Alix Earle, the brilliant friend

Never as in the last three years has TikTok been the catalyst for many influencers and internet phenomena. Do you want the boredom caused by the lockdowns during the pandemic, do you want the radical change from Instagram to TikTok, today the influencers born on the platform are the celebrities of the moment. There was the time when Charlie and Dixie D’Amelio (the two American sisters we wrote about in 2020) appeared everywhere thanks to their ballets, their way of being soap and water and their cloying positivity. Then Addison Rae, Bella Poarch and Noah Beck, while in Italy we had Emily Pallini, Elisa Maino, just to name a few. But TikTok goes fast, indeed very fast, and the star of the moment is another, who has made all the others and their ballets grow old. She is American, very blonde, beautiful and nice: let’s talk about Alix Earle.

Certainly being blonde, rich, canonically beautiful and above all genuinely nice still represents an advantage on the TikTok algorithm which, despite the many speeches on inclusiveness and openness to the discussion of political issues – which in any case exist on the platform – continues to preferring and pushing beautiful girls who talk about skincare, gives advice on how to wear make-up and records “chaotic” videos from the room of her very messy bedroom. And that’s exactly how Alix Earle became famous. His GRWM (acronym that stands for “Get Ready With Me”, or rather short videos in which one gets ready to go out in front of the camera and shows all the products used) soon reached hundreds, then thousands and finally millions of views, so much make them his trademark. Unlike other creators, Alix Earle doesn’t use makeup or products just to tell you about her beauty routine and maybe teach you about it. Alix Earle uses them as visual distractions as she shares stories about her date nights, exams she’s likely to miss because she goes out too much, cosmetic surgery she’s had that she’s always been very transparent about, which i her followers appreciate her very much. The feeling of her is that of talking to a friend on Facetime.

“I want to be your friend”, “Alix is ​​really a girl girl and I love everything”, “I wish I was a sister too Earl”: these are just some of the comments that can be found under her videos. And precisely her approach to surgery (she herself explained in a video why she resorted to breast augmentation and never misses an opportunity to show the before and after of the Botox injections she regularly undergoes) and the frankness with which talk about it have meant that it is perceived as natural and authentic. Already wealthy family (a family that would also be Republican, according to what we read online), Earle would earn, according to some estimates, between 40 and 70 thousand dollars for each sponsored post, but her followers are only happy about it. In one of her recent videos in which she is preparing to go to the Ultra Festival in Miami, she says that she was invited as a VIP backstage at the event, but that she refused because it is much more fun, she says, to be under the stage with all his friends and peers. Needless to say she was inundated with positive comments.

Her videos are fundamentally simple, without too many complications due to post-editing, without particular care in the choice of music or sounds, without landscape backgrounds or (too many) stories of extraordinary holidays: she did this when she went to Dubai for Tarte, a cosmetics brand, and found herself in a shitstorm that monopolized TikTok for an entire week. Like the influencers on Instagram and like other creators on TikTok, Alix Earle always puts herself at the center of the story, but she understood better than others that whoever is on the other side is tired of “too perfect” content: after all, it is in TikTok’s DNA that of preferring a chaotic and uncoated aesthetic, the latter instead characteristic of Instagram at its peak of popularity in the 1910s. As she explains Vogue Business

, despite the fact that the influencer marketing sector grows year on year with an estimated value of 15 billion dollars in 2022, the market is increasingly saturated. The statistics speak for themselves: followers interact less and less, especially when it comes to the only way their favorites can earn, namely sponsored posts. A phenomenon mentioned above Studio magazine we were already talking two years ago, between exhausted influencers and genuine influencers.

Alix Earle knows how to create sponsored content in line with her narrative direction and above all she knows how to sip it: in fact, sponsored posts are relatively few, with high-end brands that her followers often cannot afford. She Earle knows it: for this reason she never flaunts her wealth although she never hides the fact that she is rich. It’s a difficult balance, but she’s nailed it for now. Last year alone, the most popular aesthetic on TikTok was the “clean girl” or “that girl”: thanks to the aftermath of the pandemic, all the videos under these trends illustrated the various techniques to adopt to become the best version of yourself : healthy meals based on vegetables, fruit and legumes, sports such as pilates and yoga, a detailed skincare routine to keep your skin free from any imperfections, neutral and never exaggerated looks and (most alarmingly) a very western and white beauty. Earle is the exact opposite of the clean girl: she goes to parties every weekend, gets drunk, is very messy (a video posted on her profile in which she shows her room full of clothes everywhere, make-up scattered and food on her bed has gone viral ), eats fast food frequently and never takes himself too seriously, or so he makes it seem to his followers. And above all, she has never exposed herself in a political way, she has never taken part in social issues, she does not fight for a particular cause, the only topic she talks about more seriously is her insecurity about her due to the acne.

After Tarte’s trip she was criticized a lot, but she never apologized or justified, as is the practice after episodes of this type. She simply let some time go by and came back shortly after, always smiling, always spontaneous, without changing her story about her on the social network, or making it (as often happens in these cases) less superficial. There’s so much more to the spontaneous, chaotic, good-friend persona that Earle has built. There is a person who has perfectly understood what works on social media right now and who knows very well what to expose and what not, what to say and what to omit. And how to work great.