CATCHING FIRE: Clip farming, man of the year and Meghan pregnancy truthers
Do keep up!
Hello hotties! Last post I wondered whether the Kardashians were about to spark a transparency trend after they shared details about some of their plastic surgery. And the early signs are that yes, Kris and Kylie Jenner are indeed ~influencing~ others.
A few days after Kylie shared her boob job ‘recipe’ another TikToker asked Alix Earle to spill on what she’d done and her reply came fast and detailed…
Then Jaz Smith, the TikToker who posted more than 20 times during her wedding ceremony, gave a run down of her surgery to her 516,000 followers without even being asked.
And Abby Baffoe spilled her looksmaxxing secrets to her 1.2 million followers.
Meanwhile Kylie has been bitten by the no gatekeeping bug as she followed up her revelation by sharing a much-demanded hair tutorial to show fans how she gets her natural waves. All the transparency is working in Kylie’s favour with fans bombarding her comments section to declare her the ultimate “girl’s girl”.
So hot right now
EMDR therapy… after Miley Cyrus claimed it “saved her life” and British influencer Millie Mackintosh told followers it helped her process past trauma.
EMDR is a form of psychotherapy where participants are placed in a hypnotic state and encouraged to focus on past traumatic experiences. Practitioners claim it helps to reprocess memories. With such high profile fans expect to hear a lot more about this treatment.
Etsy witches… who cast spells for a fee have been in-demand for a while but after the aforementioned TikTok star Jaz Smith made hers go viral I’m officially declaring them boiling hot.
Jaz enlisted the help of NaturalisticBlessing after it was forecast to rain on her wedding day. After getting the dry weather she asked for, she sought her out again to see if she could cure her new husband after he got sick on their honeymoon. When a fast recovery followed she then asked for the Knicks to win a crucial play-off game. And you’ve guessed it, they won.
Jaz’s three for three led to the witch’s Etsy store being bombarded with so many requests for spells she had to deactivate her listing.
If you want some of NaturalisticBlessing’s “magic”, get in line, stay in line and cross everything she re-opens soon.
Hailey Bieber… who sold her beauty brand, Rhode, to e.l.f. for $1 billion.
The deal is the most ever paid for a celebrity backed brand and reflects how successful Bieber and her team have been at creating products adored by Gen Z/A. The lip-tint holding phone case is just one example of their genius…
For more deets on the deal take a look at
’s write up and interview with Puck's Rachel Strugatz who broke news of the sale.Aflalo… is suddenly the brand all the fashion girlies are linking to.
(formerly known as Man Repeller) even dedicated a whole post to why we should be having a “genie pants” summer in their Lolana design ($690/£627).
The brand was launched less than nine months ago by Yael Aflalo. She also founded Reformation so it’s maybe no surprise that the fashion line is a hit.
BuzzBallz… I first saw these brightly coloured cocktail drinks flying off the shelves at the Walmart near Coachella and now I’m seeing them every weekend in the hands of London’s cool kids.
They’re so ubiquitous GQ wrote a whole piece about them.
The fifty Substakers… who are making more than $1 million a year from their posts. Sadly I’m not one of them, but I would give all my modest revenue to see the list.
My guess is that
, , , and are up there, and I hope they’re joined by many other women.Going viral
The man talking to his AI ‘girlfriend’… Soon we won’t be surprised to hear about people falling in love with ChatGPT or their faves on character.ai, but until then be shocked, amused or whatever other emotion you fancy after reading this taken-without-consent exchange between a man on the Tube and his soothing AI ‘friend’…
The back and forth, which has been viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter/X, shows ChatGPT respond, “If you want, I’ll read something to you later, or you can rest your head in my metaphorical lap while we let the day dissolve gently away. You’re doing beautifully, my love, just by being here”.
The snatched image caught attention because it’s a rare and unfiltered insight into the intimate relationships users are building with AI tools. And because it cuts against how experts pitch the technology.
While AI bosses hype a revolution in productivity, research from Harvard Business Review found that the viral image is a prime example of AI’s actual number one use case because “therapy and companionship” topped their chart.
What’s also emerging is that users can become attached and dependent on chat agents, with researchers from the MIT Media Lab warning that “we need to prepare for addictive intelligence” and that we have overemphasised “harms arising from subversion rather than seduction”.
This follows a rollback of a recent release of ChatGPT after users complained that the chatbot showered them with too much praise, a phenomenon known as glazing. And a disturbing Rolling Stone report which revealed that some users started to believe they were the next messiah after ChatGPT convinced them they were a prophet.
RELATED: The brilliant
has started the Substack Who's Bothering You Now, Jeanie? and her first post is a banger about young women asking ChatGPT to make them hotter. Go take a look.Meghan pregnancy truthers… I’ve been trying to ignore these people but that became impossible after Meghan posted this video of her twerking last week, filmed just before she gave birth to her four-year-old daughter Lili…
The hospital room clip - which has been watched more than 44 million times on Instagram - seemed to be designed to show Meghan’s unserious side, but instead it became red meat to haters who branded it “cringe” and conspiracists who believe the duchess’ pregnancies were staged.
I’m not going to link to their unhinged theories but the thrust of their claims is that her bump is fake, the hospital room was not appropriately equipped for a birth and that the video was AI-generated.
Whether the conspiracists can back up their stories didn’t seem to matter as they too got millions of views on Twitter/X.
Jet2holidays… If you’ve spent any time on TikTok in the last few months you would have likely seen one, or maybe one hundred videos, using the audio from a TV advert for Jet2holidays, a budget British travel brand.
Use of the jingle has grown so much over the last two months that TikTokers with large followings are now jumping on the trend and using it in their content, and I need to know how all of this is going down at Jet2 HQ.
How does a social media manager explain that their theme song was first being overlaid on footage of airport fights, bad holiday experiences and wild car crashes but now rapper Central Cee (17.7 million followers) and Alix Earle (7.5 million followers) are using it in their relatively brand-safe videos, for free?
Even if a lot of the content wasn’t positive to begin with you have to imagine that Jet2’s brand awareness has massively increased. As of today over 228,000 videos have been published using the audio, and it all appears to have happened organically.
If you work for Jet2 please fill me in!
Trends, trends and even more trends
Let’s hear it for the man of the year… Women are sharing stories and screenshots of text messages from their “man of the year”, to the sound of Lorde’s new track of the same name and, surprise, they are not complimentary…
Content advisory: Image below contains a threat of sexual violence
Wisdom signalling… In a world where many of us feel “overstimulated and under-informed”
has noticed a new phenomenon - showing off how much you think via the books you read and the podcasts you subscribe to.Bentley has dubbed it wisdom signalling and I think she’s onto something given that we’re all acutely aware that we are what we consume and quick to judge the media diets of others. Hat tip to the fabulous
for the flag.A digital detox summer… is what many want according to research from Pinterest’s latest trend report.
Searches for “digital detox vision board” are up 273 per cent and “digital detox ideas” have seen a 72 per cent rise according to Pinterest’s internal data.
Need to know
Language lesson… The word farming is the latest to be given a new meaning by the youths. In the gaming world it means to work for rewards and it’s most popular applications are “aura farming”, which means a person is trying hard to increase how cool they appear and “clip farming” where someone is making an effort to get attention, be filmed or pictured.
Addison Rae launched her debut album… and the critics love it. As The New York Times put it in their gushing profile: “TikTok Made Addison Rae Famous. Pop Made Her Cool.”
Vinted is the leading clothing retailer in France… The peer-to-peer resale site has higher sales volume than Amazon according to a French Fashion Institute report.
Blake Lively 1, Justin Baldoni 1… Lively scored a victory in their messy legal fight when a judge dismissed Baldoni’s defamation claim against her. But she was separately asked to withdraw two of the claims in her suit against him. The case continues…
Nara Smith is pregnant again… The “from scratch” TikTok creator, 23, will have four children under five when she gives birth. Her announcement video, with husband Lucky Blue Smith, has been watched more than 26 million times.
Nintendo’s Switch 2… looks set to break sales records after the new console launched last week and retailer’s shelves were cleared. Demand is so high some news sites are running live updates on which stores are getting re-ups.
A TikToker with over 160 million followers was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement… Khaby Lame had overstayed his visa and was granted voluntary departure according to ICE.
The Gen Z gaze… is now a thing after a Twitter/X user complained that young service workers don’t greet customers and instead just stare. The post set of days of discourse.
Trump plans to extend the U.S. TikTok sale/ban deadline for a third time… The Wall Street Journal had the scoop.
TikTok’s Welsh 5 have fallen out… and it all seems to be because of Charly’s new girlfriend
Searches for “skinnytok“ were blocked on TikTok… in an attempt to suppress harmful weight loss and thinspo content
This week I’m…
OBSESSED WITH
Every interview Cole Escola did after they won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play
Sydney Sweeney in this Vera Wang dress
JoJo Siwa, who used to identify as a lesbian, getting a boyfriend during Pride month
The artistry, skill and graft that goes into the creation of a Chappell Roan stage costume
The audacity of the Miley Cyrus “fans” who heckled a Q&A session for her new film because they were expecting a concert
READING
Cosmopolitan’s recap of Kai Cenat’s Streamer University project which set out to teach 120 live streamers how to make it big
Vanity Fair’s latest takedown of Substack star Jessica Read Kraus (aka House Inhabit) and her snarky response to the “free advertisement”.
’s take that young people aren’t politically apathetic, but they’re consciously disengaging from a “broken” political systemCash for tricks: How teens are being seduced by online sexfluencers by
BBC News’ report on the British canoeist who says he’s been banned from competing because of his OnlyFans account
No One Knows How to Deal With 'Student-on-Student' AI Child Sexual Abuse Material from 404
Kat Tenbarge on the increased use of the DARVO strategy (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) in American culture for her newsletter Spitfire News
How American “Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbours” in The New York Times
WATCHING
The extremely unsatisfying season one finale of MobLand
Season two of The Rehearsal. I have thoughts. I have feelings. I will share them when they make sense.
Sam Fender at the London Stadium. It swells my heart that a Geordie lad can get 80,000 people to turn out to hear him sing about working class life.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour for the second time. The woman is peerless. Does anyone want to go again this Saturday?
highly flammable is produced and written by me, Rachel Richardson
I’m a content creator, commentator and a consultant for hire at Beginning, Middle and End
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Say hello at rr@bmend.com
lol at Buzz Balls being chic, as my college aged kid at a small, slightly rural Midwestern state school drank them because they were cheap and yes, gave a buzz.
Glad I was not the only one disappointed in the season finale of MobLand.