Emma Chamberlain on influencing, personal growth and her next big challenge

Once upon a time, Emma Chamberlain was bored. Like every other teenager, she killed time watching YouTube and thought, what the hell, I'll give it a try. Over 10 million subscribers later, she is one of the internet's most powerful people. How did she become a social media megastar? We found out...

It's only been 90 seconds, and I've already been influenced. I'm now getting a light-green manicure - a tint I never would have picked out - because Emma Chamberlain offhandedly said she liked it. We're at Emma's West Hollywood mani-pedi spot, and with her seal of approval, the colour beckoned.

So, I asked for Hint Of Mint on my fingers and my toes - after double-checking with Emma to make sure that going matchy-matchy isn't uncool. (The night before this interview, I frantically texted my little sister, age 24, to ask what I should wear. “What if the teens make fun of me?" I wrote, half-joking. "They probably will," she responded.)

In case it's not already glaringly obvious: I have no idea what qualifies as cool these days. I follow all the right influencers and subscribe to all the right Pinterest boards, but being truly cool in 2021 is a tricky thing to pull off. If anything, the more uncool something seems (visible roots, ugly shoes, grandma jumpers), the more Likes it gets.

"I think the word 'influencer' is kind of disgusting," Chamberlain, who is an influencer, tells me. "Let's use me as an example: If someone is calling me an influencer, they're saying that my job is to influence, and I don't think that's true. I prefer to entertain and be a friend. I don't want to influence." (I look down at my nails and blame them for being so easily swayed.)

But whether or not Chamberlain, who recently turned 20, thinks she has powers of persuasion (she does - sorry, Emma) isn't really the point. Whenever I try to explain her staggering success - over 13 million Instagram followers, astronomical numbers of YouTube views, a fashion partnership with Louis Vuitton, the fainting spells she causes in people like my sister whenever she debuts a new video - the main question is: "Okay...but why her?" What is it about this seemingly average girl from San Mateo County, California, that captivates teenagers all over the world - so much so that it's catapulted her into internet superstardom? The answer to this question doesn't just baffle me - even Chamberlain doesn't know. "Why do certain people connect and others don't?" she asks. "I'm like, Why has this worked?"

There's a lot that's normal about Emma Chamberlain, things she has in common with most of her young followers. She has a crush on Timothée Chalamet ("curly hair ruins me!"); a subtle, but experimental personal style (she's wearing a polo-neck with layered necklaces); and a minor infatuation with the Jonas Brothers. "I've just been a huge fan since, I mean, day one," Chamberlain gushes, recounting how starstruck she was meeting Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner at Paris Fashion Week. "I've been obsessed with them. So that was super cool. I don't think I got to explain to him how much I loved him, but we didn't have a lot of time."

All photos shot on location at Fred Segal Sunset in Los Angeles.

Indeed, Chamberlain's beginnings as a YouTuber sounds a lot like those of the hundreds of thousands of other young girls who try to become vloggers from their bedrooms. Chamberlain started out with a few channels while she was at school and abandoned them when they didn't get much traction. But, encouraged by her musician dad, she decided to try again. "It was summer. I didn't want to do my summer reading. I had to tap into other new territories in my brain because I was so bored. So every day, I was making videos."

After a few more failed experiments (this time with beauty vlogging), Chamberlain finally went viral with "We all owe the dollar store an apology." In case you missed it, think of YouTube's high-priced-haul videos, but instead of going through a luxury shop, Chamberlain essentially enthuses over plastic knick-knacks from the equivalent of the local Poundland. "I just made that video because...I don't even know what I was doing. I don't know what went through my head. I was super excited about it though. I was thinking, ‘This is actually going to be fun for me to fake through this haul’, and apparently, other people were excited about it too. And it was like, ‘All right’."

The response made Chamberlain realise something crucial: being her funny, awkward, easily excitable self was her strength. So she played to it, leaning in to harmless mockery of vegan pizza, her own spots, and more faux iterations of YouTube staples (makeup tutorials but terrible; pumpkin-spice product reviews but with choking).

Chamberlain is, in other words, fully in on the joke - the joke being herself: someone who built her brand by parodying the very thing she is. “I mean, I make fun of YouTubers and I am one. I think of it as, Why not play into it? If you can't beat them, join them." Basically, she stopped playing the game and came up with her own. And that, I realise, is the first ingredient in the "Why her?" recipe: rejecting standard YouTube #content for a f**k-it kind of irreverence.

Others started copying her shooting technique, so Emma invested an even more unique style. She dropped out of school, moved to LA, and was soon talking to the press and going to events, mostly because she was lonely and struggling mentally.

"It's a bloodbath," Chamberlain says, point-blank, about the aesthetically obsessed culture she found herself in. "Living in LA, if you're at an unhealthy weight, that's normal. That's really, really, really a mindf**k, for sure."

Unlike certain social media stars, Emma refuses to advertise weight-loss products. "Your grind is your grind, and I'm not going to get in the way of that. I just think that growing up on social media gave me eating issues as a kid. I have literally struggled with that my whole life. Almost every person I've met has had some form of an eating disorder. I mean, I've had...I don't want to trigger anyone, but so many." She's spoken before about how her all-night video-editing sessions gave her extreme anxiety, but she mentions to me now that staring at herself for all those hours also led to a severe case of body dysmorphia. “I've been fully not at a healthy weight and I thought I was obese multiple times. It's awful," she says. "My whole family was telling me I looked terrible. They were like, 'You look like you're dying.' I was like, 'I think I look great.’”

This is one of the reasons she's vowed never to use Facetune or photo-manipulation software. "I refuse to do that because nobody needs to think I look like that," she explains. "I look the way I look."

So, how has she looked after her mental health during the pandemic? “There’s definitely been highs and lows. This past year for me has been a huge year of mental growth. I’ve done so much self reflection - infinite amounts, probably too much if I’m honest. But I’ve learned a lot about myself.

"I've really tried to stop going on social media as much, especially in the last two months. I'm finding more of a balance - I've started reading books, journalling, exercising every day. I started partaking in healthy habits and implementing those into my life - I had extra time to build those habits."

Hitting 10 million subscribers would be overwhelming for anyone, though. “Sometimes I definitely overthink. I get anxious a lot, so my brain might go there and think about the weight of that. But generally I have a lightness about it. My philosophy is ‘every single person watching is just a singular person’. I don’t have to compare it to a stadium or whatever, because that’s not the reality of it. It’s me and one individual interacting. That keeps me sane.”

Chamberlain is used to hearing rumours about herself in her line of work. Some are can't-confirm-on-the-record-but-true. Others... "People think I don't shower," Chamberlain says, sipping an oat-milk latte (a favourite of Chamberlain’s - and the reason she launched her own coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee). "I made a joke about it on Snapchat and then they took it seriously. I was like, OK!"

When I was younger, if millions of people thought there was a chance that I didn't shower, I would have immediately booked a one-way ticket back to my parents' home in the suburbs and never contacted the outside world again. Chamberlain just laughs it off.

And this is where the final secret to her success finally hits me: She truly does not care whether or not she's cool. "I don't take it too seriously," Chamberlain says. "It's like, I have one life. I'm not going to waste my time being all, you know, 'Take me seriously as a YouTuber!' I don't care, you know what I mean? Watch my videos - if you hate it, go watch the news or something, I don't know. Like, have fun, but I don't care."

It's the things she does care about - her personal life, her romantic life - that she sees as her next challenge. “What’s going to inspire me? Is it fashion? Or my coffee company? Is it my podcast? My YouTube channel? Or is it my personal life? I’ve been struggling with knowing what gets me out of bed in the morning at the moment. My goal is to find new goals. But who knows where my life will be in three months?”

Of course, if anyone actually does know what the world will look like in three months - or even three years - then it's probably Chamberlain. The rest of us are just following along, enjoyed the deeply entertaining ride.

Cosmopolitan UK's September issue is on sale on 14th August and available for purchase online.

Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson. Fashion by Aya Kanai. Video by Janet Upadhye. Hair: Kristin Ess. Makeup: Kelsey Deenihan at The Wall Group. Props styled by Danielle von Braun. Production: Crawford Productions. Shot on location at Fred Segal Sunset.

Emma has her own coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee, which you can shop here.

On Emma: Faux-fur coat look: Stella McCartney jacket; Nicholas Kirkwood shoes; Sylvia Toledano earrings. Over-the-knee white boots look: Dior dress and boots. Coffee cup hat look: Vivetta blazer and shorts; Fred Segal Originals T-shirt; Dr. Martens shoes; Stella McCartney sunglasses. Untied laces look: Louis Vuitton top, skirt, boots, and earrings. Blue boots look: Valentino dress and boots. Shoes (clockwise from floor): Jimmy Choo, Fendi, Wandler, Simon Miller, Amina Muaddi, Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch (2). Pink sunglasses look: Fendi jacket, shirt, skirt, and socks; Anna Sui sunglasses.