Physically, Alix Earle exists in Miami. Metaphysically, she exists everywhere else. The 23-year-old social media personality has soared over her peers in nearly every metric of what it means to be an influencer. A shy New Jersey girl who started sharing her life on TikTok in 2020 and gained popularity in 2022, now hosts her own podcast, Hot Mess with Alix Earle, and translates her brand from the digital to the real with guest lectures, business panels, and the commencement of her scholarship program at her alma mater, the University of Miami.

Earle’s schtick is the never-dying GRWM (“get ready with me” style videos where creators do their makeup, hair, and outfit in real-time) that includes the details of her private life. When I say ‘details,’ I mean there are literally no curtains on the Alix Earle stage. In the midst of an in-depth makeup routine, she will reveal to you an embarrassing confessional or intimate insecurity, not oft unpacked by the beautiful people we follow online.

Being in front of the camera and sharing on social media was nearly instinctive for Earle. Recounting childhood dream jobs, she says, “I never knew exactly what I wanted to do as a kid. I had always loved vlogging our family trips, the first second I got a phone, it was all pictures and videos.” She continues, “One of my first jobs was working at a clothing store. I would run their socials and curate posts, seeing, you know, ‘What’s going to get all these girls to come in and shop?’ or, ‘What’s going to make the sales online go up?’ I was really interested in creating content, and I loved it—it never felt like work for me. Honestly, it still doesn’t.”

In an episode of Hot Mess, Earle remembers those who would laugh and make fun of her for wanting to be a content creator. Maybe that’s due to the subconscious cultural belief that if you get famous online, it should just happen to you. All the while, nearly every other profession in our economy requires and rewards ambition and goal-setting. Even when she didn’t have many followers, Earle would post as such. It seems obvious to post more to gain more, but it’s trickier than it sounds. While it’s not, in Earle’s words, “cringe” to be a social media personality, it is “cringe” to express that desire, even though a recent survey shows that more than half of Gen Z would become an influencer if they had the opportunity to do so. Perhaps this is where Earle’s authenticity, beyond the volume of her output, threaded this ever-evolving needle.

Far beyond acquainted doubters of her come up, Earle now faces the more intangible, threatening beast of digital condemnation. In our post-Pamela, post-Amy, post-Britney mediascape, we who identify as lovers of pop culture like to think of ourselves as parasocially enlightened, absolved of the harsh tabloid era, illumined by the biopics, reenactments, and documentaries released in recent years that emphasize the cruelty of the masses placed on young women who find themselves—whether they wanted to be there or not—atop a pedestal. But the damaging traits of mass obsession have found different outlets. If scorn isn’t left directly in a creator’s comments feed, maybe it’s tweeted, or made into it’s own TikTok disguised as an oral think-piece, or maybe it ends up on a Reddit snark page. At present, a snark page dedicated only to Alix Earle has nearly twenty thousand members.

Earle typically addresses her critics on Hot Mess or on TikTok, always a bit self-aware and humorously self-deprecating. “Dealing with public perception is a lot,” she says. “I’m always so grateful that I have a platform where I’m able to get online and speak and narrate for myself.” The saving grace for our modern-day objects of admiration might be their phones. “I’ve thought before about other celebrities in the past who haven’t done that,” Earle says of the pre-smart phone era’s limitations, “and how many lies are probably out there about them, that they just kind of sit back and let it all go on. It’s been so amazing to be able to have a platform where I’m able to tell my truth.”

For as much negativity as Alix Earle faces, she’s also reminded of the purpose behind her platform, regularly meeting and receiving messages from people who support and commend her. Followers feel connected to Earle is because of her transparency and vulnerability with her audience, regularly reminding them that “social media is fake.” Whether she’s unraveling her past experience with an eating disorder, or removing TikTok’s beauty filter to reveal her grapple with acne, her authenticity is an anomaly in an otherwise manufactured cyberspace. It wasn’t always her plan to be so candid, but sincerity has become the root of her brand and a quality that inspires loyalty in her audience.

“When I first started,” she says, “I was obsessed with trying to create a perfect profile and a perfect image of myself, just as I feel a lot of people do on social media. That’s what I had seen on Instagram at the time growing up. I always tried to curate this perfect picture. I had done that for years and years, and I never really opened up too much about my personal life, or about me. But when I started to struggle with acne, it made me so insecure that I didn’t want to post anymore, yet I had this passion for posting content and being in front of the camera. One day I just decided to tell everyone, ‘Hey, you know, I haven’t really been posting ‘cause my acne has been really bad, but here’s how I cover it up with makeup.’ And the second I did that, I started to grow this community and have these followers that were able to relate to me. It just gave my brand a whole different meaning and I realized the power of being authentic online and being yourself... as much as it is vulnerable and scary.”

In a similar style to her TikToks, Earle’s Hot Mess episodes feel casual and conversational. From romantic relationships and fashion weeks to mental health, nothing is embargoed. To newer listeners, her charm is disarming. In an episode titled “Watch This Before Getting a Boob Job” (Earle has historically shared with her audiences what cosmetic procedures she’s done), she kicks off the segment about how she ran out of antidepressant medication, Lexapro, and in this moment shatters the stereotypes we pretend not to have about beach-blonde Miami girls.

Hot Mess is a component of Unwell Network, the newly founded media organization by Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper. A natural partnership, Earle says she “first met Cooper in LA over lunch. We had a mutual friend and we just connected right off the bat.” Their meeting happened around the same time that Earle was thinking of ways to expand in her career. “The natural next step felt like a podcast,” she says. As she was looking into media outlets to pursue her show, Cooper called with the idea of Unwell.

This navigation of “next steps” is crucial for influencers with a steady following. If they make a business decision that their audience doesn’t believe in or understand, it can lead to an occupational fragility that’s hard to come back from. With Earle’s content of clubs, boat days, and last night’s debrief, it wouldn’t have made sense for her to sign with a suit looking to make a buck. Hers is a force in union with Cooper’s, whose content is similar to Earle’s by toeing the line of raunchy, funny, reflective, and advising.“[Unwell] creatively got what I wanted to do,” she recalls, “[Alex and I] are constantly talking about what it is that I’m doing and where I can take things. She gives me advice. It’s kind of like a big sister friendship that we have.”

A few thousand miles east of our conversation, the fate of TikTok sits on trial in DC with the House passing legislation that requires ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, to either sell the app within six months of the law or cease operation in the US. While the final say still awaits in the Senate, the possibility of losing TikTok sounds at first like a superfluous worry, and at second, raises concern about the future of our digital landscape, of what an app owes to its most profitable creators. There’s been playful debate in the last few years about how hard social media personalities actually have to work. To this, Earle remarks, “People can say that I don’t work hard, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. It’s something you just have to deal with. You have to know your self-worth and keep pushing for yourself.” In tandem with this conversation about influencer work ethic is the question of why a policy can so quickly unsettle the job security for micro and macro content creators when those individuals have dramatically influenced the economic success of certain products and companies.

Impacting every industry from beauty to wellness to food and beverage, a TikTok-funded study with Oxford Economics claims the app contributed over 24 billion dollars to the US GDP and increased revenue for small business owners by nearly 15 billion dollars. This, of course, is driven by the creators whom consumers (or followers) trust. If an acne-struggling Alix Earle can vlog a flawless complexion that lasts through an eight-hour rave, how could you not be influenced to buy the foundation she wears? “I think it would be really devastating if TikTok got banned,” she reflects. “It’s such an amazing platform, and obviously that’s where I’ve created a lot of success for myself.” While fraught over TikTok’s uncertain future, the risk to expand her platform proves fruitful. “I believe [my audience] would follow me anywhere. They’ve shown that with the podcast, and it’s been amazing to see that I’m able to retain their attention for an hour, or over an hour, as opposed to a two-minute video on TikTok.”

Earle’s business-savvy role models are close to home. She cites how her father’s owning his own business was an exciting catalyst for her creating something of her own. “As things started to take off in my senior year of college,” she remembers, “I had no idea how to navigate a business of my own and become my own boss, so I had leaned on my dad a lot for advice. He would sit in on meetings and make sure everything was going smoothly. It turned into us talking every day about business and it’s a really great relationship that we’ve built, different than the father-daughter relationship that we [already] have. It’s really fun to work with him and learn from him and he’s very involved and engaged which I didn’t really expect.”

Despite the rapidly amassing accomplishments, Earle says she is most proud of the Alix Earle Scholarship at the University of Miami’s Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, which offers financial assistance to business school juniors and seniors. “[The scholarship] feels the most surreal,” she says. “It was a no-brainer for me. I truly feel like the University of Miami has given me such an amazing education, and I really credit them to a lot of my success. So I just want to be able to be a good influence on these younger students and be able to support them so they can go out and follow their dreams and do the unimaginable.”

The unimaginable is what Earle frequently preaches to her audience. On the surface, she’s a classic beauty: “If you were to look at me being a young 23-year-old girl who just posts about partying and traveling all the time,” she says on preconceptions, “it’s very easy for people to think that I don’t have a brain and they can pull a fast one on me.” But at the core she exemplifies persistence and self-determination. Earle has a seat at the table not just because she wants to be there, but because she believes she deserves to be there too. Barely five years into her own career, it’s hard to say exactly where Earle might take herself, but it’s near-certain that her audience will follow her wherever that may be. 

Photographed by Davis Bates at Monday Artists

Styled by Malcolm Smith

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Hair: Graham Nation at The Wall Group

Makeup: Alex French at Forward Artists using Anastasia Beverly Hills

Creative: Oliver Hartt

Flaunt Film: Wyatt Stromer

Flaunt Film Music: Farr

Production: Chloe Cussen

Photo Processing/Development: PhotoCity