Christal Luster has always known she’s had a healing quality about her.
If it was working with her family to help create quality haircare products that help people beautiful from the inside out—acting, or ministering through the Christian music she composed, she’s always been of service. But it was laughter of all things that really converged her talents.
It all started the summer of 2020 while on a staycation with her then-husband. Luster had walked into their kitchen one lazy day and noticed a huge mess he’d made in the room, much to her chagrin. Instead of lashing out, she picked up her phone and created a video with a trending piece of audio playing in the background that genuinely captured her irritation while panning to the untidy kitchen.
She posted it, and an hour later she’d amassed 10,000 views. Then 40,000. And then Tabitha Brown commented. It was then Luster said she realized the power of her reach.
“I’ve always been silly, everyone who knows me knows that, but I don’t think I realized how important authenticity on social media was until that viral moment,” Luster tells ESSENCE. “I was completely myself, and people related.”
Luster then began to regularly create videos across all her social platforms reacting to humorous, often Black colloquial memes, with her own twist. Unsurprisingly, a short time later, she’d amassed a following of more than 700k on TikTok and nearly 300K on Instagram. She says it’s all because of authenticity.
“I feel like that’s {effortlessness} online is sometimes a big hang up for people who want to get into content creation,” Luster says. “Yes, there are parameters. Yes, there are things that you want to do to make sure that it’s clean, that it looks good. Of course, videos that have good lighting and great sound quality are important. But at the end of the day, if you take a week to create one amazing video, or if you take an hour to take a good video and you’re able to post every day versus once a week, you’re going to go a little bit further because the makeup of these apps is really about feeding the apps. It’s about feeding the beast. And consistency is always going to be the key. And so I felt that being authentic, not being so packaged, which was hard for my virgo brain to comprehend at first, showed people, particualarly millennials who grew up in the perfect Instagram feed era, that we just need to get out there,” the thirty-something said.
In under three years, her bright sense of humor created a para-social phenomenon and led to her securing partnerships with the The Shade Room, and brand deals with Curvycouture, Southwest Airlines, and SheIn among others.
She also shared her learning in Viral Vids: A Guided Content Journal for Increased Engagement on TikTok and supporting clients under her content production firm, Christal Clear Productions, LLC, which specializes in catering to the needs of small business owners and creative professionals. Although the firm is successful, she says her bread and butter is her brand.
“I am also acting and I do still have a couple of clients but I’d say about 80% to 90% of my income is from influencing,” she shares. And based on estimates, the size of her following can command tens of thousands of dollars for dedicated posts and long-term brand partnerships.
“I’m usually negotiating prices anywhere between $2,000 on the very low end for maybe one platform and one post, all the way up to about $10,000 for campaigns, depending on which platforms, plus a Link In Bio because essentially I am my own cable channel,” she wisely asserts.
Through the successes, she maintains that her true calling is service.
“Over time, it became apparent to me that this was a calling,” she tells ESSENCE. “This was something that I was meant to do. I’ve leaned into content creation heavily and have built a career out of it, which goes along with my passion for acting and music, but the real reason behind it is because I just love bringing joy to people.”