Don't Do Extra

Hi everyone, welcome back! In case you’re new here, I’m Olivia, director of content at Artemis Ward and your guide for this monthly column, where we dive into the deeper shifts behind viral moments and what they mean for us. Let’s take the plunge.

Have you noticed that everything is “-maxxing” right now? There’s looksmaxxing (optimizing your appearance to its fullest potential); sleepmaxxing (squeezing every last percentage point out of your sleep score); fibermaxxing (a.k.a., increasing your fiber intake the same way we’ve all collectively quintupled our daily grams of protein); and friction-maxxing (intentionally seeking out all the inconveniences of daily life). There’s even nothing-maxxing — essentially, the long-lost art of sitting around and doing nothing, ideally for long enough stretches of time that you can post about it. Whatever the activity, the suffix says it all: you’re taking it to its (il)logical maxx-ed out extreme.

At first glance, it’s easy to read this “maxximalist” moment as a full-blown return to excess: doing the most, all the time, in every category of life. Gone are the clean-girl days of yore, replaced instead by louder aesthetics, colorful analog hobbies, and pure, unabashed whimsy. But if you actually pay attention to what people praise (and what they drag) online, you’ll realize that things aren’t so simple. Take some examples I’ve found while scrolling over the last two to three weeks.

First, on the topic of food and bevs:

• Adding sprinkles to your morning matcha? Embracing whimsy. ✅

• Doordashing every single one of your meals to your apartment? Doing the most. ❌

And before you say, “Olivia, that’s just wealth signaling,” let’s talk about outfits for Coachella — a time when the expectation is to go all out. I mean, after all, if you’ve already spent all that money on wristbands and flights and lodging, you might as well give the people what they came for, right? WRONG! Let’s take a closer look:

• Having your mother, a famous fashion designer, design custom outfits from fabrics you hand-selected? Going hard. Diva slay. ✅ (See comments like: “This series has me in a chokehold” and “Such a flex that your mom can make you a custom fit 🥰”)

• Ordering thousands of dollars worth of outfits while claiming you have nothing to wear (even though you’re an influencer who gets free clothes on the daily)? Doing too much, for sure. ❌

Or, let’s talk weddings! One of life’s seasons when going over-the-top is more than acceptable, surely. Well, not so fast:

• Recording your multiple outfit changes on your wedding day? Amazing! ✅

• Recounting all the cosmetic procedures you’re getting before your wedding day? Now we’ve gone too far. ❌

Individually, these examples might read like random internet judgments. But if you consider all the evidence together, it points to two conclusions. First, as my colleague Ryan Weicht wrote recently, we’re living in an age of contradiction. Second (and more specifically), we’re operating within a set of unspoken rules about when doing the most — also known as being “extra” — is acceptable and when it crosses a line. Allow me to explain.

Let’s look at all my ✅ examples together: sprinkles on matcha, custom Coachella fits, multiple wedding outfit changes. What do they share? I’d argue that they’re all doing something: they’re either additive to or in pursuit of an experience. The sprinkles make the matcha more fun, the custom fit makes the festival more memorable, the outfit changes make the wedding more of a fashion moment. The ❌ examples work differently because they seem to be just about buying things. Ordering food to avoid going outside, buying more clothes instead of going through what you already own…the extra-ness feels hollow, accumulation for its own sake.

That said, the line isn’t clean, and it was never meant to be. The same behavior lands differently depending on who’s doing it, what platform you’re on, and how the comment section is feeling that day. Take the wedding procedure TikTok: despite the critical stitches and callouts, a vocal chunk of the internet had that creator’s back entirely. (See: “The fact that anyone is judging omg im gagged why can’t a girl pamper herself in peace.” “Your transparency is a gift this wedding szn!!” “I did all this and I’m a pleb. This is so normal why are people dragging you lol.”)

So, then, how do we make sense of “extra” when it’s a moving target?

The honest answer is: you kind of can’t. See below:

The So What

Normally, this is where I’d pivot to what all of this means for you. Instead, I’m going to tell you what we did with it.

At Artemis Ward, we have a running belief that the answer is in the audience. If you look closely enough at what people celebrate, adopt, mock, or reject, you can usually find the tension a brand should be responding to and the role it can credibly play within it.

So, loyal So What reader, you may remember my colleague Quinten Rosborough posing a scenario for you all two weeks ago:

Pretend you work at a creative agency. Let’s say it’s independent, has a track record of doing cool, thoughtful work, and is named after a 19th-century humorist. You’re hard at work one day and a brief crosses your desk: a CPG brand wants your help creating a new campaign. The only requirement? The concept has to feature a celebrity spokesperson. How do you decide who to choose?

Now, let’s add a bit more context. Say the brand is Seventh Generation and the product is a powerful dish soap that doesn’t rely on dyes, artificial fragrances, or a laundry list of unnecessary extras to clean your dishes. In a category that has long equated “more ingredients” with “more effectiveness,” this brand’s strength is what it doesn’t have. So, the question becomes: how do you show up in a culture that loves going all out…but only in certain places, for certain reasons, and in certain contexts?

Enter Don’t Do Extra — a campaign that celebrates going hard for the things that deserve it and keeping everything else refreshingly, unapologetically extra-free. Nine times out of ten, we’re willing to bet that everything else = doing the dishes. And if you're going to make that case to the internet, you need someone who lives it. Which brings me to the face of our campaign that we’ve been teasing: the one and only, the iconic Keke Palmer.

Keke is, undoubtedly, the internet's darling. Just take a look at a screenshot I took while we were deep in the throes of Don’t Do Extra planning:

But, more importantly, she’s someone who genuinely embodies the campaign’s logic. Keke goes hard where it matters: her work, her podcast, her partnerships, her forthcoming wellness brand, her fashion, her family, her willingness to be completely, unapologetically herself. And she’s famously unbothered about keeping the rest of life simple.

You can watch the Don’t Do Extra hero video below. But before you go, consider this your AW-verified permission slip: Be extra when you want to be. Just don’t do extra where it doesn’t belong. (And yes. That means in your dish soap. Go buy some Seventh Generation.)

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