Tween Beauty Influencer Evelyn Has A Lot to Say

02.04.2024, 18:46 allure.com

It is 10 a.m. on a drizzly day in Kansas City, Missouri. A tiered stand is being loaded up with lip-shaped macarons dusted with sugar while an oversize ring light—no, two—are being assembled with care. Kansas City’s preeminent party vendors are scurrying about a rooftop lounge that overlooks the city’s new ferris wheel, all in preparation for celebrating the birthday of their hometown hero. No, not Travis Kelce. Evelyn Unruh, age 13.

This is the first time her last name has appeared in the press. But to the hundreds of thousands of fans that followed her on TikTok—note the past tense—she, like Madonna or Beyoncé or Adele, will always just be Evelyn.

The summer before she entered seventh grade—specifically, over Fourth of July weekend, 2023—Evelyn filmed a video that changed the course of her young life. She had long admired the Get Ready With Me genre, in which beauty influencers film themselves getting ready for the day as they talk the audience through the products they’re using, but she wanted to put her “own spin” on it. So she filmed herself applying makeup, but instead of using the time to talk about, say, why she’s obsessed with a Summer Fridays lip balm, she shared pointed observations about school and friends and life, stream of consciousness-style. Then she (well, technically, her mom) posted the minute-long video on TikTok.

Evelyn “gets ready” to party using products from brands including Youthforia, Tower 28, Tula, and Ilia.

The clip didn’t take off. “I didn't really get a lot of views,” says Evelyn. “But I guess that was owed to me being very camera-shy and awkward.” Inspired by her influencer “idols” like Katie Fang, she kept at it. A couple months after Evelyn posted her first video, a conversation with a friend about “things that made them mad” inspired her to organize her thoughts more succinctly. So began the rise and rise of her now-famous, sarcasm-laden Get Ready With Me-style franchises: Things That I Don’t Understand (“Time. Who decided there were 24 hours in a day?”), Things That Are Literally Disgusting (“People who barely wash their water bottles…”), Things That Annoy Me (“When a teacher separates your group for being distracting…”), and Things That I Hate (“When TikTok bans me for no reason…”).

Oh, yeah, about that last thing… We’ll get to that in a minute.

Evelyn’s videos soon began to pick up speed in the way only TikTok videos can. The formula for her virality looked something like this: brutally honest observations divided by deadpan delivery plus beauty products minus the fluffy commentary that usually goes with them. “I felt like I wanted to do a short video that gets to the point and says a lot,” says Evelyn, who shows the products she uses on camera, logos up, but doesn’t discuss them in detail. (Brands like Drunk Elephant, Glow Recipe, Supergoop, and Saie make frequent appearances in her videos.)

Whether she knows it or not, Evelyn has created a master class in product placement. But she’s smart—it's hard to imagine she doesn't know it. “In the beginning of [making] my videos, I would wake up and immediately just go to primer and makeup,” she recalls. “However, I noticed that there'd be a lot of the same clicks on one product. I evolved to using my skin care in the mornings so I could get a click for each product.” (When viewers click to buy the products in Evelyn’s videos, she earns a commission.)

“It also just built a healthy habit. Even now, when I'm not filming videos for TikTok in the morning, I still do my morning skin care,” says Evelyn, who started wearing mascara at age 10. Now, on any given day, she uses primer, foundation, concealer, undereye brightener, contour, highlighter, finishing powder, mascara, and blush. (“I use my Rare Beauty blush, which won the Allure award, right?” Like we said, smart.)

Partygoers get crafty designing their own charm necklaces and customizing brightly-colored trucker hats.

One product Evelyn does not use is retinol, a form of vitamin A that helps smooth wrinkles and boost collagen production, which begins to slow down around age 25. “It's funny what people in my comments like to say,” she says. “I don't use any retinol. I gear more towards hydration.”

Evelyn knows that comments go with “content creator” territory. “I get a lot of feedback and, honestly, if you agree with me, that's great. If you don't, then just don't follow me,” she says. “I’m entitled to my opinions and you’re entitled to yours. If you don't get my dry sense of humor, that's okay.”

Of course, most internet commenters don’t exactly practice the “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” rule. That’s where Evelyn’s mom, Alex Unruh, comes in: “I have words that are [automatically] filtered out in her comments. I get to her messages first so that if there's anything inappropriate, I can report, block, and delete it very quickly,” she explains. “That's probably where Evelyn and I have a little bit of [friction]; she looks at it as engagement, whereas I’m concerned about bullying and her mental well-being.”

As a parent, “it's not about just saying, ‘No, you can't do it,’ because sometimes what happens is they'll find other ways to do it anyway,” says Phillippa Diedrichs, PhD, a professor of psychology at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England Bristol who studies body image and mental health, particularly as it relates to young women. “You want to be the person that they can come to for conversations about social media and mental health and who they can think critically about these things with.”

While Alex says Evelyn is the “creative force” behind her content—she writes all of her own material, jotting down thoughts in her notebook or Notes app when inspiration strikes—nothing gets posted before passing through a checklist that mother and daughter created together, which includes safety-oriented questions like, “Is the location where you’re filming identifiable?”

Ultimately, though, there’s no rule book for when your kid becomes a social media sensation, says Alex. “When Evelyn’s views started growing, it was like, ‘What is going on? Do we stop this? Do we just let it go?’ All of these people are now seeing my daughter,” she remembers. “So there was a little bit of uncomfortability in terms of, ‘How do I parent this?’ It's not like I can go ask my friends or my mom group.”

"My friends have always supported me. I'm so thankful for them," says Evelyn, sipping a strawberry shortcake-flavored mocktail.

With health experts warning that social media can pose risks to the mental health and well-being of children, especially girls, the natural followup question is: Do the members of that mom group ever question her decision to let Evelyn be on social media to this extent? “Not to my face, but yeah,” says Alex. “To each their own. Not everyone's going to agree with everything we do, and that's fine. I think the opinion you have when you're not in this situation is a lot different than if you were faced with this situation, if it was your kid.”

Evelyn was very likely going to find herself in front of the camera one way or another, anyway. “For years, she has begged me to get her into some kind of modeling or acting or anything,” Alex says. “It was a conversation we were having, we just hadn't really done anything with it—so she did it herself.”

“Looking at how much our society values social media and the power that influencers hold, it’s unsurprising that tween girls want to emulate that,” says Professor Diedrichs. The collective desire among young people to be in the public eye is “not new,” she says. What's different now is that they have the tools to make it happen in the palms of their hands.

Evelyn films while a photographer, videographer, and assistant look on. Her dress is by City Vibe, available at Dillard's.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says Alex. “You deal with it as it comes.” For now, she and her daughter have regular check-ins during which they talk about how Evelyn is feeling, go over her filming commitments (she has created sponsored content for brands such as Good Molecules and Peter Thomas Roth), and make sure she’s still having fun along the way. “If I start to see her attitude shift or if she's not enjoying it, it's not worth it,” says Alex. “But as long as she's having fun, and she's doing a good job in the other areas of her life that are important, then we continue.”

But in early December, around the same time Evelyn hit 500K followers, the bullet train she’d been riding toward TikTok stardom came to a screeching halt: Her account was permanently banned.

Evelyn was at a sleepover party at a friend's house when it happened. “I felt kind of disappointed, because having the account since July, I thought I was safe,” she says. Safe, that is, from a rule listed in bold within TikTok’s Community Guidelines: You must be 13 years and older to have an account. But in this case, Evelyn’s mom was the account holder. Alex provided verification of her identity when she registered, she says. It was she who pressed “post” on the videos, and she who interacted with commenters. (In the US, TikTok offers a “limited app experience” for those under 13 called TikTok for Younger Users, which has additional safety and privacy protections that include restrictions on sharing.)

Allure reached out to TikTok for a statement regarding its stance on parent-run accounts and was told that account holders who feature content of children under 13 must indicate adult involvement in posting or producing their content, including regularly publishing content that features the adult, noting in their bio or handle that it is a joint account, and featuring an adult or family in their profile picture. (We followed up to ask exactly when those policies were instituted and were told they were “longstanding.")

In any case, TikTok looked at the account, saw a then 12-year-old, and just like that, it was gone. Fans created videos wondering where Evelyn had gone. “Guys,