As sugary as a frosted cupcake: Newspaper representations of Zoella

‘As sugary as a frosted
cupcake’
Newspaper representations of a
YouTube celebrity
Ruth Deller (@ruthdeller, r.a.deller@shu.ac.uk) and Kathryn Murphy (@kathryndmurphy)

'the videobloggers or vloggers who create content on [YouTube] have become not
just YouTube celebrities, but celebrities outright‘ (Foulis 2014)

‘[B]ecoming a micro-celebrity requires creating a persona,
producing content, and strategically appealing to online
fans by being "authentic"' (Marwick 2013: 114).
‘As video-blogs supposedly capture ‘everyday life’ and
various aspects of the vloggers’ ordinariness, their
celebrity relies more and more on what their ordinariness
is able to draw upon for its self-commodification… the
YouTube celebrity simply highlights the tightrope walked
between ordinary and extraordinary, person and celebrity
(a fact true of all celebrity)’ (Smith 2014: 257, 260)

With her Disney-like features and bubbly personality, Zoella (whose real name is
Zoe Sugg) looks like many other pretty 20-something girls. However, with an
estimated yearly income of £300,000 and a strong following of nearly seven
million, Zoella isn't you average 24 year old. The brunette began her Zoella
beauty blog four years ago and has since been able to turn her hobby - which
sees her talk to camera about everything from lipstick to anxiety - into a lucrative
career… What exactly is the fuss all about? We're not entirely sure but she's
pretty, happy and does normal things normal teenagers do. She's seen as a 'big
sister' to those who are glued to her videos. While she does look like a cutesy
Disney princess, she is a good respite from the tweaking, nakedness of Miley
Cyrus and co.

The other girls try to explain to me the point of Zoella: "Zoella is just such an inspiration" is
the gist of it. All Zoella seems to do is blog about make-up, I say. I'm missing the point. She's
"amazing" and "just normal" and "brave". If you like your teenagers sullen or outrageous or
rebellious or intellectual or difficult or anti-parent or with pink hair or covered in injudicious
tattoos or buried in a Penguin Classic, be thankful that, on this beautiful day, you're not in
the basement of a Brighton shopping mall. Zoella's followers are good girls. Too good and
too girlie, it could be argued. They spend a lot of time in front of their computers glued to
Zoella's pink blog. She is cheery and upbeat, what the Americans would call "perky", a
girl/woman always on the brink of exclaiming "Yay!" Her property developer father and
beautician mother have created in Zoella a perfect storm of upbeat salesmanship. Zoella is
almost indecently inoffensive; unencumbered by dark or even negative thoughts. She never
swears. Although English, she uses Americanisms like "fall" (for autumn) and "dang". She's
an advertiser's dream, an avatar crossed with a presenter on QVC.

The most frequently used terms for her were 'YouTube
sensation' (Malm 2014; Runcie 2014; Wyatt 2014a; Wyatt
2014c); 'YouTube superstar' (Runcie 2014; Singh 2014a)
and 'vlogger' (Awford 2014; Malm 2014; Matthew 2014;
Runcie 2014; Selby 2014; Wyatt 2014c), showing an
emphasis on her online background and highlighting to the
reader that she is not a 'traditional' type of celebrity.
(Murphy 2015)

Her eyes are enormous. She looks like a startled bird; albeit a bird with the gorgeous,
flowing locks of Rapunzel, the high-pitched giggle of Tinkerbell, and a name so
irritatingly Disney-fied it makes my stomach churn: Zoella.
Zoella is a beauty and fashion vlogger – the latest creation spat out by the YouTube
machine to instruct young girls how to paint on the perfect smoky eye or red lip… It’s
maddening that a girl who has made it her business to tell teenagers how to put make
up on, or get their hair just right, now feels she’s in a position to admonish them for
“fretting” about their appearance. Why, if she feels so strongly about the pandemic of
insecurity raging through the tweenage generation, doesn’t she vlog about going to
school without make-up, or encourage kids to spend their pocket money on books or
days out with friends, rather than on the latest liquid eyeliner to hit Boots’ shelves?

When the world seems scary, Zoella is comforting. Her message, when she has one, is ‘be
yourself!’ But the self she’s representing is, to me, infuriatingly bland and intimidatingly
perfect… Girl Online feels like a reprimand, or rather, having the head girl point out all the
mistakes in our homework. When I look at Zoella, the contemporary patron saint of glossy
hair and perfect relationships (she’s dating fellow YouTuber and millennial icon Alfie
Deyes) I desperately want to hear her say something genuinely inspiring, something that
will make the young women of today sit up and challenge every beauty myth and bit of
gender conditioning they have ever been exposed to. Then she comes out with the
formula for the perfect smoky eye. She’s contributing to a beauty culture I’m
uncomfortable with. She’s indisputably gorgeous and talented at what she does, and I
can’t blame Zoella for capitalising on her skills in this field, but it frightens me that millions
of young women in 2014 are still being told to prioritise pretty over clever, confident and
smart.

That’s a lot of people reading a lot of books, and much has been made of the fact
that the star is inspiring a younger generation to read. The trouble is, no one seems
to care about exactly what it is they’re reading. Seven out of eight of the books
Zoella recommends are modern teen romance novels… That’s not to say there’s
anything wrong with any of these books – on their own… But perhaps Zoella has a
responsibility to expose her young fandom to more. Put together, these books teach
young girls to care predominantly about boys – not education, not society, not
history. This is something that doesn’t seem to have crossed Zoella’s mind.
“Together they all look so amazing and pretty,” she said, discussing the pastel covers
WH Smith has printed exclusively for her book club…unlike when you or I pass on a
book to a friend, she has a greater responsibility to consider the consequences.

She's crafted a sizeable fortune from writing teen-friendly posts but
could blogging sensation Zoella be now trying to widen her fanbase?
The Brighton-based star, who is said to make £50,000 a month in
books and endorsements, posted an image of herself in her
underwear on Sunday night… Captioned with the words 'Goodnight'
and a string of 'ZZZZs' , the image was posted to social media site
snapchat, which meant that anyone could see it. Until now, it's the
first time followers have seen a more daring image from Zoella,
who's dating fellow blogger Alfie Deyes, and some weren't so keen
on the change in tack when it comes to her image. One observer on
Twitter wrote: 'I think you need to take your CK Knickers off
snapchat. My 15-year-old sister looks up to you.'

HERE’s beauty vlogger Zoella as you’ve never seen her before — flashing her pants in
bed. The YouTube sensation, who’s made MILLIONS appealing to young girls and
tweens, cast off her squeaky clean image to pose in her knickers. Posting the scantily-
clad, sexy image to social media, Zoella – real name Zoe Sugg – showed off her black
and white Calvin Klein pants. Lying in bed, the 25-year-old flashed her toned midriff,
going braless in a tight white top. She posted the image to Snapchat on Sunday night,
meaning anyone could see it, and simply captioned it, “Goodnight.” It’s the first time
the usually sweet and innocent star has EVER shown a more risqué side. Zoe – who
makes a whopping £50,000-a-month – trades on her squeaky clean image to flog books
and beauty products to her TEN MILLLION followers. Her fans are made up of children,
tweens and teenage girls, who flock to watch her make up tutorials and buy her
merchandise.

Disclaimer: I am not Zoella's target market. I was once a teenager, but
times must have changed because the teenagers in this book bear no
resemblance to any I have ever met. On their second date, Noah and Penny
share a flask of tea on a tartan picnic blanket. This is an excellent date if
you're 83, but doesn't strike me as terribly realistic for an 18-year-old rock
musician from Brooklyn. Left alone in the house, Noah leads Penny down
to the basement where he reveals… a tent festooned with fairy lights and
the handwritten sign: “This here is Penny’s tent. Keep Out!... unless your
name is Noah!” There is a sub-plot about a doll called Princess Autumn
that set my teeth on edge. Even Winnie the Pooh might regard it as a bit
twee.

Girl Online is different to your standard ghost-written book, and that’s
because of the implicit promise that Zoella makes to her followers. Their
relationship is based on a fundamental understanding that she will be
honest with them. These are teenage girls who worship their idol, and
really believe her capable of doing anything. To them, she isn’t a celebrity
whose name will be used to shift a product; she’s their best friend. If Zoella
tells them she is “writing a book”, as she did several times, they believe
that she is doing just that. This is why they bought it, and why they are so
proud of her. If this is not the full story then they have misled.

‘[C]ontemporary celebrity memoirs and their female
author-subjects are ‘bad objects’: viewed as inauthentic
due to visible mediation, and thus denied authority and
rejected due to the anxieties they stimulate…the
ghostwritten celebrity memoir becomes doubly
discredited. That a book is authored by a sole subject is no
guarantee that their words are credible, and yet if the
authorship is collaborative it is read as a guarantee that
their words are not. (Yelin 2015: 2, 4)

The social media star Zoella and her partner have begged their fans to stop
bothering them at their mansion. Zoe Sugg, 25, better known by her video
blogging name Zoella, and her boyfriend, Alfie Deyes, 22, have pleaded for
privacy and told visitors to "get a better hobby… The couple, who live in a
five-bedroom mansion in Brighton, run a multimillion-pound YouTube
empire with 15 million subscribers between them… Fans tweeted their
support for the stars, but others were less sympathetic, with one saying
"welcome to the famous life, didn't you see this coming?" Sugg responded:
"Considering we did not set out to become 'famous', no. It is also not
something we should have to put up with."
Millionaire bloggers beg for
privacy

YouTube stars Zoe 'Zoella’ Sugg and her boyfriend Alfie Deyes have begged fans
to give them some privacy, as they claim many have taken to peering in their
windows and ringing on their bell. Vlogger Zoe, 25, and her boyfriend, 22,
launched a Twitter plea for privacy after die-hard followers began looking
through the windows of their £1million five bedroom mansion in East Sussex.
But social media users were less than sympathetic, with one tweeting:
“Welcome to famous life, didn’t you see this coming?” The twosome replied:
“Considering we did not set out to become ‘famous' no. It is also not something
we should have to put up with.”

ZOELLA has pleaded with fans to stop begging for selfies on her doorstep.
The vlogger, who SIMON COWELL was teeing up for the Xtra Factor host
role, has asked her three million fans to stop visiting her new £1million
Brighton mansion. She bought it with boyfriend and fellow vlogger ALFIE
DEYES after making a fortune off her online videos and book deal, which
she later admitted was ghostwritten.
Zoella, right, wrote: "Polite reminder, please don't knock on my door for a
photo :) I am more than happy to meet everyone & anyone out and about
but not at home.“ Even selfie-made stars have their limits.
ZO: LEAVE ME BY SELFIE

‘The hobby that made her famous’ (The Independent)
‘Zoella has found fame and fortune in sharing personal detail on the internet’
(The Independent)
‘She spends at least six hours a day on either her computer or her phone. Plus
there are videos to shoot, events to attend and books to write. Some people,
she's said in the past, don't understand that it's a "real job".’ (The Times)
‘… the very young-and-already-far-too-rich YouTuber Zoella.’ (The Sun)
‘Miss Sugg has also starred on the BBC's Comic Relief Bake Off special
alongside celebrity contestants Gok Wan, Jonathan Ross and Abbey Clancy.’
(Daily Mail)

Back when YouTube sensation Zoella was at school, her teachers would
have probably laughed at the thought of her becoming a millionaire just
by sitting in her room on the internet. But the vlogger is having the last
giggle as new figures show she is raking it in after building her own online
empire, launching beauty products and releasing her own books. The 25-
year-old star, real name Zoe Sugg, reportedly earns more than £50,000 a
MONTH, which will leave anyone her age stuck pulling pints for pocket
money completely speechless.

A YouTube video a day can get you a long way in the property market.
Zoella and boyfriend Alfie Deyes have just bought their first home and it
cost a cool £1 million. The gated property in Hove, East Sussex boasts five
bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, solid oak floors throughout, a
designer kitchen and even a log cabin. Snazzy. It’s also fitted with CCTV
and various alarm systems to keep the YouTube sensations secure.

This week the earnings of Zoella, the UK's most successful vlogger, were revealed. When
I read that she makes £50,000 a month, I was so suffused with jealousy that my legs
went all bendy and I felt faint… Zoella is now so famous that typing her name does not
induce the red squiggly line of my spell check. (She is up there with Leonardo da Vinci
and Che Guevara and Boadicea in this respect.) Zoella is 25 and very pretty with very
good teeth and she sits on the end of her bed with fairy lights strewn across the
headboard and basically shows off the items she has recently bought while offering
beauty and fashion tips… I have just been to practise sitting on the end of my bed, and
it turns out I'm bloody good at it; a natural… And I have watched Zoella's latest post,
and have seen how it works, and how you might talk an audience through
Treaclemoon's honey bubble bath ("it doesn't smell sweet and sickly, although, smelling
it now, it is quite sweet and sickly")…
If Zoella makes £50k a month, I'm
launching Debella

Blogging sensation Zoella has debuted a daring new look by posting a snap of herself on
Twitter with grey hair. The Brighton-based star, who is said to make £50,000 a month in
books and endorsements, shared the silver-locked selfie last night along with a winking
face and V for victory emoji… Zoella has made a fortune off her blogs which are
resolutely teen-friendly, offering her wisdom on hair, make-up and clothes. It's a formula
that works well financially; her followers trip off her every word and queue for hours to
meet her, an appeal that saw her buy her first home in Brighton last year, a five-
bedroom property worth £1million. It hasn't all been plain sailing though, with Zoella
admitting that sometimes the attention gets too much. Negativity surrounding her
debut novel, Girl Online, which was written with a ghostwriter pushed her to see a
therapist and announce she was quitting the internet…

Zoella and other YouTube stars could be on the verge of losing a heap of money
after it transpired they are hosting adverts for junk food and gambling on their
vlogs. YouTube celebs, also known as Vloggers, can be paid up to £20,000 to allow
ads at the start of their online videos. But, taking Zoella, 25, as an example, with an
audience whose ages range from 11 to 17, concerns have been raised that these
ads are targeting youngsters... It turns out advertisement regulations don’t apply
to vloggers as they do to TV shows. Even so, with Zoella, who has been blogging
for six years after setting up her channel in 2009, posting out videos to her
followers – of which she has amassed 7.7million on YouTube alone (that’s over
4million more than biggest boyband in the world One Direction have, by the way),
she’s inadvertently opening up a world of fatty foods to the youngsters.

A TEENAGE predator groomed hundreds of young girls by posing online as
blogger Zoella and as a member of Britain's Got Talent duo Bars and
Melody. David Harmes, 19, persuaded victims aged eight to 18 into
stripping for him via Skype. A court heard he falsely claimed he was
YouTube fashion blogger Zoella and teenage rapper Leondre Devries,
neither of whom knew of his activities. As Devries, Harmes would tell
besotted fans to pose in swimwear and underwear for a chance to get
tickets for BGT, before getting them to perform "degrading and
humiliating" acts.
'ZOELLA' FIEND IN DISGUISE;
Paedo's 294 victims

People say that Zoella’s brand is built on “authenticity” and so she should
have been honest. Well, I’ve watched one of her videos. It consisted of her
taking make-up out of a carrier bag and talking about it. I would personally
prefer to see a teenage role model talk about how authentically ridiculous
and counter-productive it is to worry about your looks, when you could be
doing something worthwhile, like reading a book, but yes, she does comes
across as quite a sweet and open person.

Zoella films herself in her bedroom giving beauty tips. Her target YouTube
audience is girls aged 13 or 14, though she herself is in her 20s… Zoella’s persona
is that of sensible, clean-thinking older sister. She babbles away, incredibly kind
to herself in the edit – or unkind, depending on your perspective. It wouldn’t be
so vapid if it were cut a little bit tighter. As it is, there’s a lot of “I would say these
were my favourite for July, but it’s the middle of August now, so these are August
favourites”. The more you watch, the less irritating these meanderings become;
she turns into one of those relatives you tune out but are fond of. I imagine, if
you watched enough, the inanity would be part of the attraction..

The pitfalls of offering to partake in a live Q&A with the great British public is that while
plenty of your fans will turn up to ask sweet questions about your favourite colour, pizza
and eyeliner - others will try and spoil the party. Brighton-based star Zoella has fallen
foul of a particularly high-brow brand of trolling after asking for questions via the
#AskZoella hashtag. Sensibly worded queries about black hole theory, the Brexit debate
and even Islamic extremism all appeared under the 25-year-old star's hashtag... The
chat, which is due to be filmed tomorrow has already had 12,400 questions tweeted.
It's an impressive haul for the young blogger who is rumoured to make £50,000 a
month from her teen-friendly video posts including books and endorsements.

This will maybe make Zoella think twice about taking pictures of ‘random’
strangers and their pets after she has been trolled for not recognising Pink
Floyd’s David Gilmour. The vlogger, who has her own waxwork at Madame
Tussaud’s is often considered the new ‘celebrity’ with over 10 million YouTube
subscribers, but it would appear that she can’t tell one from the other. She
recently shared an arty photo of a “random man and his dog”, because it was
cute – with cracking lighting – but fans quickly twigged that this wasn’t just
some “random man”. Instead, he was actually one of the greatest guitarists
ever to have graced this planet…“Jesus! hahahahaha... Humanity will talk about
this "random man" and his music by the next 500 years,” one user commented.

‘activities such as playing with toys’
'a sugary confection that plays on her own story’
‘Comfortably Dumb’
‘the millionaire YouTuber’s bubblegum brand of bedroom-based blogs’
‘chipper mini-Stepford wife’
‘the social media star insists that even though she has millions of
adoring fans, a lucrative book deal, a wonderful house and a
seemingly 'perfect' life, she still has to deal with the insecurities like
everyone else’
‘Zoella hasn’t really written a book, she’s written a cheque’

FOULIS, Ruth (2014). YouTube Celebrity Culture. [online]. Last accessed 24 November.
http://ruthlilywritesstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/youtube-celebrity-culture.html
MARWICK, Alice E. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven, Yale
University Press.
MURPHY, Kathryn D. (2015) How do the mainstream media represent the online celebrity Zoella? Dissertation: Sheffield
Hallam University.
SMITH, Daniel (2014). Charlie is so 'English'-like: nationality and the branded celebrity person in the age of YouTube.
Celebrity Studies, 5 (3), 256-274.
YELIN, Hannah (2015) A literary phenomenon of the non-literate’: classed cultural value, agency and techniques of self-
representation in the ghostwritten reality TV star memoir. Celebrity Studies.

As sugary as a frosted cupcake: Newspaper representations of Zoella

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As sugary as a frosted cupcake: Newspaper representations of Zoella