Unhinged Personal Branding Advice (That You Need to Hear)
🗓️ Alyssa Chan-Evangelista POSTED TO THE GROUP CHAT Aug 6, 2026
I'm about to give you some unhinged social media advice that you probably don't want to hear. But I'm going to tell you anyway, because these are exactly the things I've studied from some of the most iconic female founders and creators, like Emma Grede, Maggie Sellers, and Alix Earle. Consider this tough love from someone who has studied the pattern over and over again.
Get Used to Seeing Yourself on Camera With No Makeup
I'm not saying you need to show up looking like you just rolled out of bed. But if you cannot look at yourself on camera without being fully glammed up, that's not a beauty issue. That's a self worth issue, a confidence issue, a self value issue, and I need you to heal it before you blow up and before you have millions of eyes on you.
Here's why this matters more than people think: the mental game is usually what burns creators out, not the content itself.
Think about where scaling actually takes you. If you're growing your content, at some point you might be doing a Get Ready With Me for Vogue, or you'll have a team show up wanting to capture something fun and spontaneous. You can't control everything, and if you try to control everything in your content, especially the way you look, it ruins so much of the joy of creating in the first place. That's where the magic actually happens, in the moments you didn't over manage.
So let your brain let go of the need for control, the need for perfection, the nitpicking of every flyaway. Because most of the time, people don't even notice. And if someone does comment on your flyaways, that's just engagement. Say thank you and move on.
I want you to get so comfortable on camera that it stops mattering whether the camera is even on. Because you are you, glam or no glam. That's the goal, confidence that doesn't depend on the filter.
Show Off More
This one's hard, especially if you have people pleasing tendencies. But you need to show off more.
That business win. That art you created. That thing you built. Put it in your content. Because I can't care about you if you don't give me anything to root for.
Think about how a simple birthday post gets all that engagement, people showing up to congratulate you, to celebrate you. Your business deserves the same energy. So many of us default to humble and shy, and yes, there's a tasteful way to do it, but so many of you are doing really cool things and just not talking about them. Not celebrating them. And here's the truth: we literally can't celebrate you if you don't share it.
And if you're worried about coming off as pretentious or braggy, look at the people who've built the biggest platforms doing exactly this. The Jeffree Stars of the world exist and thrive on social media precisely because they show off. You're not going to come across as arrogant. You might actually be inspiring someone.
Your Fear of Repeating Yourself Is Stopping You From Growing
If I can't describe your brand and your content in one sentence, it's not specific enough. Or, as I like to say, it's not YOU coded enough.
Whether that's "the girl who does that series," "the girl who says that catchphrase," or "the girl with the little lip liner moment in every video," you need to be so annoyingly repetitive that in a sea of a thousand people, you've given me something sticky to remember you by.
And here's the thing, there is no marketing without repetition. Think about the biggest brands in the world. Same slogan. Same mascot. Same visual cues, over and over. They don't treat that as boring or beneath them. They leverage all these things within their strategy.
None of this is about becoming a different person for the algorithm. It's about becoming so unmistakably yourself that no one can copy it, even when they try. The creators you admire didn't get there by being polished. They got there by being repeatable, by showing up messy and proud and unglammed until being seen stopped scaring them.
THIS IS YOUR PERMISSION SLIP TO BUILD AN ICONIC PERSONAL BRAND BY LEVERAGING YOU (sounds like IT GIRL behavior if you ask me).
