The Sunday Read: ‘The Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During the pandemic, cheerleader-ish girls performing slithery hip-hop dances to rap music on TikTok has been the height of entertainment — enjoyed both genuinely and for laughs. Addison Rae, one such TikToker, is the second-most-popular human being on the platform, having amassed a following larger than the population of the United Kingdom. In seeking to monetize this popularity, she has followed a path forged by many social media stars and A-list celebrities like Rihanna and Kylie Jenner: She has started her own beauty brand. On today’s Sunday Read, a look at how beauty has entered a phase of total pop-culture domination and how influencers are changing the way the sell works by mining the intimate relationships they have with their fans.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In college, in the 1990s, I was very into the cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.
0:09.2	He said, reproducing something in a photo devalued it.
0:12.9	So I didn't get a camera.
0:15.5	I just refused to be a person who walked around with a camera.
0:18.6	I thought taking pictures was really gosh.
0:21.8	And as a result, I don't have any pictures of anybody I knew or myself from this time,
0:29.0	which kind of sucks because I looked great.
0:32.6	These days, it's totally different.
0:36.0	We all have cameras.
0:37.2	We're all taking selfies.
0:38.4	We're scrolling Instagram incessantly and looking at other people's selfies.
0:43.3	And during the pandemic, some of us have spent practically every day staring at our faces
0:49.0	on Zoom.
0:50.5	We're living in what we used to consider the future, a totally visual, virtual culture.
0:56.5	And it's made most of us obsessed with how we look and how we can look better.
1:03.8	My name is Vanessa Grigori-Adice.
1:05.7	I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.
1:09.0	I decided to write about the beauty industry and what it's doing to us right now.
1:14.7	One of the people I talked to for the story is Tiktok Star Addison Ray.
1:18.7	She just launched her own makeup line.
1:21.6	She's 20 years old. She is the second most popular human being on Tiktok, which means she has
1:28.6	78.5 million followers.
	...

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