Creative Expression – Live Laugh Love Do http://livelaughlovedo.com A Super Fun Site Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:29:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 Why Did This TikToker Paint Her Face Green to Ward Off Men? http://livelaughlovedo.com/culture-and-society/why-did-this-tiktoker-paint-her-face-green-to-ward-off-men/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/culture-and-society/why-did-this-tiktoker-paint-her-face-green-to-ward-off-men/#respond Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:29:48 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/09/08/why-did-this-tiktoker-paint-her-face-green-to-ward-off-men/ [ad_1]

“Is it working?”


Photo of Rebekah Harding

Rebekah Harding

One TikToker decides to go for a shocking rebrand after realizing that the majority of her audience is men. Her strategy? A full face of green paint.

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Why did the TikToker paint her face green?

In a video with over 37,000 views, TikToker Hailey (@nothaileycase) sits in a gaming chair with a full face of green paint. She uses different shades of green to mimic contour and foundation, and tops off the look with bold winged eyeliner.

“A couple of months ago, I posted a video that changed my demographics forever,” she says. In the original video, Hailey drives a tractor while showing her daily routine of harvesting wheat. It garnered over 800,000 views.

In Body Image
@nothhaileycase/TikTok

She says that the video quickly turned her audience over 70% male, despite having a primarily female audience before.

“My inbox and my comments are littered with disgusting messages,” she laments, showing screenshots of men making sexual advances at her.

Hailey says she began brainstorming ways to drive away her new male audience and restore her primarily female viewers. She decides to paint her face green.

“Ladies, is it working?” she says, while jokingly smirking at the camera. The caption reads, “NO BOYS ALLOWED (unless ur chill like that).”

Did her decision attract more female viewers?

Hailey’s comments quickly flooded with female viewers who praised her for her creativity to get back the audience she wants.

“WE ARE HERE, WE ARE HERE, WE ARE HERE! (Horton Hears a Who reference, please understand),” one writes.

“This definitely worked, I’m a lady and I’ve never seen you on my fyp before and I stayed because I vibe with your face paint,” another says.

@nothhaileycase NO BOYS ALLOWED (unless ur chill like that) 🌸💓🎀💄 #noboysallowed #ladies ♬ original sound – 🤍

“This is a strategy I haven’t seen before, but it worked. Hello from one of the ladies who saw you on her FYP,” a third adds.

Others share their experiences with TikTok, pushing their videos to a primarily male audience.

“In following you because the same thing happened to me, and it got so bad I had to disable my comments on a video,” a commenter says.

“One time a video started trending with middle-aged white men, and a bunch started following me. I fully just deleted the video and blocked them all. I was ABSOLUTELY NOT,” another writes.

The Daily Dot reached out to Hailey for further comment.

The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s newsletter here.



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]]> http://livelaughlovedo.com/culture-and-society/why-did-this-tiktoker-paint-her-face-green-to-ward-off-men/feed/ 0 A Case for Joy in a Monetized World http://livelaughlovedo.com/personal-growth/a-case-for-joy-in-a-monetized-world/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/personal-growth/a-case-for-joy-in-a-monetized-world/#respond Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:18:11 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/07/15/a-case-for-joy-in-a-monetized-world/ [ad_1]

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~William Bruce Cameron

My gardener and I were talking the other day—his English broken, my Spanish worse—but we found a way to connect.

He told me about his eight-year-old son, a bright, joyful kid who loves baseball. The boy wants to play. His mother wants him in tutoring. And somewhere in that gap, a bigger question emerged: what matters more—discipline or joy?

I didn’t plan to give advice, but it came out anyway. “Let him play ball,” I said. “Let him be part of a team, fall in love with something, feel what it’s like to give yourself to a game you care about.” Maybe there’s room for both—tutoring on weekends or part-time. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that too often, we push kids toward what’s useful before they know what they love.

That conversation stayed with me because it reflects something bigger and more troubling: almost everything in life now feels monetized.

From birth to death, we are priced and processed. Pregnancy is a billing code. Daycare is a business. College is debt. Even death has been streamlined into packages—premium, standard, economy.

Want to talk to a therapist? That’ll cost you. Want clean food? That’s extra. A safe place to live? Depends on your credit score. Even our time with loved ones feels rationed by work schedules and productivity apps. There’s a price tag on presence.

The monetization of everything is more than just an economic system—it’s a cultural atmosphere. It creeps in quietly, turning art into content, friendships into followers, and values into branding strategies. We trade attention for advertising, care for convenience. And as the world becomes more globalized, centralized, and digitized, this way of thinking spreads—efficient, scalable, and soul-numbing.

But there’s something that can’t be priced or faked: flow.

Flow is that immersive state where effort disappears, time softens, and we’re fully absorbed in what we’re doing. It’s the feeling of being completely alive and focused—not because we’re chasing a reward, but because we’re in tune with the task itself.

I remember pitching in Little League when I was ten. I wasn’t the best, but for one brief inning, everything clicked. I stopped thinking. The ball moved like it was part of me. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone—I was just there, inside the game. That was flow. And I’ve spent much of my life chasing that feeling through music, writing, teaching.

I’ve spent most of my life as a teacher, filmmaker, and writer. Not because it made me rich—it didn’t—but because it gave me something to live for. Now, at seventy, I help care for my 96-year-old mother, still trying to finish my life’s work with little to show for it in the bank. But the work still matters. So does she.

My mother’s caregivers—mostly women of color—show up every day. They help her eat, dress, and smile. They aren’t paid nearly enough, but they move through their days with compassion, grace, and humor. Their labor doesn’t fit into a tidy spreadsheet of profit. And yet it holds the world together.

I wonder: What happens to a society that forgets how to value the things that can’t be monetized?

We know something’s wrong, but we don’t know what to do. We still need to pay rent, buy groceries, find a way to survive in a system that rewards efficiency over depth, image over presence. There’s no clear answer. Just tension, quiet resistance, and sometimes—if we’re lucky—a moment of clarity.

So I say again: let the boy play. Not to win, or to be the star, but to feel the joy of running with others, of belonging to a team, of laughing, working hard, and learning—together. Let him build friendships that might last a lifetime. Let him feel what it means to be part of something larger than himself, where improvement matters more than trophies.

And maybe, just maybe, let him find flow. On the field, or even in tutoring, if the conditions are right—if the learning is alive and the focus is real. Because flow is the goal, whether in a game or a classroom. That’s where confidence is born. That’s where joy lives.

Of course, I know Little League can be its own kind of heartbreak. When the game becomes about dominance, when adults project their own regrets or insecurities onto the boys, when coaches forget it’s supposed to be fun—it can damage the very spirit it’s meant to nourish.

That’s why it takes the right coach. One who listens. One who knows it’s a boy’s world for a short while, and that this game, at its best, teaches how to care, to lose with grace, to try again, and to trust others.

I told his father all this in our clumsy mix of English and Spanish. I told him I hoped his son gets to play. Not because it will lead to anything measurable. But because it already is something valuable.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is willingly open the door—and let the players play.

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]]> http://livelaughlovedo.com/personal-growth/a-case-for-joy-in-a-monetized-world/feed/ 0 Beauty in the Age of Algorithms: Why Makeup Feels Less Joyful Now http://livelaughlovedo.com/beauty/beauty-in-the-age-of-algorithms-why-makeup-feels-less-joyful-now/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/beauty/beauty-in-the-age-of-algorithms-why-makeup-feels-less-joyful-now/#respond Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:17:06 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/06/10/beauty-in-the-age-of-algorithms-why-makeup-feels-less-joyful-now/ [ad_1]

There was a time—not long ago—when each season brought with it a new beauty “moment” that we all knew about. Graphic liner, bold blue lips, glitter brows. And while many of these trends were polarizing or impractical for daily life, they kept beauty fun, expressive, alive because we were all talking about it. Now, trends seem to have disappeared.

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram, and the majority of trends are replaced with instruction. It’s a masterclass-heavy moment. In many ways, this is a gift—we’ve never had access to professionals and the knowledge that was once reserved for celebrities (think: Danessa Myricks’ tutorials or Mary Phillips’ underpainting technique). Yet, it feels like something’s missing: the joy of surprise or rush of reinvention.

Instead of beauty inspiration coming from the pages of a magazine or the front of Fashion Week, they’re stitched together by algorithms, hyper-personalized feeds, and ever-scrolling For You pages. One person’s feed might be neutral lips and soft contouring, while their best friend sees bold liner and smokey eyes. Whether it’s over-filtered social media feeds or the striking similarities between influencers, there’s a uniformity that’s hard to shake.

It’s splintered the beauty world into hyper-particular niches—each with its own set of unspoken rules and strictures.

“Trends are fragmented because everything is fragmented these days: how we communicate, who we listen to, how we get information,” says New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman in a recent article.

But in the deluge of tutorials and trends, maybe this fracture actually creates space for us all.

With the rise of no-makeup makeup and “your skin but better” foundations, there’s been a move toward embracing (and even re-creating) natural features—freckles, texture, human imperfection. We’re questioning the beauty standards we grew up with and collectively finding empowerment in choosing not to cover up.

Yet somehow, this movement meant to celebrate individuality has somehow developed its own homogenized aesthetic. Even the “natural” look—think perfectly dewy skin, fluffy brows, subtle contours—creates a new type of conformity, evolving into its own prescriptive routine. We’ve traded one uniform for another, even if it’s a more subtle one.

“When even being anti-trend—deciding to buy nothing or at least nothing new—is trendy, you know we have reached peak trend Dada,” writes Friedman.

Has the pendulum swung so far that there’s no longer any space for whimsy and weird? How do we get back to playful expression?

Maybe the way back isn’t about abandoning tutorials or the quiet power of subtlety, but about giving ourselves permission to color outside the lines again. To apply a product simply because it makes us feel something, not because it’s trending. To reclaim experimentation as a form of art.

Dare I say, there’s room for both celebrating our natural features while exploring creative expression through the color and texture of makeup. For finding both acceptance and transformation. Personally, I want to start having more fun again.

Instead of following a tutorial from someone whose features look nothing like mine, I want to start being more intuitive in how I apply my products. Instead of focusing on doing it right, I want to do it in a way that feels right. Some days, it may be no makeup, but other days, it may be a fun pop of color.

Recently, I find myself gravitating toward grungy green eye shadow and mustard yellow nail polish—the kind of unconventional hues the minimalist version of me would run from. So I’m saying it—rather typing it—here for accountability: My goal is to incorporate more colors in ways that feel personal and authentic. Less prescriptive, more playful. Maybe you’ll join me?

Illustrations by Megan Badilla

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