YouTube star Patricia Bright: ‘I pick my life over being an influencer’

“I learned how women delivered babies from watching YouTube videos. So I had to give back. I had to share.” Patricia Bright is chatting to me by Zoom from her home in south London. Behind her is the garden office that her almost 3 million subscribers will recognise as the studio where she does her filming. We’re discussing her birthing vlogs, among them My Unexpected Labour and Delivery Story, one of which was filmed in the hallway metres from where she is sitting.

Bright is a YouTube sensation – a beauty, fashion and lifestyle guru who began making videos more than 10 years ago while working in the City, long before the phrase, “Hi, guys, welcome back to my channel,” was used ironically. She is celebrated as one the first black British YouTube to gain 1 million subscribers, but the 34-year-old’s true skill is building an empire from being a proud oversharer with a dry sense of humour and an infectious personality. She feels like your best friend or your auntie, depending on which you need. She also has no qualms in acknowledging that – as with midwifery – she may not be the most qualified person in every area she covers. “I’m not a hairdresser, I’m not a makeup artist, I’m not a fashion expert, and I’m not a financial expert.” She adds, however, with the confidence of a YouTube veteran: “If you want to create content in that area, you can do that. The platforms allow us to do it.”

It’s unsurprising, then, that Bright has become a talkshow host, having been snapped up for If I Could Tell You Just One Thing, a slick four-part YouTube series produced by Hidden Light, the production company founded by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Sam Branson. In the show, she elicits wisdom from notable women, among them Joan Collins, Floella Benjamin, Derry Girls actor Nicola Coughlan and rapper Stefflon Don.

Bright’s forthright demeanour in the series is one that I recognise. Does her Nigerian heritage contribute to how she does her job? “Oh, all of it,” she says without hesitation. “What’s funny is, I think I can get away with more. You’ll notice that a lot of my counterparts are quieter and more reserved”, she says. “But because I’m Nigerian, I can be loud. I can even talk about money and business because culturally this is what we do.”

Bright is fairly new to this type of presenting – so just how did she get the Victoria’s Secret model Leomie Anderson to say how much money she makes? “I assume that everybody else is willing and ready to share everything in the way that I do”, she says casually. “I just asked people what I genuinely wanted to ask them … I hope that I do it in a way that’s respectful rather than just downright rude.”

The tribe she belongs to, the Igbo people, are known as “business people”, and Bright is no exception. “I don’t know if I personally am a millionaire, but I do have personal assets for about that amount,” says Bright, who dissects her salary of £60,000 for subscribers of the Break, her finance and personal development channel. Born in Battersea in south London, she got her first job when she was 14 years old, doing door to door sales for Betterware “in posh areas”. After quitting her fashion marketing degree to take a punt on accounting and finance, she worked at Merrill Lynch before becoming a full-time blogger. Despite all of her own financial success and her fascination with money, she says she still has an underlying fear of being broke – even though her therapist says she shouldn’t.

Bright’s early life perhaps goes some way to explaining her worries. In the series, she recalls her father’s deportation for overstaying on a student visa, which left her mother to raise Bright and her sister alone for five years. Bright was emotional when filming. It wasn’t the first time she had discussed her family life publicly, but it was the first time she had done it in a “big way”. She sets out a typical day in the life of young Patricia for me. “You walk to school because you can’t get the bus. You go and work with your mum because she’s got no one to look after you.” Her mum worked as a cleaner, then a night-shift nurse before buying a flat that launched a property portfolio. Having “lots of love” and “warmth” meant she didn’t know they were broke at the time. “[It] trained me to be a bit more smart,” she says. “I know when I’m being hustled.”

Bright is an open book in many ways, but keeps her husband and two children largely out of the picture. She used to vlog about her family, but says matter-of-factly that it’s “not part of my growth strategy”. Besides, it distracted her from actually living. “To make a good vlog, you would have to plan a day around making content. But I just want to stay at home with the kids and snack on cakes that we make and watch [the kids’ animation] Vivo,” she says. “I couldn’t actually enjoy my life. I pick my life over being an influencer any day.”

Does she draw a line between Patricia the YouTuber and Patricia the person? The reality is, it seems, somewhere in the middle. “There are things I don’t share,” she says firmly. “I’m entitled to not share everything online. Nobody else shares everything that they do online. So why should I? I keep my private life separate, but I am the same person. I’m a bit extra, I’m a bit hype, I’m extremely bubbly – I just inject that personality into my content.” Besides, Bright isn’t who she was 10, or even five, years ago. “When I was younger, all I wanted to do was buy the next Mac lipstick,” she says. As she moves further towards being a founder and entrepreneur, her followers might not always see her online in the same way. “I may be not leaving the world of an influencer, but I’m moving into a less public position.”

She attributes her desire for privacy in part to online comments she has received, although she’s quick to stress that the negativity she receives is a small proportion of the overall interaction with fans. “When I put so much of my true self out there, fundamentally it can be quite hurtful when people don’t necessarily connect with that,” she says. Previously, she says, she would reply to those comments, but now she has a more hands-off approach. “Sometimes I do it in the DMs, but I learned to be what I call classy and cute,” she says. “I’ll never judge them [or] make a reference to them. I’ll try to be more literal or smart with my response. They don’t always get it.”

Being unfiltered is often what makes influencers so relatable – and popular – but it’s still a risk. “I got away with being so open and so transparent for so long, but the bigger I get, the more I recognise that I can’t necessarily do that,” she says.

A case in point: recently Bright was criticised for posting an Instagram story to her 1.2 million followers where she joked about being “scammed” by a woman whom she offered to buy lunch for. The woman asked for high-value items in a grocery store. She later apologised, but added that the woman “was not in need of the items”. How does Bright feel about the incident now? “My manager would probably say: ‘No comment,’” she says, before adding cautiously: “But I understand that the internet can be a place where you have to be careful about what you put out. You have to be careful and think about how people feel about things.”

Another notable challenge was being sued. The details of the lawsuit are unclear, but a gag order stopped Bright from selling products online for six months. “That was really quite challenging for me emotionally and financially,” she admits. “It’s come to an end now, but I feel as if I still have the scars from that encounter. It’s made me more cautious, and I don’t like being cautious.”

However, her career has also brought her remarkable highs. “I’ve done magazine covers, launched my own product collaborations, I’ve been able to hire people.” Viewers will see her struggle to call herself successful in the series – I ask whether anything has changed since filming. She answers in a way that’s modest and just the right side of “star influencer”. “At the time, that’s what I thought,” she says. “I now recognise that the joy is in the journey.”

The YouTube Originals series If I Could Tell You Just One Thing premieres on Thursday 9 September on Patricia Bright’s YouTube channel