My Career Story NO ONE Knows
In this interview excerpt, Vanessa Van Edwards describes how she launched her YouTube channel focused on interpersonal intelligence, social skills, and body language. Feeling socially awkward after college, she turned to academic research—discovering, for example, that neuroticism can cause neutral faces to be perceived as negative—and began creating short videos that translated these findings into practical tips for other awkward people. She supplemented her content with self‑conducted experiments, such as applying popcorn‑bag or vanilla scent to her skin to test whether men would find her more attractive, noting that these quirky tests yielded positive reactions. As her videos accumulated views—from hundreds to thousands—one of her early experiments went viral, dramatically accelerating her audience growth and solidifying her career path as a social‑science communicator.
