Katie Fang Is Influencing Your Preteen

“It’s loopy to suppose u began all this with posting a video the place you didn’t need to go to work,” chimed in one other. It’s true: On January 28, 2023, Fang was on name for her job as a hostess at a sequence restaurant in Vancouver. “I used to be having a nasty day. However I used to be like, ‘Okay, it’s wet. They’re positively actually sluggish; they gained’t want me,’ After all, they known as,” she says. “I used to be bawling my eyes out as I used to be preparing, and after I noticed myself within the mirror I used to be like, ‘Wow, this appears to be like so ridiculous.’” So, as youngsters do, she determined to doc it.

Earlier than Fang began her shift, she posted a sped-up, two-and-a-half-minute model of the 15-minute video on TikTok and added the textual content: “POV: I bought known as into work.” When she picked up her cellphone a number of hours later, “the video had simply fully blown up,” she says. “The views have been within the tens of millions already. It was terrifying.”

It’s arduous to say precisely why and the way the video picked up such momentum so rapidly; the TikTok algorithm works in mysterious methods. In any case, due to that video (which, as of this second, has north of 40 million views), Fang’s follower depend jumped from someplace within the a whole bunch to someplace within the hundreds. So what did she do subsequent? Completely nothing. “I did not put up for a complete week,” she says. “I used to be scared.”

As an alternative, Fang determined to let her account “marinate just a little” and per week later—impressed by the truth that most of the feedback on the earlier video have been about how flawless her make-up regarded whilst she cried—she posted a magnificence tutorial. The remaining is historical past: “After that, I did a prepare with me each single day earlier than college,” says Fang.

By “college” she means highschool—Fang was a senior on the time. She had already utilized to school and selected her main—journalism—earlier than her TikTok following all of a sudden ballooned. She signed on with a expertise administration firm (United Expertise Company) in June, and headed to school (the College of Victoria) that summer season.

She lived in a dorm on campus for her first semester, however discovered it tough to regulate to the slower tempo of life on Vancouver Island. “As a result of I am such a metropolis woman, transferring to an island… I imply it was a beautiful island, do not get me mistaken,” says Fang. “But when I wasn’t in school, I used to be simply in my dorm.” Or the mailroom: Fang says she used to must borrow a dolly to cart her PR packages—bins crammed with magnificence merchandise that manufacturers hoped she would characteristic in a video—from the mailroom to her dorm room every day.