The TikTokker bursting the celebrity bubble
“I feel like every publicist in New York low-key follows me,” Clara of @colormeloverly says.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Yes, I’m over the men-think-about-the-Roman Empire discourse, but I didn’t say anything about men thinking they can land planes. —Kate
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This has been the year of the public pressing their feet firmly on celebrities’ necks. From successfully pressuring Drew Barrymore to reverse her decision to break the writer’s strike to outright rejecting the smears against Sophie Turner in her divorce from Joe Jonas, celebrities can no longer get up to their old tricks. Social media is the primary reason for this, and not just because it’s the place where the pressure is applied. It’s also been the place where education about the world of celebrity—particularly, how PR works and other peeks behind the curtain—has meant the general public is now more savvy to when they’re being misled, or when something is being covered up.
This education comes in the form of TikTok explainers from creators like
, but also through humor. Clara, who goes by @colormeloverly across TikTok and Instagram, has been part of the latter since 2021, when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah inspired her to make a video impersonating Buckingham Palace’s HR department.“And then I eventually moved it over to PR and started growing my client list, so to speak, from there,” she tells me over Zoom. Clara now has over 220,000 followers on TikTok, and a podcast she shares with fellow Embedded interviewee, Clare Brown, called One More Chapter, which is about to embark on its second season.
Clara’s main focus recently, though, has been her newsletter. In
, the creator goes deeper on the subjects she playfully skewers on TikTok, from Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher’s apology to the Spanish Football Federation.“We've grown up watching celebrities react poorly to things they've done badly. And the more you start looking into it, the more you're just like, what are they thinking?” Clara says. “It would be so easy to make a normal-person response to this. Why are they fumbling it so poorly?”
In this interview for paid subscribers, Clara and I talk about TikTok discourse, toeing the line between funny and cruel, and how social media is has demystified the world of celebrity.
I feel like in the past few years with platforms like TikTok, there's become a bit more of an awareness from the general public about how PR works and how celebrities work, and videos like this unmask it a little bit. From where you're sitting, is that something you would say has happened?