CATCHING FIRE: Katie Fang, put the fries in the bag and Free Hannah Neeleman

Do keep up!

Hello hotties!

Today we’re digging into…

• The beauty influencer Generation Alpha are obsessed with

• The new deep-cut insult

• Why everyone’s concerned about a tradwife’s red-flag-filled relationship

• The Olympic athletes going for gold on TikTok

• The new political PR rules behind Donald Trump’s YouTube golf show appearance

Let’s gooooooooo

1. Katie Fang is having a moment

Eighteen months ago Katie Fang was working as a hostess at a restaurant in Vancouver, Canada. Today she’s one of the most powerful forces in the beauty world after building a massive following of Sephora Tweens.

Fang, 18, is adored by millions of Generation Alpha girls who are obsessed with skincare, and that’s got brands falling over themselves to partner with her. In the last month alone Fang has launched a kit with tweens’ favourite beauty brand Glow Recipe, appeared on billboards for another hot Gen A brand, Kosas, and helped to launch Rare Beauty’s new pressed powder with Selena Gomez herself. In short, she’s booked, busy and everywhere.

Fang’s meteoric rise started when she posted a TikTok doing her make-up while crying after being called into work in January last year.

It was a highly relatable moment - and since been watched more than 40 million times - but it also showcased how good Fang is at make-up as despite the tears her face looked “flawless” at the end of the video.

After her account following swelled, Fang filmed a GRWM (get ready with me) video every day and now she has over five million followers on TikTok. Fang strikes a chord with Gen A not only because she’s as fixated on skincare as they are but because she’s continued to be down to earth, often sharing her fears and feelings like in this post ahead of her first meet and greet.

Many of Fang’s fans also feel like they are on a journey with her. When she recently re-posted the crying video followed by one of her face on a billboard in Times Square her TikTok was flooded with comments from fans saying how proud they were and that they had been with her since “day one”.

With that level of engagement it’s no wonder brands want a piece of her… and her highly sought after audience.

2. Language lesson: Put the fries in the bag

If someone tells you to put the fries in the bag then you’ve just been hit with 2024’s most brutal burn.

The saying is used to express a lack of interest in what a person is saying, or to interrupt a person who’s rambling or being boring. The putdown also indicates that someone thinks they’re better than you. Ouch!

Put the fries in the bag’s origins go back to 2022 according to Know Your Meme but it became summer’s hottest slang after it took off on TikTok. As I’ve said before Google Trends never lies…

3. The Free Hannah Nelleman movement has begun

The tradwife world was rocked this week after The Sunday Times published an interview with its queen - Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman.

Regular readers will know that Neeleman is the Julliard-trained ballerina turned farmer, who’s a mother of eight and wife to Daniel, the son of a billionaire. The 34-year-old regularly broadcasts her life on a ranch in Utah to her 9.1 million followers on Instagram and 7.6 million followers on TikTok.

Neeleman has often courted controversy, including when she competed in Mrs. World less than two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. She’s also been dragged for being opaque about her family’s wealth and promoting traditional gender roles.

Now those critics, along with many of her other followers, are taking pity on Neeleman after The Sunday Times interview made five shocking revelations:

• Hannah gets “so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week”

• Daniel refuses to have nannies except for a babysitter once a week so they can go on a date night