Confessions of a Reformed Influencer
How I became the evil queen from "Snow White," obsessed with beauty and approval from the false mirror of social media
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I walked through the double doors of the Soho warehouse, its sparse glass and brick interior converted to a riot of florals for the fashion week presentation. There was a wall of roses, emblazoned with the company’s logo in cursive neon script. Bartenders passed pink drinks on silver trays. Mannequins sporting the latest collection clustered in faceless groups. I hesitated in the doorway for a beat longer than was normal, sucking in the perfumed air, the perfection. Influencers filled the room. They swanned and sparkled. And I was one of them.
I was 22. It was New York Fashion Week. When I walked into the room full of influencers, it was not me and them, but us. I was on the list.
I collected a drink from one of the servers and scanned the room. Girls were gathered in clusters, in front of mannequins or around cocktail tables. Everyone seemed to have a group but me. I had only started my fashion blog a few months ago and hadn’t made any “influencer friends,” as I would eventually come to call them. I swigged my drink and forced myself to approach a table of girls who appeared relatively non-threatening.
“Hi guys,” I said. “Mind if I put my drink here?” I placed it on the table as if the half-full champagne glass might earn me a spot at the table. “I’m Caroline.”
To my relief, the girls were nice. They all scooted around so I could join the circle, waving or shaking my hand as they shared their names, and often their Instagram handles too. My heart rate began to lower, and my shoulders untensed from my ears. I was doing this! I was fitting in at fashion week!
I took another sip of my drink and listened as the girls resumed their conversation.
One checked her phone, scrolling, “What do you have after this?” she asked another girl.
“Uhhh,” the girl responded, pulling out her phone, tapping. “Alice and Olivia. Then going to try to swing by Trachtenberg’s gifting suite, then the Revolve party tonight.”
“Oh you’re going to Revolve too? Want to try to grab a drink before?”
“I have a styling session with Dyson this afternoon, but I’ll be at Revolve also,” chimed in another girl.
“Oh did they send you an airwrap? I seriously swear by mine.”
As I listened, I felt heat crawl up my face. I didn’t have to check my phone to know this was my only event of the day, one of the few I’d been invited to for the entire week. Terrified they might ask me what else I had planned for today, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
As I made my way through the press of influencers, something shifted—like a spell had been cast (or perhaps lifted?). Faces glowed white in the light of phones. Everywhere arms extended to snap selfies, record stories. Brand insignias I couldn’t afford winked from purses, shoes, headbands. Prada. Gucci. Miu Miu. The miasma of different perfumes was suffocating. Falsetto squeals and exclamations echoed through the warehouse at regular intervals like an alarm.
When I exited the building, I took long drags of fresh air, leaning against the cool, white-painted brick before beginning the walk home to my apartment in the west village. On the way, a street photographer stopped me and asked to photograph my outfit. I obliged, switching poses with each snapping snick of his shutter. I had been so proud of this outfit, a diaphanous maxi dress from Mes Demoiselles Paris styled with galactic statement earrings and chunky black heels. But now I felt stupid, getting so dressed up for my singular event.
This is how fashion blogging would feel for the next five years until I quit: brief highs almost immediately negated by the cooler, more impressive, accomplishments of others. Each morning I would pull my phone from under my pillow. Briefly, the smudged black screen would reflect my strained, puffy face. Then I would click the phone to life to check how my latest post had done.
I would ask Instagram, “Am I the fairest one of all?” And because Instagram was brutally honest like the mirror we all know so well from the famous tale, it would always say, “You’re beautiful, but I can show you many who are even more so.” And like the reviled Queen, as the years went by I resorted to increasingly desperate measures to change its answer.
As a child, I was fascinated by Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” But it wasn’t the titular Snow White or the dwarves that captured my imagination as a child. It was the long shadow of the huntsman looming up the tree. It was the animate dark woods, which came alive, branches tearing, clawing, and snarling at Snow as she tried to escape. And most of all, it was the evil queen, her dungeon laboratory, her talking mirror, the pointed tips of her fingers on a shining poison apple, her transformation into an old, warted hag, and her final, perilous fall over a cliff, animated by a ferocious storm and slashing lightning. It was no surprise that the queen held my fascination as a child. She figured prominently in all the most exciting parts of the movie, only absent during the boring domestic scenes between Snow White and the seven dwarves. But now I wonder if my interest in the queen was something deeper than fascination—was, in fact, identification.
The Grimm fairy tale version of “Snow White” spends less time on the joys of domesticity, giving readers a deeper look into the psyche of the stepmother instead. When asked about the changes he’d made from the Grimm tale, Disney said, “It’s just that people now don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. They were too rough. In the end, they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.” But what fascinated me about the original tale, and what was lost in Disney’s version, was the fluctuations of the stepmother’s mood and sense of self, predicated by the mirror’s assessment of her relative beauty. In the beginning of the story the queen is the fairest in the land, and so she is content. But as Snow White grows more beautiful, the conditionality of the queen’s contentment is revealed: she can only be happy when she is on top.
When the mirror first declares Snow the fairest, the Queen’s mental state plummets.
“When the Queen heard these words, she trembled and turned green with envy. From that moment on, she hated Snow White and whenever she set eyes on her, heart turned as cold as a stone. Envy and pride grew like weeds in her heart. Day and night, she never had a moment’s peace.” - “Snow White,” Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Before Snow White came along, when the queen felt beautiful, she felt satisfied, so she draws a connection in her mind between primacy in beauty and happiness. This drives her first attempt to eliminate Snow White by ordering the huntsman to kill her. When the queen believes he has obeyed her orders, her confidence in the supremacy of her own beauty is restored, and “Her envious heart was finally at peace, as much as an envious heart can be.”
It is this second clause of the sentence that gives it all away: as much as an envious heart can be. The Brothers Grimm slyly ask the reader, “Can any heart have true peace if the peace is predicated on the approbation of others?”
I still remember the first photo shoot I ever did for my blog with a real photographer. Up until that point, I just made my friends and family take pictures of me. I found the photographer through Instagram, and she suggested that DUMBO would be an excellent location for shooting. I packed two different outfits in a big tote bag and took the subway over to Brooklyn. We shot at eight in the morning to avoid crowds—and other bloggers. The first outfit was a strapless black maxi and sneakers on the Brooklyn Bridge. After a quick outfit change in a public restroom, we moved to Washington Street. There, bookended by two buildings, is an iconic view of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s a similar street in Paris always full of photographers, where two apartment buildings frame the Eiffel tower perfectly. For this shot I wore black shorts, a blue silk tank, and a towering pair of heels. A nighttime look, photographed before nine am on a Sunday.
When I received the photos back from the photographer, I was overcome with pride. I looked fucking awesome. Skinny. Stylish. About nine feet tall. I couldn’t post the photos quickly enough. As soon as they landed, one right after another (these were the days before carousels), the likes and comments started to pour in. “Legs! Holy shit!” “Are you actually Charlize Theron?!” “Stunning shot!”
I was riding high. I was hot. I was fresh out of college in the big city, absolutely crushing it. The next weekend I visited my friend in D.C., and took a selfie of my makeup before brunch. I looked straight at the camera, eyes lined in black, lips pouted. I facetuned a few blemishes and hit post. When I checked my phone after the brunch, I had lost nearly one hundred followers. This happened almost eight years ago, but I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach, the panic, the confusion. I stared at the picture, as if at a mirror, my own face staring back. It was maybe overedited, I thought. Too close up? My makeup looked bad? A selfie was too narcissistic?
When reading “Snow White,” the queen’s quest for unimpeachable beauty seems so obviously shallow and futile, her obsession with the disembodied assessments of a mirror, unhealthy and pathetic. But the Queen believed the mirror’s measure of her was accurate. In fact, she repeatedly calls the mirror truthful and emphasizes that it can tell no lies. If you believe the message of the mirror and have experienced the high of happiness that comes with its approval, then it’s easy to fall into the cycle of seeking it again and again.
In the Grimm tale, the stepmother’s increasing desperation for the mirror’s approval is reflected by her increasingly desperate efforts to kill Snow White. At first, she commissions the huntsman to kill Snow White. When this is unsuccessful, she takes the task into her own hands. She dresses as a peddler and sells Snow lace, which she ties so tightly around her waist that she can’t breathe. When the dwarves cut the lace loose and save Snow White, the queen resorts to a poisoned comb, paralyzing Snow White when she places it in her hair. When the dwarves free the comb, the queen finally devises the infamous solution of the poison apple, which is only thwarted when a beautiful prince dislodges the piece of apple from Snow White’s throat as they kiss.
In other versions of “Snow White,” the machinations of the evil queen figure are even more violent. Maria Tatar, a fairy tale scholar, writes in an essay on the tale, “In Spain, the queen is even more bloodthirsty, asking for a bottle of blood, with the girl’s toe used as a cork. In Italy, the cruel queen instructs the huntsman to return with the girl’s intestines and her blood-soaked shirt.” Across all versions, though, the beauty-obsessed queen figure is the villain. After all, who could be that desperate? That obsessed with disembodied approval communicated through a glassine surface? I am here to say that I was, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Many people have fallen into a similar trap as the queen, attributing honesty and truth to a voice of unknown provenance that speaks to them through their phones and social media.
As my following grew, surpassing five thousand, ten thousand, nearing fifteen thousand, so too did my confidence in the mirror. Composed of so many, the vision of myself reflected back by my followers must be honest. If they said my outfit was cool, it must be cool. If they said I was beautiful, I must be beautiful. If they said they were omgggg so jealous, then my life must be worthy of envy. But, if a post flopped, only garnering a few likes or a couple comments, that too, must be true. It must be true that this post was less creative, my outfit less stylish, my self uglier.
But as each vignette of Snow White brings a new scheme for the Queen to vanquish her competitor, each day brought a new opportunity to post, a new chance to ask the mirror, “Am I the fairest?,” fresh hope that the mirror would answer affirmatively.
However as the financial and lifestyle allure of “influencing” grew, there were more Snow White’s flocking to Instagram. And now there were multiple mirrors—Youtube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reels. The competition for followers, likes, collaborations, attention, and approval became fiercer every day. With each passing year, my follower growth slowed, my engagement fell off. But like the queen, I couldn’t stop, sure that my next scheme would finally achieve the results I craved, that my next post or campaign might return to me that glorious feeling I had, right at the beginning of blogging, when I posted the photo of myself on the Brooklyn Bridge—the fairest of them all.
I made friends with other influencers, taking photos together so we could cross-promote, our entire social gatherings predicated on “getting a good picture.” When we drove from shooting location to shooting location, I noticed bags of clothes in the back of their cars, still with the tags on, ready to be returned after the shoot.
I copied successful photos of others, adopting entirely new styles, color schemes, and personas in an effort to chase what was working for other bloggers.
I followed hundreds of random people in the desperate hope that they might follow me back. If they didn’t, I unfollowed them, sometimes accidentally unfollowing my own friends and family—mistakes that even to this day are too awkward to remedy with a belated follow.
I joined massive Telegram group chats with other influencers where we would share our posts when they dropped so we could all descend upon the photo and like, comment, save, share to boost the post in Instagram’s ever-changing algorithm.
I developed carpal tunnel in my wrist because I spent so much time “engaging” on Instagram, tapping out comments for hours on end in my bed in the mad hope that the comment-receivers would return the favor. I was so militantly dedicated to my hours of “engaging” each day that I did it on family vacations, missing out once-in-lifetime experiences to write illuminating things like, “So cute!” “Girl you are so hot!” and “This outfit is STUNNINGGG,” always with a near-psychotic amount of emojis.
I shot in clothes I would never wear again and promoted products I didn’t actually use, because I was desperate to bulk up my portfolio of collaborations so I could secure partnerships with brands I actually liked, command a higher fee, and arrange free clothing from coveted companies.
I woke up before work, shooting in the bitter cold, exhausted, to get more content. More. More. More. I learned how to shoot with a tripod and a remote so my pursuit of more wouldn’t be limited by my photographer’s schedule. I dedicated my weekends to working on my blog, turning down social events with my real friends to acquire more digital ones.
One morning, I woke up at six am on a Saturday in March. I had gone out the night before, and was exhausted, hungover, and swollen. I spent an hour washing the cigarette smell from my hair, ice-rolling my face, and applying copious layers of makeup. Then I donned an outfit for a spring campaign I needed to shoot and walked outside to a bone-chilling, thirty-degree morning. There was a white-painted wall down an alley near my house, and I hustled over to it, tripod and camera in hand, the wind bringing tears to my freshly-makeupped eyes. I set up my tripod and camera, and began to pose against the wall, clicking my remote with each movement. A delivery truck pulled down the alley, and I scrambled to move my tripod, using the break to scroll through the photos in my camera. They were awful. I looked pale and fat, the dress limp and boring. Once the truck passed, I repositioned my tripod closer, trying new sitting and squatting poses that I thought might add a little dynamism to an otherwise stale shoot. A group of friends, dressed in workout gear and carrying coffees passed me in the alley, carefully averting their eyes from the spectacle. My legs prickled with goosebumps and my skin went numb as I tried another angle, and another, and another, each one only yielding more hideous results. Finally, on the verge of tears, I grabbed my tripod and stormed home. When I walked into my apartment, I hurled my tripod onto the ground, kicked my shoes off, and started to cry. My roommate, holding a book and still in her pajamas, came out of her room, eyes wide.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, eyeing the mess I’d made in front of the door.
“It’s just really hard being this ugly,” I said, using anger to deflect further tears.
“Aw Caroline, you’re beautiful,” she said, squatting on the floor and hugging me.
But for all I knew, she could easily be lying. Only the mirror, after all, told the truth.
At the end of the Grimm fairy tale, after the final resurrection of Snow White’s beauty from another of the queen’s failed schemes, the queen receives an invitation to the wedding feast between Snow White and her prince. The queen does not want to go, but “she never had a moment's peace after that and had to go see the young queen.” She must look upon the beauty that has beaten her, driven her to this lowest point. In the Disney movie, the final scene between the queen and Snow White sends the queen plunging from a great height to fatal depths. The fairy tale is even crueler. When the queen arrives, “iron slippers [have] already been heated up over a fire of coals.” They are “brought in with tongs and set right in front of her.” Snow White makes her evil stepmother “put on the red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she [drops] dead to the ground.” Her quest for beauty is her undoing, and, in the end, it is the object of her jealousy who deals the final blow.
Some fashion bloggers may have uncovered the secret to authentic community and genuine artistic expression of their own personal style. But I never did. My genuine love of fashion and photography was almost immediately overtaken by my need for online validation. And I suspect most bloggers are caught in the same cycle of brief highs and long lows, modulated by the same mirror of social media that was so toxic for me.
So, in the end, I quit. With around fifteen thousand followers, hundreds of dollars coming in every month from collaborations, and free clothes delivered to my doorstep weekly, I stepped away. I logged off Instagram. I did not log back on for almost two years.
Anne Sexton wrote a poem titled “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” and the first stanza reads, “Beauty is a simple passion,/ but, oh my friends, in the end/ you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.” I attempted to make a career out of the pursuit and representation of beauty. But the mirror of Instagram, and public opinion, is more fickle than it is honest. I danced the fire dance for my followers in red-bottomed shoes, denying the pain it caused me until I couldn’t any longer.
Years after quitting blogging, one of my friends told me, “It used to be hard for me to follow you. It made me feel bad about myself sometimes.” There could have been no way for her to know I was feeling the same way the entire time. Anne Sexton’s poem concludes with the line, “Meanwhile Snow White held court,/ Rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut/ and sometimes referring to her mirror/ as women do.” Sexton knows even the mirror’s darlings will eventually become its victims. The only escape is to smash the mirror.
Epilogue:
After finishing this post, I thought it was high-time to free myself of the last lingering vestige of my influencing career: the clothes. They have weighed me down like an albatross around my neck for too many years, making moving—and living—comfortably, difficult. Plus they serve as a physical reminder of the past I’m so ready to leave behind. So I ordered fifteen Thredup bags (an online consignment service). I filled all fifteen and realized I had massively underestimated how much shit I’d accumulated over the years. So I ordered fifteen more. All in, when I was done, I had filled thirty Thredup bags. A Thredup bag is meant to accommodate thirty pounds of clothes. That’s nine hundred pounds of clothes I got rid of. It’s disgusting. It’s wasteful. It’s harmful. It’s the reality of influencing.
(Essay on shopping addiction and overconsumption coming soon)
Such a fascinating piece, and I love the Snow White analogies. I love this sentence, which may or may not be a pun, I'm guessing it was unintentional: 'In the beginning of the story the queen is the fairest in the land, and so she is content.' (as a long-time language teacher, I would point out the change in word stress in 'content' and giggle hysterically).
I'm a self-proclaimed cranky old Gen Xer who struggles to understand the world of influencing and this shed such an interesting light on some of the things I hadn't thought about. I've often seen public photo shoots or the excessive selfie taking and just rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath, but that's probably a generational thing.
It's funny that I've just recently embraced IG, YouTube and TikTok (yikes!) because, as an author, I'm trying to be more online and establish some sort of presence, and branding and all that. I don't want to do it, tbh, but it seems like I have to if I want to sell books and raise awareness. I know I'm not the target audience for so many of the influencers I come across on IG, but I look at some of the people with huge followings and I'm baffled as to how they've amassed so many. I don't get it - like, what on earth attracts people to this nonsense? I see it all as fake.
Sorry, I'm rambling, but a quick final story: I have a friend who's a Ukrainian influencer, she's a doctor with some 60,000 IG followers, always posting glamorous shots with her husband and son but I know the truth (because she told me!). In real life, she's so down-to-earth, giggly, quirky with such a great personality but online she has to project this image of glamour and perfection. I know her marriage is on the rocks and I know she's now pregnant with another kid because it will help her overall wholesome image, but is that a price worth paying for that? Continued unhappiness?
It's just...nuts!
Another brilliant piece, Caroline! I’ve been in PR for most of my career and worked with a lot with influencers. It’s such a strange world! I always found it icky the way people were reduced to their followings and engagement rates. Even though I knew the realities of influencing, there was still a part of me that envied the people we worked with. It’s so easy to get swept up in the glamour of what we see in our social media feeds.