#listen ok I didn’t know who to put there so i decided pirelli
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
itsgrapes-exe · 12 days ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
this is inspired by a hatchetfield one I saw
5 notes · View notes
threezframe-blog · 8 years ago
Text
A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2
A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2.
...
(To her amazement, her Facebook following isn’t shabby at 90K Likes, despite the fact she hardly touches it apart from linking her Instagram to it—a no-no according to the “gurus���. B*tch, please.)
Jeres would be quite happy to simply continue bewitching the public and getting paid to look pretty, if time was on her side. She knows that at the (ripe) age of 28, in one or two years, she will probably lose out to younger social influencers who are more willing to undergo more extreme surgeries to look even more Instagram-worthy; who are more willing to Snapchat what their boobs look like after augmentation.
(The thought occurs to her, fleetingly, that maybe Instagram won’t be around in two years, and neither will “social influencers”. But she brushes it out of her mind. No time for ridiculous notions! She needs to get her hair fixed right now.)
Sighing, she gets off her pink armchair and picks up her phone. She knows it’s a little too soon to call, but surely Dave at Tomlinson Hair will give her a much-needed hair makeover. She might even—gasp—give him a freebie Instagram and Snapchat in return.
Looks like she’ll have to call that dreaded Garry and ask him to come down and take her photos, and pay him ten whole dollars plus Uber fee. Not even her legendary dimples can melt that bastard’s heart.
 * * *
 Ping!
Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!
Ping! Ping!
Jeres opens her eyes at the sound of her iPhone exploding… with Whatsapp messages and iMessages. She knows it’s something important. But just five… minutes…more…
“Ah Bee!”
The sound of her sister’s voice jerks her awake. She sits up crossly. “What lah? Why cannot let me sleep?”
“The ranking of Top Social Influencers is out in the Straits Times this morning!”
How could she have forgotten about the ranking, the most important mainstream event of the year, the only reason on earth web personalities actually go out and buy physical copies of the national newspaper?
It registers briefly that this scenario is heavy with irony.
Jeres heaves her 169-centimetre frame out of bed, and grabbing her phone, dashes out to the living room. Her father is reading—sitting in the branded massage chair she was gifted last Christmas—the Life! section. Jeres spots her own photo in the collage on the front page.
“Pa, can I borrow the papers?” she asks in her calmest, most neutral voice.
“You can wait. I’m still reading,” comes the expected response.
Jeres resists the temptation to throw herself into a dining chair in a show of temper. Maintaining peace in the home is very important. It is what keeps a social influencer from being thrown out of the house that she contributes zero to.
Nervously, she taps on Notifications that keep lighting up her phone screen. First message was from her best friend and fellow Influencer Gigi Hafiz (real name: Anika Hafiz): “Babe, hugs xoxo. It’ll be better next year.”
Jeres’ heart sinks and a bitter, metallic taste fills her mouth.
She taps on the next message. Colin, the maybe-boyfriend. “Jeresalynne. Ur much more than a number ok. Drinks on me 2nite. Pick u at 9.”
It must be bad. Colin never offers to buy drinks.
She knows if she goes on Instagram, everybody’s going to be talking about it. She doesn’t think she has the strength for that. Not on home ground.
Finally, her father puts the paper down. He fixes a stare at her, which, despite her best efforts at nonchalance, reduces her internally into a mass of melted lipsticks on the dashboard of a car parked outdoors.
“I don’t even understand what you do with your life, Ah Bee,” he finally says. Oh no, Jeres cringes, he’s going to ask me to find a real job.
“You’re 28, still living in my house, eating up all my rice…”
Oh gawd, it’s the Korean serial version today, she moans to herself while she keeps her eyes in “regret” mode, looking down at the placemat sitting on the dining table, a gift from the pasta brand that sent her an unsolicited hamper of sauces and spaghetti last week.
Thankfully, her father does not go on. He simply hands her the folded up wad of print and ambles off to the kitchen to get his post-newspaper cup of soya bean milk.
Hands trembling, Jeres scans the cover page—she is featured somewhere left of centre in the collage. She does not want to turn the page but is unable to stop.
Pirelli Pang’s image takes up the length of Page 2. Looking a million dollars, she (with her shiny Red Velvet Hair) is wearing an Alice + Olivia embroidered, multi-colored patterned mini dress with matching gladiator sandals. Jeres notes cattily that Pirelli’s oversized silicone pouches masquerading as breasts makes what is supposed to be an elegant dress look vulgar. At the same time, she is sure the vulgarity does not hurt Pirelli’s popularity one bit.
The words hurt far more than the photo. Under the headline, which reads “SOCIAL SCORCHERS”, the cloying standfirst belts out: “Pirelli Pang (@callmepirelli) is the undisputed princess of Singapore’s Instagram universe. Outshining her closest competitors, which include last year’s winner Candy Chan (@candyanime) and runner-up Jeresalynne Chionh (@jeresababe), Pang shows them how it’s done.”
Jeres wants to put the paper away and not look at it at all (actually she feels like ripping it to shreds but her mother hasn’t read it yet). As if powered by a sadistic poltergeist, she finds herself searching frantically for her face. Her mind is a blur as she scans the first two pages. Candy Chan is Number 2, but the rest of the pages are filled with people she barely or does not recognise. Jeres stares in disbelief that she does not appear in the top six. There must be some kind of mistake.
She flips the page. There, on the top of Page 4, is a quarter page photo of her. It is the Bindi Photo. Next to her name, “7”.
“Jeresalynne Chionh, who ranked number 2 last year, fell from grace this year due to a series of unfortunate posts,” the story reads. What series of unfortunate posts?! screams Jeres in her head.
The article goes on to list just what: the infamous Bindi Incident (which cost her 26 Instagram followers), the time she took a selfie against the background of Singapore Civil Defence Force personnel carrying a body to an ambulance (which became a viral photo and the topic of many print media discussions about what constituted insensitive social media—but Jeres read none of that, it didn’t concern her) and the time she was Instagram’d using her Chanel handbag to press the lift button.
“That wasn’t even my post!” Jeres says out loud, indignantly. That bloody Colin. She should have untagged herself from his stupid post. So she is a little bit germ-phobic. Do these people judging her know the number of foreign talents staying in her HDB block? “These talents don’t enjoy the same education system as we do,” Jeres had told Colin, “so their standards of hygiene are likely to be different from ours.” Colin had quoted her next words almost verbatim: “Haven’t you noticed that [people of undisclosed nationality] never wash their hands after going to the toilet? I’m not touching that lift button. I can disinfect my Chanel later.”
Now she wishes she had made him delete that post. He did mention that it drew a lot of comments and Re-grams, but he never made her listen to what he was really saying: that it made a lot of people angry! Just for that, I’m going to order a whole bottle of single malt tonight! she decides in fury.
Number 7. She had dropped five places. How in the world was she ever going to catch up to Pirelli now? Last year Pirelli was a measly Number 4, but Jeres was already seriously worried because Pirelli wasn’t even a social media sensation till that year itself.
Jeres sits, slumped over the dining table, her head in her hands. Sok Choo, her sister, seeing that the worst is over, comes and sits next to her with a cup of soya bean milk.
“Here, drink, Cheh,” she soothes. “You’ll feel better.”
“I have to do something about this, Ah Choo,” Jeres says resolutely, gulping the drink. “I can’t peak at number two. I just can’t.”
Sok Choo nods, patting her sister on the back. “You just need to do something desperate, like XiaXue. She always shocks her followers so they never unfollow her.”
Jeres stares at her sister and suddenly sees the genius in her otherwise ordinary sibling. Of course. XiaXue was the first to have a multitude of surgical procedures done (copied by others). Then she coloured her hair an unapologetic pink (copied by others, in a range of colours). Then she got pregnant (copied by one other). Then she blogged about her unbearably cute kid (copied by many others).
Jeres simply has to do something—or some things—that nobody else has dared try before.
Jeres envelopes Sok Choo in the best bear hug her skinny arms can muster. “One of these days, I’m going to Instagram you!” she promises as she floats back to her room for a deep planning session.
TO BE CONTINUED...
2 notes · View notes