Alix Earle’s Real Beauty

It was 3 a.m. on a cold December night, and Alix Earle was throwing up in the bathroom of her sister’s New York City apartment. It’s the type of chaotic scene her combined 12 million followers may expect from her. This is, after all, a woman who once went viral for posting about the vomit-stained dress she held onto for a year after her birthday festivities. And who sustained a 25-hour party marathon like it was a professional sport. But that night’s situation was different. For one, it was the eve of the most important and busiest days yet for her new skin care brand, Reale Actives, which she’s been secretly working on for the past two and a half years. And the culprit was far from a party — food poisoning had set around 10 p.m. “I was more sick than I’ve been in my entire life,” she tells me. Her call time that morning? 5 a.m.

The media-day itinerary was grueling — 12 hours of showing off her previously top-secret line of cleansers, serum, and moisturizer for acne-prone skin to reporters — and it didn’t stop there: After the press blitz, she’d go into two days of shooting the line’s first campaign. “It’s not like I can just show up and be brainless,” she says. Indeed, the show must go on. “I was green, feeling faint, nauseous, bloated, so sick, but I wouldn’t cancel.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that no amount of bad takeout can stop Earle from showing up and showing out. Stamina of the “no sleep, bus, club, another club” variety has long been part of her secret sauce. Now the party-girl influencer we all met in 2022 as a University of Miami undergrad with a preternatural talent for hypnotic Get Ready With Me videos, who has become a Gen Z superstar and an investor, is at 25, simply parlaying that ethos as founder.

The real surprise might be that she managed to find the time to create an entire brand without anyone knowing. She is, almost literally, all over the place: at the Super Bowl, spectating from a VIP suite, then making a cameo during Bad Bunny’s performance; filming a travel vlog from her girls trip in Aspen, where she’s also shooting scenes for her family’s upcoming Netflix reality show; stepping out in Las Vegas for the star-studded opening of Zero Bond. And she’s setting the rumor mill ablaze for supposedly dating any man she so much as stands next to in any of those places. Meanwhile, she’s also still cranking out her bread and butter: the Get Ready With Me videos that made her famous in the first place.

“You probably think a lot more about your skin than other people do.”

On the spring afternoon when we speak — three months after that unfortunate run-in with food poisoning — Earle is at her family’s home in New Jersey for more filming, fresh off a red-eye from California, tired but marked safe from illness. Just a few hours later, she’ll embark on her second trip to Harvard Business School, where a professor is turning the Alix Earle phenomenon into a case study. Next, it’s off to the Vanity Fair Oscars party. Then, a surprise drop of the photos from her third Sports Illustrated photo shoot, which took place in Botswana… sometime. If your head is spinning, same.

I’d briefly met the reigning queen of TikTok before and witnessed her captivate a room with her bubbly banter and infectious charisma. So when she signs onto our video call from her childhood bedroom, I’m expecting her usual pep, the chaotic kindness that has become her signature. But the Alix Earle who greets me onscreen today is more subdued, professional, sitting cozy with still-wet hair in a roomy sweater with a statement collar. She is ready to talk business. When I ask her about the theme of her life at the moment, the name of this chapter, she responds quickly, with a smile: “Change.” So perhaps audiences should get used to a new side of their parasocial bestie.

“I would rather not post myself crying online. But my audience is going to know I’m holding something back. So, unfortunately, I just have to embarrass myself sometimes.”

Reale Actives (launching March 31) is a four-step acne-focused skin care line, formulated in partnership with dermatologist Dr. Kiran Mian, D.O. While Earle has made strategic investments in on-brand companies before — prebiotic soda brand Poppi and the canned cocktail SipMargs — this venture marks her first foray into founder-dom, a goal she’s had since she was a kid watching her dad (her manager, whom she also calls her “other half” and “therapist”) and uncles run their own construction business. “Watching them pour everything into their business and be so passionate about it, it was always something I wanted to do,” she says. “I definitely did not think it was something I’d be doing at 25. But the influencer industry can be very fleeting, here one second, gone the next.” She was ready to create something entirely her own.

At this point in the life cycle of the influencer-to-entrepreneur pipeline, the brand founder is prevalent and widely studied. Still, Earle’s ability to move major amounts of product made her ripe to start her own thing. Brands call it “Alix Earle effect” — she posts a product, and they inevitably sell out. But she wasn’t in it for a cash grab, she tells me, and had no interest in throwing her name on something that wasn’t personal to her. She wants to build something with a deeper purpose, something that made sense to her and for her followers. “When I started to go through figuring out my ‘why’ for a company, I couldn’t really find one besides ‘Oh, maybe people would buy these products because I’m promoting them,’” she says. “I kept coming back to makeup for acne-prone skin and makeup that can cover acne really well, and finally, someone on my team said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you do skin care if you’re so passionate about it?’”

At first, it was a hard no. “I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I hate skin care. Miserable. I don’t enjoy it.’” As someone who had struggled with acne for many years, she resented having to stick to “clinical and boring” brands she was embarrassed to display on her counter, especially while peers played with the cutely packaged products du jour. And the more she sat with the idea, “It clicked for me that there was a gap there I could fix.” It took a minute, but the “why” had become crystal clear.

“A lot of this, honestly, has been a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation.”

Earle’s first memory of feeling embarrassed about her skin goes back to middle school, when her mom would help her cover her pimples with concealer. “The teachers and principal would call me out, and I’d get in trouble for wearing makeup, and they’d make me wash it off,” she says. “That always just felt so terrible. Even worse than feeling insecure about my skin was having an adult call it out in front of everyone else. That always stuck with me, and it’s something I felt insecure about for a long time.”

Eventually, she discovered for herself that insecurities really can become one’s greatest superpowers. “It may sound silly, but I think that when you are on the path that you’re created for or that you thrive in, a lot of things fall into place,” she says. “When I started posting about my acne online was when I started to get a lot of views and engagement. I remember sitting in this chair right now where I am: I was showing a makeup tutorial, how I cover my skin and go out. That was one of the first things that really resonated with people.”

Reale Actives’ campaign imagery reflects this part of her story, with an emphasis on showing real skin without retouching. “I want everyone to see real pores, real texture, real acne, redness, whatever it is — that’s really, really important to me,” she says. “Our launch photo shoot is sexy, bold, confident, and if you zoom in, you can see that my skin doesn’t look perfect, but it would never be the first thing that comes to mind when you look at the photo — whereas for me, looking at myself, it would be. I want the story to be told that you probably think a lot more about your skin than other people do.”

“Authenticity” may be an overused buzzword these days, but cliches exist for a reason. “My audience knows me so well. And for better or for worse, if I’m holding back and not telling them something, they know,” she says. “Recently I’ve shared a lot of my mental fluctuations and me crying online, and my family’s like, ‘You have to stop. You look psychotic.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, either I’m not posting or I’m sharing what’s going on.’ I would rather not post myself crying online. I don’t want anyone I know to actually see this. But if I don’t share it, they’re going to know that I’m holding something back. So, unfortunately, I just have to embarrass myself sometimes.”

The one area where Earle says she’s “trying” to keep things under wraps is her dating life. “Not that there’s anything going on that’s exciting,” she’s quick to clarify. “But I think that’s been a really hard thing because everyone was so involved in my last relationship online,” she says, referencing her much-documented former romance with football player Braxton Berrios. “So I feel like that’s something where I would try to make sure it’s very concrete before sharing.” She smiles. “I say that now, and then I’m going to be blabbing about it.”

“I want everyone to see real pores, real texture, real acne, redness, whatever it is — that’s really, really important to me.”

Though she may be on a new career track, embracing business-world professionalism like never before, Earle can’t shake the vulnerable side of her that endeared her among TikTok fans in the first place — and that, too, is part of the secret sauce. “A lot of this, honestly, has been a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation and just going with my gut,” she says. “I’ve had to learn a lot while getting a lot done. I was 23 when I started interviewing CEO candidates who were 20 years older than me, with 20 years more experience. So I’m going into these interviews scared sh*tless because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

When it came to making that critical decision, she says, “I wanted to find someone who would be as passionate about this as I am. It was between a few different candidates, and I asked them all on a Saturday afternoon to hop on a call with me. Some of them didn’t reply until Monday morning. But the woman who we ended up hiring, Andrea [Blieden], answered me right away and was willing to get on a call. And that’s what I was looking for, was someone who cared about this 24/7 and was willing to go above and beyond, someone who really, really wanted it and who cared.”

Of course, Earle’s show-up-no-matter-what ethos is hard to match — and it seems she has enough to go around. Another test from the universe comes the evening of our interview, when what should be an easy hourlong flight to Boston turns into a series of flight delays and cancellations. Eventually, Earle and her dad decide to take a car from New Jersey to Cambridge through the middle of the night. She keeps her spirits high, turning the tale into a wildly entertaining vlog. No sleep. Car. Harvard. What, like it’s hard?

Top image: Chloé clothing