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Hold, for a moment, your name and all the weight it carries in the palm of your hand. Does the texture prick your skin? Where does your ego flatten? Your sense of self thin? What leaks from the membrane that holds you together? Allow yourself, for a moment, to cradle that small knot in the creases of your palm. Now, turn it over to a friend. Turn it over to a hundred friends. A thousand. Four million.

Brooklyn-born musician, actor, model, and general online phenomenon, Justine Skye, has been part of this exchange of the ego for over a decade. A card-carrying member of the bygone Tumblr vanguard, Skye signed to her first record label at 17 years old and has been releasing music since, all the while tending to a burgeoning acting career, most notably demonstrated in Grown-ish. Whatever arcane elements allow for the self to be treasured by the public across dynamic internet platforms, varied artistic mediums, and ephemeral trend cycles—the young starlet seems to have mastered them. Justine Skye—the artist, the ego, the alters—is on our minds, but Skye herself? She tries not to think about it too much.

“I don’t think that I have an alter ego,” she considers on an early summer afternoon. “I think I have a lot of emotions.” We’re discussing Skye’s forthcoming yet-to-be-titled EP. The artist, whose 2014 single “Collide” witnessed an astronomical revival— soaring to the #1 spot on TikTok’s charts in 2023 and catalyzing the artist’s first iHeartRadio nomination in 2024—is negotiating her popularity of the past with the person she is at present. In 2014, Skye was widely recognizable for her purple hair, her cadre of NYC-based Tumblr-famous friends, and her signature R&B sonic styling. Today, Skye has a female-dominated management team, new music coming down the pipe, and a revitalized outlook on genre—but she doesn’t take any particular issue with the way the public digests every iteration of Justine Skye into a singular entity: “Depending on [my look], that’s the emotion that is evoked—but they’re all me, they’re just different emotions of Justine Skye. I wouldn’t say they’re different people. Even when I change up my hair color, it’s not like I’m a different person—it’s just a little refresher.”

Refresh is a word that surfaces often with Skye, particularly when discussing her forthcoming EP. Less of a cleavage from her R&B roots and more of an experimental meander towards a modern identity, the star’s new music is, in a few words, more danceable: “I’ve been to a lot of parties recently, unfortunately,” she says. “That’s pretty much what [the creation of this EP] was all about, just wanting to make something that I can actually dance to with my friends. I always look at myself as the girl that’s twirling around in the middle of the dance floor, just wanting to have a good time. My friends and I, we go out to dance. There are some people that go out looking for something, looking for someone, and we literally go out to dance.”

There’s something specific about dancing—about any kind of creative release, really—that Skye considers intrinsic to her sense of artistry. To Skye, health isn’t about just going to the gym (“I actually don’t like working out at all,” she confides), but rather moving her body and getting others to share the impulse: “My major goal in this next project is making people want to get up and move their bodies and feel good, and feel refreshed or exhausted because they’ve been dancing so much,” she admits. The motivation is evident in Skye’s first single of the new era, 2023’s bouncy “Whip It Up,” produced by lauded industry hitmaker SADPONY. A delectable taste of Skye’s rebrand, the track demonstrates Skye’s evergreen creative prowess across genres—and the single is only a small inkling of what’s to come.

“I was asked to be on a song with this really dope DJ, Austin Millz,” she tells us of the catalyst behind the new sound, “and that’s kind of what inspired me to start experimenting more with dance music. It was so much fun to record, so much fun to make, and shooting the video was just...” she trails off, and returning to her thought says, “I was very proud of being a part of that moment...I was like, ‘Why am I not experimenting with this for myself?’ So I went on that journey, into meeting different producers and different songwriters to collaborate with, and I’m perfecting what that sound is for me specifically. It’s just such a cool process.”

Skye credits a great deal of her creative energy—whether it be found in the annals of her Tumblr dominance or what she observes within herself today—to her Brooklyn roots. “I always say how grateful I am to have been born here out of anywhere in the world,” she shares. “It adds so much character to you, whether you’re realizing it or not. The creativity that’s lurking on every single street block that you’re walking down...every corner you turn here there’s something to see, whether it’s something crazy or something beautiful or something sad or something happy.”

Skye claims that being from New York influences her perception (and execution) of sentimentality as well. “People just aren’t walking around hugging people in New York. If someone is hugging you and they’re from New York, it’s probably more meaningful. In LA it’s a bit more fake. It’s just like an empty hug that doesn’t really have any emotion behind it. In New York, you can sense real love, because no one would be touching you in New York if they didn’t really want to.”

Does native New Yorker Justine Skye want to touch people with her music? Obviously. “It’s always an honor, as a musician, or for me specifically—I make music for myself as a release and things that I want to hear,” she says. “If anyone feels any emotion, whether it’s happiness, sadness, or confidence, if I’m able to make them feel anything, it’s always such an honor. I think it’s so cool to be able to reach so many people around the world. It’s the coolest job ever.”

Though Skye’s job is to connect with people online, through television screens, and through streaming platforms, she prefers to chat in person. “I feel like there’s a lot of misconception about me,” she admits. “I guess people think I’m stuck up. I don’t know what they think about me, but they have the wrong idea. It’s normal for humans to have preconceived notions, but I like proving people wrong.”

For Skye, who has made a life out of disseminating and then discarding iterations of herself across the digital ether, there’s no right way to reconcile the distance between that little ball of self she holds in her own hands and the one that someone else is holding, thousands of miles and multiple screens away. “I don’t know what they’ll try to do,” she considers. “I stopped thinking about that. To be honest, I feel like as I get older I realize life be lifein’. There’s so many things to be concerned about other than what someone’s doing on Tumblr.”

What happens when your identity—with all of its glittering thorniness and flashy desirability and unphotogenic quietudes— is passed around the sweaty palms of millions of strangers for over a decade? If you’re Justine Skye, a woman of diverse talent and an undeniable work ethic, you make several hit songs. You feature on a widely-loved television show. You dance with your friends whenever you can and you walk down paths forged by your own private interests. If you’re Justine Skye, you never allow yourself to think that you’ve “made it.” You clench your fist around that ego, and you keep on working.

Photographed by Zhamak Fullad

Styled by Jay Hines

Written by Annie Bush

Hair: Sean Fears at Opus Beauty

Makeup: Maddie Jones

Flaunt Film: Isaac Dektor

Flaunt Film Editor: Camryn Spratt

Flaunt Film DP: Timothy Shin

Stylist Assistants: Gabriella Lane and Jai Simmons‍

Production Assistant: Ella Brignoni

Location: Axe Construction

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