She's in her bathroom, babe. She's always in her bathroom.
The lighting's a little off — not bad-off, just real-off, just I-grabbed-my-phone-off. Her hair might be wet. There's a towel. There's a ring light she paid for herself, catching her at that angle that says I woke up like this but make it sellable. And she's holding something. A serum. A tube. A little glass bottle with a dropper, because everything has a dropper now, because we've decided that's what science looks like.
"Okay so I was really skeptical but..."
You know the rest. You've seen it four hundred times. You've watched it while you were supposed to be working, while you were on the toilet, while you were falling asleep with your phone three inches from your face. You've clicked the link. Don't tell me you haven't clicked the link.
I've clicked the link.
So here we are, you and me, two people who know better and do it anyway. Let's talk about why.
Of course there's a formula. Did you think there wasn't a formula?
Someone put it in a PowerPoint and got promoted. Someone made a PDF and sold it to brands for a consulting fee. Someone optimized the hell out of your attention span and gave it a name: Hook → Problem → Solution → Call-to-Action.
The hook: "I never thought I'd find something that actually works..." The problem: "I tried everything, my skin was a disaster, I was about to give up..." The solution: "...and then I found this." The call-to-action: "Link in bio, babes."
That's the skeleton. You can see it now, can't you? You'll see it every time, now. You're welcome. I'm sorry.
The trick — and this is the part I almost admire, the way you almost admire a pickpocket — is making the skeleton invisible. As Billo's creator guidelines note, the best UGC should feel spontaneous, not scripted.1 That's the whole point.
So they send her a brief. Talking points. Key messages. But they tell her to use her own words. Leave in the stumbles. Film it on your phone, not a camera. If it looks too good, we won't believe it.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that amateur meant honest. So they learned to manufacture amateur. They learned to produce the appearance of not being produced.
That's not new, of course. Magazines have been doing "no-makeup makeup" spreads for decades. The "candid" celebrity photo has always been staged. What's new is the scale. What's new is that they can do it with ten thousand girls in ten thousand bathrooms, for a few hundred dollars each, and your feed will never run out.
You should know what you're worth to them. I think it helps.
There are platforms now — Billo, Insense, others — that exist purely to connect brands with people who are good at seeming like your friend.8 Not influencers, exactly. Those are expensive. These are just... people. People who can hold a product and talk to a camera like they're talking to you.
A creator gets paid somewhere in the tens to low hundreds per video. Plus the free product, obviously. The whole thing takes a couple of weeks. The brand gets perpetual rights to the footage — they can run it as an ad on your feed next Tuesday, next year, whenever. Your trust, purchased in bulk, deployed at scale.
The pitch to brands is simple: this works. Higher click-through rates. Lower costs. Because we believe her, the girl in the bathroom, more than we believe a billboard.
Of course we do. Billboards don't have wet hair.
Here's the part where I'd love to tell you we're being stupid. It would be easier if we were being stupid. We could just... stop being stupid.
But it's not that.
According to LTK's 2023 Beauty Shopper Study, 78% of Gen Z women — I want you to sit with this number — rank online creators as their most trusted source for beauty and skincare recommendations.2 More than ads. More than brands. More than — and here's where I put my drink down — their real-life friends and family.
A stranger in a bathroom. Paid to be there. Holding a product she received in a PR box last week. More trusted than your mother. More trusted than the friend who's actually seen your skin in real life.
We're not stupid. We're wired. We're running ancient software in a modern environment. The part of your brain that says someone like me uses this, so it's probably safe — that part evolved in villages, in tribes, in groups small enough that you actually knew the people giving you advice.
Now we've got what psychologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl first termed parasocial relationships in 1956 — the one-sided bonds we form with people we've never met.3 We watch someone enough, we start to feel like we know them. We care what they think. We take their advice. They have no idea we exist. The relationship feels real to us. It just isn't mutual.
And the really elegant part — the part that makes me want to slow-clap — is something called the pratfall effect. Elliot Aronson's research from 1966 showed that small imperfections can make someone more likeable — more relatable, more human.4 So when she stumbles over a word, when her bathroom's a little messy, when she laughs at herself mid-sentence? That's not a mistake. That's the technique. The flaw is a feature.
Authenticity, it turns out, scales beautifully.
You know it's an ad.
I know you know. You've read the think pieces. You've seen the TikToks making fun of the TikToks. You've said "this is such obvious marketing" while watching the whole video anyway.
Knowing doesn't save you. That's the thing I keep coming back to. We think knowledge is armor. It isn't.
The research has a name for this too: what Friestad and Wright called persuasion knowledge in their influential 1994 study.5 We can recognise when we're being sold to. Recognition doesn't make us immune. It just makes us feel smarter while we fall.
Because in fashion and beauty, we're not buying products. We're buying feelings. Identity. The version of ourselves who has good skin, who figured it out, who found the thing that works. And feelings don't care about your critical thinking skills. Feelings walk right past the part of you that knows better.
Research published in Computers in Human Behavior shows that disclosure helps viewers recognise content as advertising — but recognition doesn't eliminate influence.6 The brand outcomes remain intact. We know, and we fall, and the knowing doesn't stop the falling.
I'm not here to make you feel bad about that. I'm here because I do it too. We're in this together, babe. Scrolling at midnight, clicking the link, knowing the whole time.
Now. Here's where it gets relevant to what we do at this magazine.
The girl in the bathroom has discovered sustainability. Or rather: the brands selling sustainability have discovered the girl in the bathroom.
Every "clean beauty" company is using this format now. Every "sustainable fashion" startup. Every brand that wants you to feel good about what you're buying figured out that a girl in her bathroom is more convincing than a B-Corp certification. And they're not wrong. She is.
Some of them are telling the truth. Some of them are selling genuinely better products and using UGC because it works. Fine. That's just marketing. I'm not naive.
But some of them aren't.
There's this case I keep thinking about. Free People launched a collection called "Care FP" — the sustainable one, the ethical one, the one that cares. They recruited sustainable fashion influencers to promote it. Women who'd built their whole thing on conscious consumption, on doing better, on not falling for greenwashing. And these women said yes. They made the videos. They gave the brand credibility.
As Remake documented in their investigation of sustainable influencer partnerships, Free People scored just 3 out of 100 on their ethical report card.7
Three.
The influencers didn't know. Or didn't check. Or didn't want to know, because the brief was flattering and the product was free and the language was right. That's the thing about sustainability jargon — with the right vocabulary, even the least ethical brands can seem like they have good intentions.
The girl in the bathroom isn't fact-checking the supply chain. She got a brief, a box, and a fee. She believes what she's saying, probably. She's not lying to you. She just doesn't know. And you trust her more than you trust an ad — which is exactly why the brands that can't survive an ad are using her instead.
I want to be careful here, because this isn't the part where I tell you to be smarter. You're smart. We're all smart. Smart has nothing to do with it.
The girl in the video exists because we're hungry for something. Not products — we have infinite products. We're hungry for guidance. For someone to say this one, this works, I've tried it. We're hungry for the friend who knows things. The village elder who remembers which herbs are safe. The mother who taught us how to take care of our skin.
We don't have that anymore. So we pour our loneliness into parasocial relationships with strangers, and the market saw that shape — the you-shaped hole where the village used to be — and built a format to fill it.
I want to give you a name for this. Something you can use outside this article.
Scaled Intimacy.
That's what we're living in now. Intimacy manufactured for infinite reach. Care that's been industrialized. The feeling of being known by someone who cannot possibly know you — cannot possibly know the forty thousand other people watching the same video, feeling the same thing, believing they're the one being spoken to.
Scaled Intimacy is what happens when we try to recreate the village inside systems that can only deliver reach, not reciprocity. The girl in the bathroom is performing closeness. Your Spotify Wrapped addresses you personally. The brand emails you by your first name. The algorithm serves you exactly what you need. You feel seen. You feel understood. You feel accompanied.
None of it is mutual.
Villages were mutual. You knew the herbalist; the herbalist knew you. She remembered your mother's sensitive skin. She noticed when you looked tired. She couldn't scale to ten thousand people because knowing doesn't scale. Care doesn't scale. Attention doesn't scale.
But the appearance of care? The performance of attention? The simulation of knowing?
That scales beautifully.
The girl in the bathroom is Scaled Intimacy. So is the cooking creator who feels like your fun aunt. The fitness guy who feels like your older brother. The sustainable fashion account that feels like the friend who always knows where to shop. The meditation app voice that sounds like she's only talking to you. The customer service chatbot that mirrors your tone. The algorithm that knows you're sad before you do.
All of it is Scaled Intimacy. All of it is the performance of closeness without the cost of actual relationship. And we accept it — we pour our trust into it — because we're so hungry for guidance that a simulation is better than nothing.
Here's what I can't stop thinking about: we built this. Not brands — us. We wanted the village back so badly that we accepted a version that could scale. We wanted to feel known so desperately that we accepted being known by systems that track us, rather than people who remember us.
Scaled Intimacy isn't evil. It's not even dishonest, necessarily. It's just what intimacy looks like when it has to reach everyone. It's the compromise we made when we chose scale over reciprocity, reach over depth, infinite access over actual relationship.
And the compromise works. That's the part that hurts. It works well enough that we keep coming back. We keep scrolling. We keep clicking. We keep feeling like the girl in the bathroom is talking to us, specifically us, even though we know — we absolutely know — she's talking to everyone.
The knowledge doesn't save us. That's what I keep coming back to. You can see the mechanism clearly and still fall into it, because seeing the trap doesn't eliminate the hunger.
You're still lonely. The algorithm still feels like it gets you. The girl in the bathroom still sounds like a friend. And maybe that's okay. Maybe we stop pretending we're above it and just... see it clearly. Name it. Recognize it when it's happening.
She's not your friend. She's Scaled Intimacy. She's the industrialized version of care, deployed at reach, performed with skill.
That's not her fault. That's not your fault. That's just what friendship looks like now, when friendship has to scale to millions.
I don't have a fix for this. I don't think there is a fix, exactly. You can't unscale the internet. You can't go back to villages of two hundred people where everyone knows your name. That world is gone.
But maybe it helps to name what we're living in. To look at the girl in the bathroom, at the algorithm that knows you, at the brand that addresses you personally, and think: oh, there it is. Scaled Intimacy. Not fake — she's real, the video is real, the feeling is real. What's simulated is the mutuality. The reciprocity. The part where she knows you back.
And maybe seeing that clearly — not with judgment, just with clarity — means you can still enjoy the performance without mistaking it for the real thing. You can still watch her, still listen, still learn, but without pouring your trust into a relationship that cannot hold it.
Because the hunger is real. The loneliness is real. The need for guidance is real.
The friend isn't.
She's Scaled Intimacy. And once you have the name, you'll see it everywhere. Not just in bathrooms. In every algorithm that "understands" you. In every email that addresses you personally. In every experience designed to feel intimate while reaching millions.
You're not stupid for falling for it. You're human. We're wired for village-scale intimacy, and we're living in a world that only offers the scaled version. The simulation is all we've got.
So maybe we stop performing guilt about wanting it. Maybe we stop pretending we're immune. Maybe we just see it clearly, name it accurately, and decide what we want to do with that information.
I don't know what comes next. I don't have the answer.
But I'll take clarity. It's better than pretending. It's better than shame.
We're not above this, babe. We're in it. All of us. Hungry for something that doesn't exist anymore, accepting simulations because they're what's available, feeling known by systems that cannot know us.
At least we can name it now.
At least there's that.