Xyla Foxlin

Xyla Foxlin is a mechatronics engineer, entrepreneur, and YouTuber. She is the founder of the non-profit organization Beauty and the Bolt, which focuses on making STEM fields more accessible to women and minorities. She was crowned Miss Greater Cleveland in 2018.

Foxlin attended Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated in 2014. She was a member of many extracurricular clubs throughout both high school and college. While in high school, she was captain of the school's robotics club, a technical theater carpenter and spotlight operator, and a varsity member of the track and field team. Also while in high school, Foxlin taught violin to a woman with Down syndrome to help her improve her fine motor skills.

She continued her education at Case Western Reserve University and graduated in 2019 with a bachelor of science in engineering with a focus on mechatronics and creative engineering. She was a member of the school's robotics club, hacker society, salsa club, and society of women engineers. The summer after her first year at college, Foxlin was a mechanical engineering intern at iRobot. She served as a Sears think[box] teaching assistant from the beginning of her freshman year in 2014 to the end of 2017. In the beginning of her senior year in 2018, she was an advanced creative technology intern for Walt Disney Imagineering.

Parihug was a company started by Foxlin in January 2016. It produced Bluetooth-enabled, pairable teddy bears called Pari that transmitted a sensor from one bear to the other when hugged by the user. Foxlin designed the bears with fabric-based sensors to make the bears softer and more huggable, unlike the normal hard electronic boxes that come inside stuffed animals with sensors or audio features. Foxlin lists her run at the company from January 2016 to July 2018. Parihug was founded while the bears were still in development. A Kickstarter campaign for the bears was launched in April 2017. Foxlin announced the project's cancellation in May 2018 due to privacy concerns regarding "recent internet connected toy hacks."

Foxlin founded Beauty and the Bolt in September 2017, a non-profit organization aimed at making STEM fields more accessible to women, girls, and minority groups. Foxlin advocates that women can appreciate beauty, fashion, and dressing up while also liking and being talented in the fields of math, science, and engineering.

My big thing is that femininity and engineering are not mutually exclusive. I’m still the only one in a dress at design reviews or the only one wearing all pink in the shop. We should be teaching our girls that it’s OK to like princesses and power tools.

Foxlin is active on YouTube. She runs a personal channel and a separate one for Beauty and the Bolt. She commonly posts videos of different engineering or building projects she completes, including putting a rocket motor in a Christmas tree, building a cedar-strip canoe, constructing a corset made of wood, and other other innovative projects.

A Beauty and the Bolt episode on the basics of electricity