Meet the teenager who rules trendy app
Teenager becomes overnight celebrity with Tiktok videos
The young people of Ohio weren’t physically distancing, and Gov. Mike Dewine needed to do something.
But what? The Republican governor is 73. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the U.S. and elsewhere in March, he needed Charli D’amelio — even if he didn’t yet know who she was.
Charli is simultaneously an ordinary teenager and a complete anomaly. This spring, she had two events to celebrate. She turned 16 with a quarantine-style party where family and friends drove by her home in Norwalk, Conn. Oh, and she became the most popular creator on Tiktok.
For her May 1 birthday, she created a short video of herself dancing to Sixteen by Ayesha Erotica while wearing a hoodie printed with the words “Charli’s 16 Squad.” The hoodie was only for her inner crew, but it looked like a piece of merchandise that her more than 58 million Tiktok followers would buy in droves.
Thanks to her online stardom, she’s danced onstage with Bebe Rexha at a Jonas Brothers concert, appeared on The Tonight Show and will voice a character in the upcoming animated flick Stardog and Turbocat. Her family — which includes older sister and fellow Tiktok influencer Dixie, stay-athome mom Heidi and father Marc, a clothing entrepreneur — recently inked a production deal with Industrial Media to create a reality show.
She’s been on Tiktok for a little more than a year.
The app where users create, view and share short-form videos has reportedly been downloaded more than two billion times. It’s one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. And Charli D’amelio is its undisputed ruler.
As with most Tiktok stars, Charli creates all kinds of videos, but dancing is her specialty. Goofy dances. Choreographed dances. Solo dances. Group dances. Trending dances. Original dances.
For outsiders, her popularity might feel as elusive as Tiktok’s appeal in general. For insiders, there’s no explanation necessary. It just makes sense. She’s Charli. Just say her first name and everyone knows who you’re talking about. Try to figure out exactly what sets her apart from the other teens dancing in their bedrooms on Tiktok — and you won’t get very far.
Pose the question to Charli, and she’ll shrug and tell you she has no idea. Her Tiktok bio reads, “don’t worry I don’t get the hype either.”
Ask any number of her friends, fans and collaborators, and they all tend to repeat the same things: She’s a genuinely real but genuinely talented 16-year-old girl just having fun online.
The best way to explain her unexpected celebrity involves a Midwestern governor, a manufacturer of cleaning products and an unprecedented global pandemic.
Dewine teamed up with Procter & Gamble and the ad agency Grey Group to craft a campaign to reach generation Z. And they called Charli. But she had a demand: The campaign must have a charitable component.
Once they agreed, she came up with the choreography — after finishing her math homework. The dance, which she posted on March 24, is at once simple and complicated. After some hip flares and hand motions, a full body roll mimics the instructive lyrics of Big UP’S by Jordyn & Nic Da Kid featuring Yung Nnelg:
“Inhale
“Exhale
“Breath slow
“Rewind”
Charli encouraged fans to post Tiktoks of themselves replicating the dance, with the hashtag #distancedance. It spread quickly, earning a short segment on The View. After nine weeks, Charli’s video has been watched more than 192 million times and has spawned nearly 3.5 million other videos with more than 16 billion combined views. P&G donated a product for each video to Feeding America and Matthew 25: Ministries.
“It just took off. It’s absolutely crazy, the number of people who have seen it,” Dewine said.
As an added bonus, she has gained approximately 20 million followers.
Charli’s story is both highly unusual and increasingly common.
“My life before Tiktok was very normal,” she said. “I would go to school, go to dance, do my homework and go to bed. It was pretty much like every other teenager’s” life.
She kept a vision board, topped with a photo of Jennifer Lopez, who she had wanted to dance with since she was 12 years old. Eventually she downloaded the app, immediately taking to it as “a place for me to be creative and express myself.”
Her first video, posted on March 30, 2019, doesn’t exactly foreshadow her future success. For one, it’s a simple lip-synching gag with a friend that’s filmed horizontally, while Tiktok videos typically appear vertically.
“I never really expected anyone to see my videos other than my friends,” she said. Then, in July, on her way to dance class, she posted a side-by-side video of her following the dance moves of a user named Move With Joy. Her phone started pinging constantly. She didn’t know what was happening. “I had like seven followers,” she said. But when she picked her phone back up after class, suddenly she had 2,000.
“It was crazy. No one knows how to react to that,” she said. “There’s no guidebook of what to do when you go viral on an app.”
Her mom, Heidi, remembers weeks of Charli waking up to hundreds of thousands of new followers a day. Suddenly she needed representation — she now has an agency, publicist and manager.
For Charli, the landmark moment came when she finally met and danced with J-LO in a Tiktok during the Super Bowl.
Before meeting her, “I told myself, ‘Don’t cry. You’re going to ruin every picture you take,’” Charli said. But after chatting with her idol for a bit, “I just started crying. I could not hold back. She just embraced me with the biggest hug ever.”
Charli also discovered the pitfalls of the world knowing your name: The media obsessing over her dating life. The online bullying. The body shaming.
She tries tuning out the trolls, but she’s beginning to feel the damage they can do.
“I do have a lot of people looking my way to be a role model and to lift everyone up. And I try to do that so much that sometimes I don’t focus on myself, or how I’m feeling, or how things are really hurting me when I see people say nasty things about me. It’s really hurtful.”
The Washington Post