Light does more for how your content looks than any camera you could buy, which is why it sits at the top of the kit. The good news for anyone working out of a bedroom or a corner of an apartment is that flattering light comes down to a few principles you can apply with a window and a sheet before you spend anything at all.
The first principle is softness. A large, diffused light source wraps around skin gently and hides texture, while a small, direct source like a bare bulb, a phone flash, or direct midday sun throws hard shadows and exaggerates every pore and blemish. For skin and bodies, soft light is almost always what you want. You soften light three ways: make the source physically large, put something translucent between the light and you to diffuse it, or bounce it off a wall or ceiling so the whole surface becomes the source. A bedsheet hung over a window or in front of a lamp is a diffuser that costs nothing.
Your best free light is a window. Daylight through a window is large, soft, and directional, and a window that does not get direct sun gives you the most even version of it. Where you sit relative to that window changes everything: facing it gives flat, even, forgiving light, turning to forty-five degrees adds shape and dimension, and turning side-on creates drama and deep shadow. A window directly behind you turns you into a silhouette unless that is the point. The catch is that daylight shifts with the hour and the weather, so it is wonderful and unreliable, which is the reason you eventually add a light you control.
Direction matters as much as softness. Light coming from slightly above you and off to one side looks natural, because it is how the sun and most rooms light a face. Light from below looks strange and unsettling, and dead-flat light straight from the front is even but can flatten you out. The workhorse position for a main light is up around thirty to forty-five degrees off to one side and a little above eye level.
A small room creates its own problems, all of them solvable. Colored walls bounce their color onto your skin, so a green or blue room can tint you in ways that read as a mistake, which you fix by correcting your white balance, overpowering the room with a stronger neutral light, or hanging a neutral backdrop. Mixing a cool daylight window with warm indoor bulbs gives you two colors of light fighting in one frame, so it is usually cleaner to switch the room lights off and control a single source. And in a tight space light bounces off everything, so watch for hot reflections in mirrors, screens, and glossy surfaces, which are both unflattering and, in anything showing your room, a way to reveal more of yourself or your location than you meant to.
Small rooms have one quiet advantage, which is that you cannot get a light far away, and a close light is a soft light. Use the proximity. A diffused source close to you and just out of frame is exactly the soft, wrapping light you are after.
Most of what you need comes from two positions. A key light is your main source, set at that angle above and to the side. A fill is anything that softens the shadow on the opposite side so it does not go fully black, and a fill does not have to be a light at all: a sheet of white foam board, a pale wall, or a cheap reflector bouncing your key back at you does the job for nothing. One soft key and one bounce will carry most of your content. A second light only earns its place once you know what the first one cannot do.
If your work is about your body, let the light serve what you are showing. Soft, even, frontal light smooths skin and flatters form, which suits softer and more sensual content, while a harder light raking across from the side carves out muscle and texture, which suits anything selling definition. Decide what the shot is meant to do and place the light to do it, rather than lighting the same way every time out of habit.
Ring lights deserve a plain word, since they are cheap and everywhere. They give flat, even, easy light that is useful for talking to camera and for close face work, and they leave a telltale ring-shaped catchlight in the eyes that marks the look instantly. For faces and chatter they are fine. For moody, dimensional, or body-focused content they are limiting, and a small softbox will take you further for not much more.
The last principle is reproducibility. Once you find a setup that looks good, make it repeatable: note where the light sat, mark the floor if you have to, and keep the settings consistent. Being able to rebuild your look in two minutes is what lets you shoot on a schedule instead of waiting on good light, and a controllable artificial source is what frees you from the time of day and the weather entirely.
You can start tonight with a window and a white sheet, add one diffused light when you want to shoot after dark, and grow from there. Specific lights and their prices change constantly, so treat any current pick as something to verify rather than a permanent answer. With the picture lit, the next thing your audience will judge you on is how you sound.