Poppy Is Popping
The Millennial Fembot Pinup
Viral YouTube and Instagram stars are everywhere, from vloggers to streamers to would-be models whose looks are eerily altered by judicious use of filters and digital enhancements. At first glance, Poppy is another in a long line of empty beauties, but there’s more to her than selfies… Or rather, there isn’t, but that’s the point.
From one angle, Poppy is nothing new, just another model in the endless sea of identical vapidity, but look a little closer, and she reveals herself to be something more, a post-modern commentary on beauty and fame in the age of Instagram and SnapChat. Poppy is a character played by model Moriah Rose Pereira, and her story is shepherded by writer/director/musician Titanic Sinclair. She is a multimedia performance artist whose influence stretches across social media and the internet from Twitter to YouTube and even wide-reaching trans-media ARG experiences. Her Reddit following is massive, and theories about her ever-growing saga are simultaneously consuming and bewildering to Millennials all over the world.
Her visage is one of scientifically-calculated beauty; her face is coldly immaculate, with nary a single humanizing blemish or hair out of place. She looks like she was designed, not born. After all, that’s what true beauty is, right? Impossible perfection? Perpetual youth? In the search for perfect beauty, all roads lead to non-human androids devoid of soul or substance, and Poppy aims to be a subversive indictment of such male-driven standards of beauty, and the lengths to which some women (ahem, Kylie Jenner) will go to reach those standards. Her new YouTube Red series, I’m Poppy, looks to deepen her increasingly complex mythology even further.
What is Poppy’s endgame? What is her goal? To be rich and famous? To warn of the dehumanization of objectification? Could her ambitions be so grand? Or will she ultimately come out with a skincare/makeup line and become just another peddler of artificial beauty like so many before her? The story of Poppy is only just beginning, and it will surely get weirder and even more compelling before it ends.
Follow Poppy on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Her debut album, Poppy.Computer, is out now.
