You know Clare Brown from Pinterest

(Even if you don’t know you know.)

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩

The Anonymous Women of Pinterest should start a band. —Kate

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Clare Brown on Instagram, and probably hundreds of people’s Pinterest boards. Photo: Instagram.

While Embedded is firmly on team Pinterest Is Back, the image (and now video) curation platform will be forever associated with the blogging years of the early 2010s. The twee aesthetic we wrote about yesterday? The participants probably got all their inspo from Pinterest—and from bloggers like Clare Brown. 

Brown began blogging in 2009 under the name Clarabelle, sharing affordable fashion finds to recreate looks popularized by J. Crew. 

“The stakes were very low,” she tells me over the phone. “It was very collaborative and easy. It was nothing like it is now.”

For 10 years, Brown posted her outfits every single day. These lookbooks would ultimately end up shared in bits and pieces on Pinterest. Individual images would go viral, and Clare’s face ended up on countless boards across the platform. Eventually, regular Pinterest users would come to recognize Clare, even if they didn’t know her name or anything else about the person they were pinning. 

“I definitely had you pinned multiple times,” one commenter wrote on a recent TikTok video Brown made about her Pinterest fame. 

TikTok is where Brown spends most of her time now, making humorous and educational content that’s completely different from how she got her start online—it even earned her a write-up in the New York Times. 

After seeing Brown’s TikTok about Pinterest, I wanted to hear more about the unique kind of internet fame that comes with being the face of popular images but somehow still totally anonymous to the people who interact with them. In our conversation for paid subscribers, Brown and I talk about the toxicity of early 2010s blogging culture, how being a face on Pinterest changed her career, and why she rebuilt her brand after leaving social media.