Manny MUA Started His Beauty YouTube Channel in Secret. 3 Years Later, He Became the First Male Face of Maybelline (Exclusive)
Manny MUA Started His Beauty YouTube Channel in Secret. 3 Years Later, He Became the First Male Face of Maybelline (Exclusive)
Luke ChinmanWed, June 3, 2026 at 8:00 PM UTC
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Manny GutierrezCredit: Phillip Faraone/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty -
Manny Gutierrez — the beauty influencer known as "Manny MUA" — started his YouTube channel in secret, hiding it from his "anti-LGBT" community
His content started to take off, and three years after launching his channel, he became the first male ambassador of Maybelline New York
The creator tells PEOPLE about his hard-fought dominance in the content creation space and the ongoing battle he faced to be taken seriously as a man in makeup
Manny Gutierrez — the beauty influencer known and loved as the handle "Manny MUA" — first felt attracted to the internet as a place to express himself. He can still recall one of the earliest videos he stumbled across online: a 2010 makeup tutorial by the creator Michelle Phan, recreating Lady Gaga's iconic look in the music video for "Bad Romance."
"I remember thinking, 'This is so and cool and unique,' " he tells PEOPLE in an interview. "I was searching for a community that I could really be myself, and online, they didn't already know me — what I presented to them is what they'd know."
Gutierrez, 35, grew up in a Mormon family in San Diego — what he describes now as a "very sheltered" and "anti-LGBT" environment. For much of his childhood, he hid his gay identity from his friends and family, and when he launched his YouTube channel in 2014, he blocked almost everyone he knew.
"I was very nervous to start posting in those early days," he says. "I remember thinking, 'I don't want anyone to see what I do.' I was very much living this Hannah Montana life."
But his content — makeup tutorials, challenges and reviews — started to take off: hundreds of views became thousands became millions.
Manny GutierrezCredit: Manny Gutierrez/Instagram
At the time, it was still a rarity for men to make beauty content online — and he says he felt like a "novelty" in spaces with other makeup creators. But slowly, over the course of his first few years online as more and more men started channels of their own, he developed a small community of other men in makeup.
As the number of men sharing beauty content online grew, so did brands' receptiveness to partnering with male makeup artists for partnerships. And in 2017, Gutierrez was named the first male ambassador of Maybelline New York.
Still, behind the scenes, Gutierrez says he felt like he was "constantly swimming up current" as he tried to land the same brand deals that female creators with much smaller followings were easily picking up.
"I would've been paid the same amount as the girl with one-third my following and way less engagement than me," he says. "And I was willing to take it because there weren't that many opportunities."
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At the time, Gutierrez continues, he and one of his closest friends in the beauty industry — Patrick Starrr — realized that they could get far more success when they pitched themselves to brands as a duo.
"Brands were getting two boys for the price of one girl," he says. "That was something we struggled with — being seen as individual creators. We were our own people having to couple up as a duo for the sake of branded work."
Gutierrez is still making content nearly a decade later. As a creator with one of the longest continuous careers in the beauty space, he has a unique vantage point for observations on how the industry has changed. While he feels that male creators were making steady progress in the first few years he was online, over the last decade, he doesn't think it's been quite so linear.
Credit: Manny Gutierrez
"There are definitely ebbs and flows," he says, adding that he has the sense that there's been a "regression" as of late.
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"There's more boys in beauty than ever," Gutierrez says. "But people are more willing to send homophobic and transphobic hate and be more volatile for their disdain for queer people."
He points out the firestorm over Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, as well as a recent trend he's noticed of brands primarily inviting cisgender women on brand trips.
"It happens so slowly and so subtly that you wake up and suddenly queers are being erased from spaces that they were accepted in," he says. "No one really talks about it, but it's such an apparent thing."
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
