Alix Earle: The 23-Year-Old Who Moves Global Markets One Mascara Swipe at a Time

PARIS—While French farmers were dumping manure on the A7 to protest diesel taxes, and while Japanese teenagers queued for ramen-flavored Coca-Cola in Shibuya, a 23-year-old from New Jersey quietly became the G-7 summit of the algorithm age. Her name is Alix Earle, and if you don’t know it, congratulations: you still possess the ancient luxury of ignorance. For the rest of the planet—roughly 5.9 million TikTok followers, plus their translators, brand strategists, and bemused parents—Earle is less a person than a floating exchange rate. One flutter of her mascara wand in a Miami Airbnb can wipe 2% off L’Oréal’s share price in Paris the next morning. The IMF has spreadsheets less sensitive.

Earle’s ascent, like most modern miracles, began in a dorm room at the University of Miami, a city already engineered for maximum optics. There she mastered the sorority-panic aesthetic: the messy bun that is never messy, the “Get Ready With Me” that is really a NATO briefing on consumer spending. Each video is a 37-second masterclass in soft power. A swipe of concealer doubles as an arms deal between Revlon and the attention economy. The lighting is so flattering it could rehabilitate war criminals.

In São Paulo, marketing executives watch her stories on mute, taking notes like Kremlinologists. In Lagos, street vendors hawk knock-off “Alix Earle lip kits” next to mangoes and phone chargers. In Seoul, AI labs feed her voice into deepfake generators so regional influencers can pretend they, too, just woke up like this. The global supply chain has never been more intimate: your serotonin, bottled in New Jersey, shipped via algorithm, and returned to you as a serotonin deficit.

The numbers are almost Soviet in their implausibility. One Earle post reportedly moved $1.5 million in product before her coffee cooled. A single mention of a handbag in Dubai caused the Italian factory to add an overnight shift staffed by migrants who have never heard of TikTok but now dream in beige calfskin. Economists call this the “Earle Butterfly Effect.” It’s less chaos theory than late-stage capitalism wearing false lashes.

Naturally, every empire invites its assassins. European regulators mutter about “commercial transparency,” which is Brussels-speak for “make her label the eyeliner like a cigarette pack.” Beijing’s censors have already memory-holed her for excessive bronzer, a crime against socialist pallor. Meanwhile, American senators—whose average age predates eyeliner itself—hold hearings on “youth mental health,” as if adolescence were not already a pre-existing condition.

Yet Earle soldiers on, blinking through the smoke of burning platforms. She has diversified: podcast, merch, a rumored reality show where contestants must contour their way out of an escape room. Last month in Capri, she was photographed beside a Russian oligarch’s yacht, prompting a thousand op-eds on soft diplomacy. The oligarch later claimed he thought she was a weather app.

What does it all mean? Possibly nothing; possibly everything. In the same week that COP28 delegates argued over commas in a climate accord, Earle posted a GRWM from the Dubai Expo, tagging a fast-fashion haul. The irony was so dense it bent light. Somewhere, a polar bear updated its LinkedIn.

Still, there is something almost heroic in the purity of the grift. While nations weaponize wheat and microchips, Earle traffics in the last honest currency: wanting. She wants a bigger closet; we want to watch her want. The transaction is symmetrical, global, and ruthlessly transparent—qualities our diplomats can only envy.

So raise a glass, dear reader, to Alix Earle: the influencer-industrial complex’s accidental geopolitical consultant. Long may she reign, or at least until the algorithm discovers the next 23-year-old with better ring lights and a more tragic backstory. In the meantime, the world will keep spinning—on its axis, and on a pivot sponsored by Tarte Shape Tape.