I have been trying to write something on a person who I consider to be the ur-influencer, one Mikayla Nogueira. She is now past the stage of being a baby demon one shudders to name at all and has moved on to being a full-fledged Babylonian whore. The difficultly for me lies in trying to explain all the ways in which she is an awful individual while the language to make sense of the larger phenomenon she represents – that is, feminist analysis – has been gradually drained of all meaning and demonized itself.

Nogueira has called herself a makeup artist, but I suppose she would be more widely known (relatively speaking, ha) as a beauty influencer-content creator and got her virtual limelight start on TikTok, another entity I am reluctant to type or speak of. However, she is now a sort of brand founder (backed by venture capital) – a type of transition TikTok is eager to advertise about their Kontent Kreators – which I will get to later on. She apparently worked a few months at Ulta, quitting as the plandemic was in full swing (lately she states she was fired) and in recent months has claimed a title that the corporation never offered to any employee. This is typical of her – if her lips are moving, she is lying. If her camera is working, she’s shapeshifting by the hour. Who and what is this creature, how can she even be described?

Why do I even know of this person? you might ask. I am not a TikTok user, but as with so many things intended to infect the wider internet and our brains (4chan, for example), the videos that emanate from it are unavoidable if you want to participate in the virtual public square at all. Well, first off, let me admit to my indulgence in cosmetics and my occasional foray into the world of “influence”, usually by accident. I do not believe that I am a hoarder or purposefully wasteful, but since getting back into it a decade ago when I was working on some fun Halloween lewks, I became a hunter for simple skin tint that’s not damaging, a lip stain, and an affordable yet highly-pigmented eyeshadow palette. These items were rare back then but have been produced at a shocking rate as we’ve been filed away online. Perhaps the biggest success story of digital selling is the beauty industry, which is in fact very ugly. And there is quite the irony in applying more and more to one’s face as we’ve been cut off from public life.

On that note – only a partial digression here- personally, I have not been able to move on from 2020. It has been 2020 for the past five years as far as I’m concerned. More accurately, I’ve lost pieces of myself and my autonomy that I am afraid of never being able to restore, and that I need to reconcile, because I was in reality robbed of them as we all were. At the same time, the existence of internet influencers as a profession meant to hound us all and drive us absolutely mad gives the impression that they’ve always been around, but really it’s been since the advent of covid. Only five years, you could say, since time has felt like it was frozen.

So I receive the suggestion to view certain influencers in different feeds, as I assume any reader can relate to. Nogueira came up in my feed one day a couple years back and “it” gave me the most fascinatingly horrifying fright like I had never experienced before. The short video started with her un-shellacked face, an unfortunate looking one at that, covered with acne and scars with her bloodshot eyes bulging whilst yelling at the audience in the fakest Boston accent that would put Ben Affleck to shame about whatever product she smacked onto her face at the same time. Then she moved onto a full-coverage foundation, and then we see a cut to her completed eye makeup that could have won a drag queen title in the 1999 Kansas City club scene. I immediately blocked her YouTube account that has a modest following unlike the millions she allegedly garnered on TikTok. She is the strangest industry plant I’ve discovered to date, so her “engagement” includes a lot of fake accounts and bots.

After the initial shock wore off, I realized I had to know who she is. Since I have a mostly un-influenced search engine, the subreddit criticizing her existence that is simply entitled r/MikaylaNogueira popped up first. Videos critical of her were abundant as well. The subreddit is tightly moderated, and comments from people with newer Reddit accounts and those displaying “fan behavior” are quickly auto-deleted, and these users are threatened with a permanent ban if they persist. (The point of the former is to discourage “bandwagoning” behavior so that the subreddit is taken more seriously and not strictly seen as a “hate” page.) Fat- and body-shaming are discouraged as well, and while there is a lot of gossip that may tend toward what has been coined as the “bitch eating crackers” syndrome, there are some insights to be found and a burgeoning, larger analysis of the beauty industry in whole. Still, Reddit is overall a surveillance system, so you have to wonder where this is all going.

Other platforms where other proudly self-described influencers criticize her, and admittedly do it fairly well with at least partial understanding and awareness of how the larger industry is situated, disturbingly makes it still feel like a trap. It seems we are doing endless circles in trying to pin down these slithering worms sent out by intelligence agencies and their backers in part because, well, they are largely seen as not that important (feminine time suck) and regardless of where one stands, more product is amassed, and it doesn’t matter which kind or brand. It keeps you in. Heads they win, tails we lose, is one way to look at it. In any case, I still find it important to explore – who is making all this product? Where on earth does all the waste go? Who is benefiting? Et cetera. What brought us to this many-headed beast known as Mikayla Nogueira? Because she is absolutely abhorrent while daily demonstrating a type of profound self-hatred advertised as cynical self-interest that I don’t think has been seen before in brand-making and perhaps exclusive to online “influencing”. More on that next time.