TikTok Face

THE MOST “LIKED” TikTok in 2020 was not some astonishing clip of a goose twerking, girl Renegading, or group of strangers harmonizing the shit out of a sea shanty.

THE MOST “LIKED” TikTok in 2020 was not some astonishing clip of a goose twerking, girl Renegading, or group of strangers harmonizing the shit out of a sea shanty. It was a deceptively simple recording of a young woman bobbing her head, bouncing between animated expressions as if trying to hypnotize a baby. “It’s M to the B, it’s M to the B,” she lip-syncs, mouthing the words to a 2016 British diss track. Her cutesy gestures are amplified by TikTok’s “Face Zoom” lens, which keeps the camera locked tightly on her expression at all times. At one moment, she smirks peacefully, her eyes relaxed; a few seconds later, she looks moony and cross-eyed, her smile skewed quirkily to the side. In the eyes of her many critics, she is doing nothing—and yet, the “M to the B” TikTok has over 45 million likes, a number greater than the entire population of California.

The young woman is 23-year-old Filipina influencer Bella Poarch, a former U.S. Navy veteran whose emphatically “adorable” facial choreography has made her TikTok’s fourth most-followed personality. Her videos’ chief draw is that they’re “oddly satisfying”—an epithet commonly reserved for ASMR soap-cutting videos, or images of perfectly smooth scoops of peanut butter. These are seemingly ordinary things that nonetheless generate intense visual pleasure; they gratify basic desires for symmetry, repetition and flow. Like ASMR content, Poarch’s smooth head-bobbing and elastic gestures lull you into a state of calm. Nothing distracts you from her expressions: Her skin is spotless, her make-up neutral, her background wholly nondescript. Her TikToks are almost too seamless; strangers marvel that she looks “like a Pixar character” in the comments.