Twenty-seven-year-old Erica Kathleen regularly finds herself making private TikTok videos in the middle of the night to " manifestation sounds ". She never posts the videos and says she wishes she didn’t have to make them but the obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) she’s had for the past decade makes her feel it’s impossible not to. OCD is an exhausting mental health condition that is made up of hugely misunderstood obsessions and compulsions, both external (like having to complete a task a set

The desire to be tanned online is driving a new generation of people to their local sunbed shops, where they film the process for millions The viewers are getting ready with an influencer as she decides what to wear to head to the sunbed shop. She picks loose-fitting clothing, she tells the camera, because she always feels sick after a sunbed. Elsewhere, a different influencer sprays a “triple-strength” watermelon-flavoured tan accelerator up her nose at her dressing table before putting her ha

A new wave of dating and relationship gurus are advocating optimism and the joys of being delusional on TikTok.

Ceramics have been around since at least 24,000 BC, the term 'thirst trap' since 2011. In 2016, Copenhagen-based Eric Nathan Landon became one of the first ceramicists to find fame online for his pottery videos, in which his natural attractiveness is enhanced by some deeply suggestive clay turning. The years since have seen the introduction of TikTok, which has taken thirst trap pottery to a new high. For You pages are now filled with beautiful people sat at the turning wheel, some simply workin

A photographer captured the heartwrenching scene of strollers left by Polish families ready for the arrival of Ukrainian moms leaving their home country with their babies, in a now-viral image. Photojournalist Francesco Malavolta has been documenting the current refugee crisis at the borders of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary over the last 12 days. In a scene that has since spread online, Malavolta captured a heartbreaking moment of humanity on March 3, as donated strollers lined Przemysl train s

Lucy’s honesty might come as a shock, but she regularly informs 30,000 people about her stealing habit via @ferretsborrowing, a TikTok account she runs. What started out as a way to share a glittery PowerPoint she made for a friend on how to shoplift is now part of what is known as “Borrowing TikTok”. This isn’t the first online community of shoplifters. In 2014, a Tumblr user “outed” a relatively smaller group of accounts that were also detailing their hauls and tips. But according to those in

Cindy Smock has 300,000 followers on TikTok. Gen Z loves her. She has iconic catchphrases and is asked for selfies wherever she goes. But Smock isn't an L.A. teen doing the "Renegade" in her content creator house. She's a 63-year-old evangelical Christian campus preacher from Indiana. "Welcome to Sister Cindy's Slut-Shaming Show," she says in one of the many videos that catapulted her to TikTok fame. After finding that college students had been sharing videos online from Cindy and her husband B

“Some people started to find out about where I was working and they started to form their own opinions about it," Cristina Villegas begins. "I wanted to take control of my own narrative so I decided to start vlogging my work experiences to show what it is really like and to set the record straight on assumptions that were made about me." Cristina started stripping at 18, and making videos about it a year later in 2018. She now has over one million subscribers, and she's a veritable trailblazer i

When clubs across the UK closed in March, 21-year-old Amber turned to a surprising alternative to meeting randoms in the smoking area: Omegle. “I really missed being out in clubs and meeting loads of new people, so I thought, ‘I’ll just go on Omegle’ and then I actually met some really nice people, so I just started using it quite a bit,” she explains. “There was a two-week period where I went on it every night.” For most of us, the 2009-born video chat room site Omegle is a distant memory of r

TikTok is no stranger to politics — whether it’s current rumours of it being banned in the US, videos encouraging safe protesting for BLM activists, or that time teens on TikTok apparently bought out Trump's rally**.** As the app has exploded in lockdown popularity, the platform has become a space for discourse on current events and society just as much as it is somewhere to learn fun dances or look at memes. Against that backdrop, it’s unsurprising — well, maybe a little surprising — that the U