Who's that girl?
She has 11 million followers, shuts down shopping centres for meet and greets, and launched a beauty brand with hype akin to a Kardashian. But if you’re not a superfan, you may not know Anna Paul at all. In a rare interview, Courtney Thompson meets the surprising internet superstar.
PHOTOGRAPHY by BRETT CLARKE
STYLING by ANNALIESE DOIG
You’re standing in a crowded Westfield shopping centre, in an already bustling London, where thousands of teenagers are converging on the British pharmacy chain Boots. It’s pandemonium. A handful of security guards are attempting to corral the frenzied line of people, all craning their necks, iPhones in hand. Eventually, Westfield officials have to cut off the queue; there are simply too many people. Assessing the scene, you’d guess Harry Styles was in town, or maybe Billie Eilish. But no, it’s Anna Paul, fresh from the Gold Coast. “It was wild,” she says, recalling it like a dream she can’t believe.
There’s a chance you’ve never heard of Anna Paul. But it doesn’t really matter, because there are more than 11.4 million people who have. That’s the number of followers the 25-year-old has across all her social channels, which include TikTok (with a following of 7.2 million, it’s her largest), Instagram (3.3 million across two accounts), X (531.6K) and Snapchat (374K). On TikTok, she posts day-in-the-life vlogs where she takes her audience on a trip to Costco with her beloved ‘Mama’, or lip syncs to the latest viral Gracie Abrams song. On Instagram, photo carousels perfectly nail the balance between being really hot and really real. She’s got a trademark way of narrating videos that sounds like she’s put the audio on double-time, and her audience – made up of people of all ages, but mostly gen Z – eat it up. When fans see her out in public, they scream. “We’ll be driving down the highway and all of a sudden I’ll hear shrieks from people in cars spotting us,” she says.
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And yet, this InStyle story is Paul’s first major editorial, let alone cover, and this is one of the first interviews she’s ever given. With her level of reach, she has little need for traditional avenues of self-promotion or marketing. She’s done it all herself – and without a publicist or manager in sight. Regardless of what you think about content creators, or social media, you can’t deny they’ve completely fractured our idea of celebrity. Paul may be scoffed at by some, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a highly influential figure in Australian media right now
Born in Sydney to German parents, her family bounced between Germany and Australia before settling here when she was four (her younger brother, Atis, was born in Germany). Her mum struggled with English and found it difficult to find work, but eventually landed as a carer; her father would flip things he found at garage sales. Paul has spoken of relying on Centrelink payments to get by. Now, she earns enough that both her parents have retired. Her mother and brother live with her in a Queensland waterfront mansion, made possible by Paul’s career. When I ask about buying the house, Paul is quick to correct me. “Oh, I’m renting that,” she clarifies. “I don’t want to invest a bunch of money into a house that’s going to be unsafe. I’ve moved four times in the past two years because my address always gets leaked so quickly.”
Her upbringing is somewhat of a contested area in the lore of Anna Paul. There are entire Reddit threads dedicated to whether or not she grew up rich, with many of them pointing to specific Instagram posts from more than 10 years ago, but Paul has a detailed explanation for each. Like one picture she posted of a Gucci watch when she was 13. “My dad bought it at a garage sale because his job at the time was to buy and resell things for cheap; he’d buy them for $2, sell ’em for $25,” she explains. “One day, he came home with a watch. And I was like, ‘That’s so ugly.’ It was like an ugly grandma watch. He said, ‘Yeah, but the brand is Gucci, so it’s gonna sell well.’ And immediately I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s Gucci, I gotta take a photo for Instagram.’ Then my dad sold it so he could pay rent.” From an early age, Paul had an innate understanding of how to use social media as a means of self-promotion. She admits that even as a child, she leaned into the smoke and mirrors of it all. “Instagram isn’t real and so you try to sell people this life,” she says. “And even though I was 13 and I wasn’t an influencer or anything, you struggle in real life, so you create this life for yourself online. Like, ‘Look, I have a nice bracelet, too, guys.’ I was 13, I was a kid.”
As she went through school, she made videos with her brother that they’d post to YouTube. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do after high school,” she says. Then 2020 happened. People started talking more about two burgeoning platforms – TikTok and OnlyFans – and Paul joined both (she was 21). “That’s when I started posting more of my life on TikTok,” she says. “It was easier to edit than a YouTube video, and faster and more personal with your followers as well. And then it took off during COVID.” ‘Took off’ might be putting it lightly. Not long after joining, Paul became Australia’s #1 creator on OnlyFans, in the top 0.01 per cent in the world – and some reports claim she makes as much as $220,000 a month through subscriptions. There, she posts photos in swimsuits, lingerie and strategically covered up nudes. Raunchy? Maybe, but only marginally more suggestive than the bikini shots you see all over Instagram.
Many people baulk at the idea of OnlyFans. Self-proclaimed feminists get tongue-tied trying to talk about the platform that allows people to post and charge a subscription fee for (most commonly) explicit content. They question whether it serves as a form of liberation or simply reinforces patriarchal structures. Like many complex issues, the answer likely lies somewhere in between. But the nuance of such a proposition gets lost, given it’s much easier to just brush off OnlyFans as a cheap and ugly part of society that entrenches women’s degradation. At the core of people’s distrust, or distaste, with OnlyFans and its creators is misogyny (even, or especially, the internalised kind), but also the stigma that clings to sex work. To be clear: there are lots of issues with OnlyFans, as there are with any platform that turns digital content into gig work. But to Paul, it’s all a matter of perspective. “An actress could do a sex scene and they’re considered an amazing artist,” she suggests as a comparison. “And then I do way less and I’m disgusting?”
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Paul talks as openly about OnlyFans as she does TikTok. To her, it’s not a big deal, and she credits her upbringing for her more neutral view of the naked body. “German people, or Europeans in general, when it comes to showing skin, it’s not sexual,” she explains. “Like, what’s sexual about boobs? They feed a child. That’s the kind of mentality I grew up with.” This attitude, combined with an understanding of her own parameters, has informed her approach to OnlyFans. “From the beginning, I’ve had firm boundaries about the kind of content I post,” she says. The biggest issue she’s encountered has been when she’s held up as a poster girl for all people on the platform. “Everyone is assumed to be doing the same thing,” she says. “But what I post on OnlyFans is akin to what Kylie Jenner posts on her Instagram, so my perspective isn’t necessarily representative of someone who’s very positive about being a full-service sex worker. It’s impossible for me to represent the whole spectrum.”
The fact she’s on OnlyFans and has been for so long is something that distinguishes Paul from her influencer contemporaries. But she’s unique in other ways, too. She recently got all of her lip filler removed, for instance, returned her hair to its natural colour and has an average screen time of an hour every day. She doesn’t have a team of handlers managing what, or how often, she posts. You can count on one hand the number of brand partnerships she’s done – which isn’t because she doesn’t receive offers. She does, daily. “I don’t wanna use my influence to just give my followers a discount code for some random brand if I don’t know how it was created,” she says diplomatically. “I don’t know the ingredients, I don’t know the owners, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t wanna promote these things if I don’t know that they’re 100 per cent legit, 100 per cent good, 100 per cent fairly priced.” Talking to Paul, it’s easy to see why young people develop such strong parasocial relationships with her. She’s completely devoid of pretence or the kind of insecurity that feeds arrogance. No wonder when she announced she’d broken up with her boyfriend of eight years, people lost their minds (it really was amicable, by the way, and she’s single now).
It’s not only that. Many influencers who reach a certain level of success feel immense pressure to keep up a gruelling schedule of posting. It’s why Emma Chamberlain took a hiatus from YouTube in 2022, and why Alix Earle admitted at one point she felt she needed to post at least three to four videos a day to maintain her rate of growth. “For me, it’s way more spontaneous than that,” Paul says. “I just post my life as it happens. I’m not really planning any of it. If I get an idea for a video, I usually get that idea on the day. For example, if I wanna hide money in baby formula at the supermarket, I’ll do it.” This is actually something Paul did – hid $1000 cash under the lids of baby formula and in boxes of nappies at a supermarket. “Mama was a struggling mum growing up,” she tells her audience in the video, her mum next to her. “This would have helped [her] a lot.”
This sort of thing isn’t uncommon for Paul. Take her skincare line, Paullie. Launched in 2023 with a six-figure waitlist, it sold out within six minutes and was one of the biggest beauty launches in Australia, drawing comparisons to Kylie Cosmetics. “I wanted to do something nice for my audience and give them something more than just my videos,” she says. “This way, they can still have something nice and positive when they’re in the room by themselves and not on their phone.” The Paullie range is intentionally basic; made up of 10 products – a cleanser, serum, moisturiser, two masks, a body butter and scrub, lip balm and scrub, and pimple patches. “When we were in development, people would say, ‘This is a very simple skincare routine,’ and I was like, ‘Yes, exactly.’” Keenly aware of the demographic of her following, she knew that if she started creating skincare products with actives in them, the Sephora teens who follow her would buy them, even if she told them not to. “One of the earliest decisions we made was that whatever comes out needs to be safe for everyone’s face.”
On more than one occasion, she has also purchased luxury items – Louis Vuitton wallets, Chanel perfume, Tiffany & Co. jewellery – to put inside random Paullie orders. “I just wanna give back to you guys,” she reasons in one TikTok video, “because you’ve given me so much.” And that’s just it: Paul is far more thoughtful and aware than she’s given credit for. With her happy-go-lucky vlogs, bikini photos and giddy double-speed narration, people might dismiss her as ‘just another influencer’. Funny, they once said the same thing about Kim Kardashian.
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