Kissing Recessions and Revenge Venmos

Welcome back to After School Monday Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. 🫶

In today’s letter:

• Ellie Ellis, AI RushTokers, and the blurring of real versus fake virality

• The “kinda chic” meme is peak ”pick me”

• Inside the great sorority sponsorship gold rush

• Young datamaxxers are piping their biometrics into Claude

• Refreshers are the drink of the recession

• The wellness gap is the new swag gap

• Gen Z is buying diamonds on TikTok Shop

• CeraVe is taking on teen tanmaxxers

• The warrior cut is here (RIP broccoli cut)

And so, so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:

“If you don’t have friends or whatever, like, maybe find some.”

PLS DONT BULLY ME THANKS

A 16-year-old British girl named Ellie Ellis had six TikTok followers seven days ago, and today she has more than 700,000. Her first post, a GRWM captioned “Pls dont bully me thanks,” got over 15 million views, and every TikTok she’s posted since — 17 over the last week — has gotten several million views.

On Friday, five days after her first post, she got her first influencer mailer from the beauty brand Too Faced. That clip now has 3.5 million views; by comparison, Too Faced’s average TikTok this month has drawn fewer than 5,000 views.

Overnight fame like this doesn't really happen on TikTok anymore, at least not since the early days of 2020, which is why so many are skeptical that Ellie's virality is real.