and structure of her videos. Her channel by this point had only a couple vlogs about her visiting theme parks with her boyfriend and her 2014 demo-reel. Since she began posting regular weekly videos on beauty, style, and 'weirdness' in January 2017, she has gained over 5.5 million subscribers to her channel, and her videos regularly gain over a million views.

Safiya Nygaard waited six month after leaving 'BuzzFeed' to post the video 'Why I left BuzzFeed' on March 19, 2017, addressing the issue as by that time, all the videos she had already produced for the company were uploaded to the internet. She clarified that the primary reason she left 'BuzzFeed' is because she wanted more independence. She also mentioned that certain rules at the organization prevented her from interacting with her fans on YouTube to answer their queries. Furthermore, despite the fact that Nygaard and Ransome created and produced most of the content for the show, they were not included in high-level decision-making about the future of 'Ladylike', possible collaborations, partnerships, and branding. While she acknowledged that it is justified that the company owned all the content she created for it, she gradually began to realize how little control she had over what is being distributed under her name. As the possibility of creating merchandise on her name arose, she finally chose to dissociate herself from the company.

Interestingly, since she left 'BuzzFeed', many of the videos uploaded on the company's channel were found to have an uncanny similarity to videos Nygaard was posting independently on her channel. Considering that all of her old content for the company had already been uploaded to the net, many fans called out 'BuzzFeed' for blatantly copying her videos.