Jul 14, 2026@alixearleby CorrespondentDavid Brandon Geeting for TIMEAlix Earle has made a career out of oversharing on the internet. And yet, on a sweltering June afternoon in Miami, she notes that there are still things people get wrong about her. The first misconception she’d like to dispel: that amassing 8.5 million followers on TikTok was easy. The second: that she is merely the face of a business someone else built. “People underestimate me,” she says, “or think I’m just a dumb blonde.” Her skin-care brand Reale Actives did $1 million in sales within the first five minutes of its March debut, and sold out by day’s end. Nick Brown of the venture-capital firm Imaginary Ventures, which has invested in brands like Emily Weiss’ Glossier, calls the debut of Earle’s acne-focused line “by far the most successful launch day” for any of the businesses his firm has backed in the eight years since it started investing in beauty. Yet people still ask Earle if she actually is involved in decisions for the brand. “It baffles me,” says the 25-year-old. “I’ve been pretty open about being involved in every single detail.” Another common misconception: she does not like you. People who catch Earle in the wild looking unimpressed—a far cry from the effusive persona she shares in her content—tend to think she’s ticked off. But she swears that her stony stare is just the way her face is built. “It’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life: the case of the RBF,” says Earle (referencing “resting bitch face”). “When I meet people, they’re like, ‘I thought you were miserable.’ I swear I’m happy.” David Brandon Geeting for TIMEThe final misconception: that she identifies as a MAGA supporter. It’s a theory that appears regularly in the comments of her posts. “I have addressed it, and I just don’t think anyone listens,” Earle says, giving a tight smile. “My senior year of college I was like, ‘I am not a Trump supporter.’ I don’t personally support him. I get a lot of questions about that online still. I just tend to not address it every single time because then I feel like I am creating a massive storm.” But creating a social media storm is what Earle does best. Earle was a pioneer in the “Get Ready With Me” genre, talking about her decision to get breast augmentation, dating an NFL player, the tumult after her father had an affair—all while applying makeup. Her confessional approach invites viewers to feel like close friends. The strategy has catapulted her to cultural relevance that transcends social media. In the past year, she’s popped up in the Super Bowl halftime show, competed on Dancing With the Stars, and appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. This fall, Netflix will debut the reality series Earle Meets World. It’s a content miracle that there’s still material reserved for the show, which trains its lens not only on Earle but also on a family she acknowledges has its own history with the tabloids. (Her stepmother was involved in a political sex scandal.) Perhaps most intriguing for fans who closely follow Earle’s life, she says the show will address the question a certain corner of the internet cannot stop asking: What led to her alleged beef with megainfluencer Alex Cooper?At a time when 57% of Gen Zers aspire to be influencers, Earle has, to borrow from The Devil Wears Prada, a job a million girls would kill for. She has become so popular that when she recommends a product, sales get a massive bump—a phenomenon known as the Alix Earle effect. She got to this place not just because her looks have been rewarded by the algorithm (though that certainly helped), but also because the former University of Miami marketing major has a forensic read on her audience and the skills to sell them the products they want. “What makes a great early-stage VC? Really, it’s people-picking,” says Brown, whose firm also backs Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Tom Holland’s Bero, among others. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Elon Musk or Tiffany Masterson of Drunk Elephant. You’re investing in an idea, but you’re really betting on the individual.” Earle, Brown says, is a good bet.One spring morning in Cambridge, Mass., Earle woke up and filmed herself peeling her face off her pillow. She had come to guest-lecture at Harvard Business School, but the more pressing matter was that the pillowcase had stuck to her skin overnight. One of the formulas she’d been testing for Reale Actives was too tacky. She sent the video to her CEO. The serum would need tweaks before the “complete routine” of four products, which together retails for $120, went on sale the following year.Earle has spoken at Harvard not once, but twice, the second time shortly before Reale Actives debuted. That class, called Founder Launch, asked Earle about her brand deals—she has lent her face to companies like Carl’s Jr.; Amazon; and the prebiotic soda Poppi, for which she was compensated in equity, a decision that paid off when PepsiCo bought the brand for nearly $2 billion last year. They also debated how the market would respond to yet another influencer launching her own product. The students who argued Earle would succeed should get A’s. After selling out on launch day, Reale Actives managed another $1 million in sales in the first five minutes of the next month’s restock.Rapid-Fire Questions With Alix EarleEarle went into “Taylor Swift mode” (her words) before debuting her brand, dropping hints to her audience about what was coming. A teaser account, @wtfisalixdoing, drew some 400,000 followers in a week. It culminated in Earle’s friends putting puzzle pieces on a billboard in New York City, slowly revealing a giant marketing photo. The fans did the rest. “They’d become FBI agents. They were sitting in a TikTok live, solving what the brand name is,” says Reale Actives CEO Andrea Blieden. “They discovered the name of every single trademark I filed under our stealth company name.”Earle understands what her followers want because she obsesses over metrics and learned from years of trial and error. Raised in New Jersey’s Monmouth County, Earle is the oldest daughter of Alisa Maniaci and Thomas “T.J.” Earle, the latter of whom runs a successful construction business. As a college student, she tried every trend to get famous on TikTok: performing dances, unboxing shopping hauls, filming day-in-the-life videos. Her break came in the summer of 2022 when she shared her acne struggles with her then 150,000 followers. The video got a million views. “It’s not like I changed the world,” she says. “But the fact it meant so much to so many people made me realize that there was this missing piece online.” She had been smoothing out her skin in every photo. “I was a part of the problem,” she says.As she let go of that polished image, she would post reviews of various products and offer updates from her dermatologist, who now collaborates with her on Reale Actives. Her approach fostered that overused yet elusive term in social media: authenticity. It helps that Earle won’t just endorse any old product. When I ask if she’s rejected big paychecks, she coyly replies that she passed on a brand with global reach last year despite many people on her team, including her dad, who is also her manager, telling her to say yes. “There's just an underlying sense of guilt promoting something that I don't genuinely love,” Earle says.Celebrity forays into products can feel ham-fisted. An A-list actor likes tequila or coffee? Sure. But for Earle, who has felt insecure about her skin since middle school, Reale Actives was a natural evolution of her content. “I ended up doing Accutane three times. After the third time it came back again, and I just felt so frustrated,” says Earle. “I actually hated skin care. That was probably the last thing that I ever wanted to get into because I was so confused by it. It felt so negative and isolating for me. So I wanted to create something that felt fun.”Blieden recalls that Earle obsessed over minute decisions about the marketing. For the launch campaign, “She said, ‘I want it to be real skin. I want it to be water and sexy and hot.’ And so there was Alix, naked in a pool. People don’t realize Alix is the person commenting on her account. She’s the person in her DMs. She will log into the Reale Actives account and post a TikTok on her own. That is not normal for a founder.” David Brandon Geeting for TIMEEarle allows that her status as an influencer-founder can cut both ways. While she has lots of fans, she also has plenty of critics. She anticipated skepticism, imagining people might ask, “What credibility does she have in the skin-care space? She's not a doctor, she's not a chemist.” And she knew that people might be confused since she’d used prescription medication to treat her own skin. So on launch day she shared a video explaining her skin journey again and how Reale Actives was designed as part of a routine, not a cure-all. She deployed the same transparency when the moisturizer bottles malfunctioned, making a joke about the situation as they fixed it. “Just being honest goes a long way,” she says.Earle’s dog starts barking the moment I bring up Alex Cooper. Asia, a rescue, is in a back room being placated with treats while we talk. “She heard the tough questions coming in, and she said, ‘No. I’m going to ruin the audio,’” Earle jokes. For the uninitiated: Cooper, host of the interview show Call Her Daddy, built a podcast network and made Earle her first recruit—but after 18 months, the partnership dissolved, and neither party has ever given a clear explanation as to why. In the spring, Cooper called out Earle in a video, saying Earle is not under NDA and urging her to say her piece; Earle commented, “On it!” but hasn’t followed up. The alleged feud even inspired a Saturday Night Live sketch. “It’s something I’m going to talk about on the show,” Earle says, referring to the Netflix series. Will Alix Earle Address Her Conflict With Alex Cooper?“That was one of the things in the beginning they wanted me to talk about, and I really wasn't comfortable sharing,” Earle continues. “Then everything unfolded the way it did while we were filming. There was a serious struggle behind the scenes of emotions, and my family showed up for me. Those moments that sometimes seem so fun for people online, but are hard behind the scenes—I am happy that we were able to capture that.”Another thing she plans to address on the series? Her family drama. As a fourth-grader, Earle learned her father was having an affair with Ashley Dupré (now Ashley Earle), who first made headlines in 2008 for a sex scandal involving former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It turned out her parents had been shielding her from paparazzi. The family eventually rebuilt itself, but filming the show excavated old wounds. "There's stuff in my family that we didn't really talk about for so long, because we were all hurt in our own way,” Earle says. “It was important to show how we got to where we are today, and that things aren't perfect all the time."Unpacking those big events with her family probably never would have made it to her YouTube channel. “Filming has made me realize I do try to share a lot more of the uplifting moments [in my vlogs]. You're not seeing me in the heat of these emotions. I'm usually coming to you after, when my thoughts are a little bit more collected,” she says. Letting someone else tell her story is a change. “It’s definitely scary. I would think at this point that I would not be scared at all because I'm used to sharing my life online so much.”Netflix sees the audience for the show as larger than just Earle’s TikTok followers. “Watching her navigate building a real business empire while also being a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a 20something still figuring things out, those dynamics are endlessly compelling and deeply relatable,” says Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s VP of Nonfiction Series & Sports. “The audience for this show is anyone who’s ever followed Alix on social media and thought, ‘I want more of this’—and honestly, that’s tens of millions of people across every age group. Gen Z grew up with her, but her family dynamics and that push-pull between ambition and authenticity resonate far beyond any single generation.”There may be more television in Earle’s future. She jokes that her poker face would make her a perfect Traitors contestant. And she mentions an interest in acting, though not in the context of fulfilling some lifelong dream but rather in terms of diversifying her portfolio. “Every decision I make is about longevity and creating a career that can be sustainable, because the creative economy can be so fleeting,” she says. “You can have someone’s attention one minute and then not have it another, so I have to dip my toes in other areas.” She would be thrilled if those who don’t know her from TikTok discovered her through Reale Actives. So, while she admits that the amount of travel required of her as an influencer attending brand events and premieres is not sustainable for the long haul, especially since she eventually wants a family, right now she is in “grind mode.”Of course she could find success in any number of fields and still have people question whether she really is the brains behind her own operation. She shrugs. “Guess we’ll just have to prove them wrong.” Powered by Whalar GroupHair: Vincent Pelletier at A-Frame; Makeup: JoJo Marchevsky at The Wall Group; Wardrobe: Britt Theodora at The Wall Group; Cover look: Emily Dawn Long dress, Lelet NY hairpin, MACHETE brush; Red look: Carolina Herrera dress, AGMES bracelet; White look: Hermès dress, Lelet NY hairpin; Location: Fifty Three Films; On Set Producer: Jorge Texidor.