Nara Smith Is Craving More

Eighteen hours before I first meet Nara Smith, she becomes the main topic of discussion at a dinner party I'm at in Los Angeles. "You know," one of my tablemates attests, "Super beautiful, lots of kids, speaks in a whisper, wears these over-the-top looks, cooks things from scratch?" Everyone at the table concedes that we do, for the most part, know who she, an influencer of some clout, is talking about. "I just need to know. Is it, like, a joke?" the influencer asks the group. The answer, I suppose, depends on whether you find a combined 14.9 million TikTok and Instagram followers funny.

Here is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of items Smith, a 23-year-old model turned viral sensation, has made from scratch online in the past few months: churros; caramel apples, Spaghettios; a Crumbl cookie with pink frosting and homemade sprinkles; horchata; hot dogs, including buns; a blueberry birthday cake with buttercream frosting; Froot Loops; schnitzel and broiled red cabbage; raspberry crumble with vanilla whipped cream; Firecracker Popsicles; potato chips; Goldfish crackers; Capri-Sun; Coca-Cola; Takis; boba; ketchup; Cheez-Its; chewing gum; barbecue chicken pizza; salted caramel marshmallows; Oreos; soft-serve ice cream; Cookie Crisp cereal; and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with homemade peanut butter, jelly, and bread. Regardless of the menu, each video begins the same way with soothing music and includes up-close process shots of Smith at the counter in her spotless gray-and-white kitchen and quick cuts between mixing bowls and knife work. She is always in the same carefully angled pose, always perfectly made-up and clad in something fetching and outrageous yet fashion-forward (diaphanous tulle for juicing pineapples, floral appliqué for sifting flour), and always eerily emotionless. The dish is always completed within the time frame and always introduced with the exact same whispered, husky, monotone voice-over—someone in her house has a craving.

The whole thing began organically, Smith tells me in her regular voice, which is largely the same as on TikTok but at a normal volume, when we meet for tea in West Hollywood in October. A German native, she moved to America at 18 after falling in love and marrying her husband, model Lucky Blue Smith. Having been so transplanted and quickly pregnant with her first child, she found her skin and autoimmune system flaring up. She developed severe eczema, evidence of which I can see on her palms, and was later diagnosed with lupus. She began to consider the ways food could be affecting her health and adjusted her diet. "It forced me to really reevaluate how I eat and what I put into my body," she says. This concern extended to her family, including Lucky and her children, Rumble Honey (age 4), Slim Easy (age 2), and Whimsy Lou (6 months). She started making as much of their food as she could from scratch at home in Dallas and filming the process to share on social media. This soon included homespun takes on snack-aisle sensations. The more outrageous the prompt, the more her audience ate it up. "A lot of times—believe it or not—Lucky's actually craving something, or he's like, 'I want you to cook this,' or my kids ask me for random things," she says of her viral videos. "People think that's just my tagline, which it is, but that's actually the truth. They actually do want these things."

Admittedly, most people's kids want specific things to eat, and they'll go out and buy them if they are able for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and their sanity. ("Kids: mum I'm hungry. mum: that will be ready in 3-5 business days 😁" is one typical comment on a Nara Smith video.) "I feel like people think it's super hard or takes super long, which some recipes for sure do. Sometimes, I'm in the kitchen for seven-plus hours," Smith says, adding that the kids will be fed something else off camera in those cases. "Sometimes, some things are so much easier to do than one might think." Apparently, I could be making my own cheese in less time than it takes me to go to Erewhon and back. "It's fun to show people that they can actually make mozzarella if they want to at home in like 30 minutes," she says.

By now, it's been widely reported that food in much of the developed world is required to meet certain nutritional standards that food in America is not. Add to that the Trump-era regulatory rollbacks that have resulted in recent outbreaks of dangerous contaminants like salmonella in eggs, E. coli in fast food, and listeria in everything from deli meat to frozen waffles, and the concept of feeding your family with ingredients you personally handled (and can pronounce) starts to feel a lot less ridiculous. Factor in the cost of, say, baking bread versus buying it, and it's no wonder that influencers promoting easy, cheap family recipes and soothing cooking-related content have been on the rise for years. Smith's offerings are something slightly harder to define. They're not all easy for the average home cook and not always inexpensive, especially when you consider the labor involved. Her most popular videos aren't the ones where she's suggesting meal prep for busy moms—though, those do exist. They are the ones where she whips up something you're used to seeing from massive conglomerates like Nabisco and Kellogg's, seemingly without breaking a sweat. It's just a little bit ludicrous, and the question of exactly how aware she is of how ludicrous it is has become part of the draw. Viewers tune in and ask, What mass-produced confection will she whip up next? What will she wear to do it? Above all, Is she serious?

Let's get into it. Yes, she is serious. She is really cooking this food from scratch, she is really making it for herself or her family, and she is often wearing something designer and pretty impractical to do so. There is no off-screen team of kitchen helpers and nannies doing the grunt work. (There has only sometimes been a part-time nanny—Lucky and Nara rely on each other for childcare and family members when they travel.) There is no hidden film crew or stylist assisting. Though, she's been known to recycle a look from an editorial shoot. Smith used to reach out to fashion brands herself through Instagram; now, they come to her.

The clothes are a big part of the equation. A large part of the appeal of her videos relies on the repetition—creating a soothing haze of auto-playing content her viewers can relax into like a bubble bath—but the fashion does not repeat. Fashion has been a major part of Smith's life since she got scouted as a model at age 14 by IMG, and she's always loved dressing up, she tells me. As a hands-on mom of toddlers, she has pretty limited options to turn a look, and she first started dressing up in the videos for the fun of it. "I don't get to leave my house that much to work. I don't have a normal 9-to-5 job where I get to go to the office and maybe wear something fun, so my way of just feeling cute and feeling kind of fun is dressing up in the kitchen," she says. "If I get to do that in my kitchen while cooking and get a cute reaction out of Rumble when I walk down the stairs, I'll do that." She is giving people what they want, and it just happens to also be what she wants. "With my videos, I am pretty true to me," she says. "I feel like my videos are me but just more enhanced, more polished. … It doesn't feel like I'm playing a character because, technically, it's just me, right? [I'm] just speaking quietly and dressed well, but it's me." How does she protect the clothes while she cooks? "I wish I had an answer for that," she says. "Every time I'm done cooking, I look down dreading what I'm going to find, and I never find anything." She shrugs, adding, "I don't know how. I don't know why."

Commenters have complained that this category of content exists only to make other new moms feel bad about themselves, their store-bought dinners, and their kids' school-supplied lunches and that Smith is teaching young women to have unrealistic expectations of motherhood. But is it that different from the way people present the best-edited versions of themselves online, Facetuning a zit out of a photo and choosing the best frame of a set to post on Instagram? The perfect façade Smith presents in her videos doesn't negate her reality—the failed attempts, the spilled batter, the screaming toddler rendered inaudible thanks to audio muting. It just exists alongside it. It's not that this kind of idealized content (requiring, as it does, a fair amount of media literacy) is necessarily great for society and its young, impressionable minds, but you can't argue that it isn't here. Smith is not presenting her TikTok videos as a documentary. It's entertainment, and it's very popular.

In the 10-plus months since her videos began to really take off, Smith has been followed by frenzied fans in airports and shopping malls, pursued and heavily gifted by brands and designers, parodied by joke accounts, seated front row at runway shows, and invited to red carpet award shows by The Business of Fashion and the CFDA. Saturday Night Live seemed to be spoofing her in an October sketch skewering how TikTok addled we've all become, and Ariana Grande gave her a shout-out on Instagram. "All I can think of is Nara Smith. 'And when I got home from the Academy Gala, I made my kids some Capri-Sun from scratch, and I zested the lemons,'" Grande said in a video from the makeup chair. ("She's such a gem," Smith says of the pop star.) Smith is Gen Z, meaning she's basically always been online, but this level of fame has been an extraordinary development. "I feel like social media… It's just numbers on a screen until you go out and see what it actually does," she tells me. While sitting with her at a café on Melrose Place, I am increasingly aware of a certain angling of iPhone cameras, lingering stares, and quick whispers behind cupped hands in our direction, at least from the under-30 set. "There's this weird thing where I don't really realize the reach that my social media has," Smith says. "[It's] to where I usually step into a room, and there are all these actors and musicians and top models, and I'm just sitting there thinking to myself, 'What am I doing here?' But then they actually come and approach me. … I've met so many people that I've looked up to and admired or even just randomly saw on TV and loved their show, and they come up to me and [say they] watch my videos."

Smith says her husband has been a huge help navigating the newfound attention. When they met, Lucky Blue Smith was one of the most famous (at least online) male models in the world. "He would leave shows, and there would be thousands of people outside screaming his name, or when he'd go to airports, there would be girls showing up in wedding dresses, fainting, thinking that they're going to get married," she tells me. "So he kind of knew what that was like." He encourages her to avoid the bursts of negativity that can surge up, like the response, especially on Reddit, that arose from their announcement on Instagram a year ago that she was pregnant again at 22.

"I'm not on there, so I don't really know, but what I heard was that so many people were having an issue with us having another kid," she tells me of the blowback. "That all came over to my TikTok, and I was like, 'What is happening?'" She dove into the comments—the good, the bad, and the livid (on her behalf for her perceived imprisonment or directed toward her for her life choices)—and fell into what sounds a lot like depression. "I just felt so heavy," she says. "Nothing felt good to me anymore." She was pregnant, hormonal (Smith says she had a tough time postpartum with all three kids), and already feeling insecure, and now, she was feeling fundamentally misunderstood. "I didn't understand why all of these people were saying things that were untrue and actually running with that," she says. "It became this insane thing. … I was getting attacked for literally just posting cooking videos and not harming anyone."

To protect her mental health, Smith decided to disengage as much as an online creator can. In fact, Smith doesn't spend much time on social media at all. She'll post her content and usually respond to the first wave of replies, which tend to be more positive, from dedicated followers who admire her elegant fashion and parenting style, and then she keeps it moving. "I do love my community, and I love talking to people. That's one of the things that I enjoy about having social media—that connection," she tells me. "As soon as it gets too much, I just walk off."

A large part of the online vitriol Smith receives has to do with the perception of her as a "tradwife," a term coined for a typically conservative, white, and traditionally feminine Christian woman who chooses to take a submissive role in a marriage rooted in the belief that a woman's place is in the home—raising children, cooking, cleaning, and not having any fiscal or social independence. (Detractors argue that tradwifery is basically a dog whistle for fundamentalists who'd prefer women out of the workplace and back in the kitchen. Proponents say homemaking is an important job worthy of celebration and a personal choice, which is what feminism is all about.) Either way, it is not a label Smith—a woman of color who has been a part of the professional world since she was a teenager—accepts. She does not often reply to negative comments, but any mention of "tradwife" is typically one she will correct in real time.

I was curious why it's still so important to her to keep correcting the record. "First off, I think everyone should live their life the way that they want," she tells me. "If you want to be a traditional wife, I think that's so honorable, and you're doing so much. People don't realize how much it takes being a wife, a mother, and running a household. You work multiple jobs in one, so if that's the life that some people choose for themselves, that's great." She stresses, however, that it's not the life she chose. "I'm a working mom. I take care of kids. I split the responsibility with Lucky. Our household is very 50/50," she tells me. "We try to figure out the kids while both of us work. It's very much this jigsaw puzzle that we're trying to work through every single day. Being labeled as [a tradwife], that just didn't fit." It also has the added insult of twisting the perception of something she loves doing into something much darker. "I didn't want this narrative out there that I'm just at home slaving away. I'm not a tradwife. I'm a working mom, and I love cooking, and I have a passion for cooking for my husband, for my kids. Cooking is my love language. I love taking care of people in that way," she says.

I ask whether it's a strange moment to be a Mormon given the increase in reality TV–spurred attention thanks to shows like Hulu's summer hit The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Bravo's fan-favorite Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and accordant outsider opinions on a famously private and insular group. Smith is understandably reluctant to speak on behalf of an entire religion, not least because she and Lucky are not presently sure how Mormon they want to be. "We're both exploring what exactly we want to do for our family, and obviously, we are religious, but that looks different to everyone," she tells me. "People put all these perceptions onto us and think all these random things when, in reality, we're figuring out our faith. We know that we believe in something bigger than us, but how exactly that looks for our family, we don't fully know." They are not "hardcore Mormons," she has said; they don't wear garments and did not get married in the temple.

"It's really hard to be boxed into this one thing and be like, 'Oh, they're Mormon,'" she says. "No, we're not. We're figuring out our faith. We're growing. We're evolving." She wants to leave the door open to develop and adapt like any young couple might. "We obviously grew up in certain ways, and we obviously got married so young, and throughout the years, things change, and opinions change, and thoughts change." They're also raising kids, which means having conversations around how exactly they want them to be raised. "What do we want them to believe in? How do we want to go about daily life? All of these things are ever-evolving, and we don't share the same opinions on things as we did a year ago or six months ago," she notes. "It's such a personal thing to both of us that I don't feel the need to share that on the internet or talk about it a lot. I believe that everyone should make decisions for themselves, and I would never want anyone to feel influenced."

Smith and I set off on a shopping excursion and stop at a new boutique on Melrose, Bundï, which exclusively stocks Ukrainian designers. The store has several dresses Smith has already worn in her videos, including the famed Capri-Sun number, and the salespeople are as thrilled to see her as someone might have been to see Jennifer Aniston in the age of Friends, thrusting slinky sequin gowns and a chiffon rosette–covered ensemble at her to take home. (She wore the latter a few weeks later to meal prep for the week.) "I know you just had a baby. I just had a baby too," the store's owner says. "That's so wonderful! You look great," Smith says. "You look better," the owner says wistfully.

As the team at Bundï packs up her gifts in shopping bags, I ask Smith what she wants to do with her fame. Cookbook? Clothing line? Acting career? She's not ruling much out. "I feel like the world is my oyster," she tells me. (My money is on the cookbook, at least to start.) She wants to get back into modeling, she says, and with her newly elevated profile, she feels she can be really picky, which is exciting. What's really important to her now is "just building a legacy and building longevity and building a brand and a name that lives beyond just social media." She says she particularly admires Martha Stewart, a former model and on-screen cook turned mogul who could prove to be something of a blueprint. "She's a freaking icon," says Smith. "I admire everything she's built for herself so much."

One thing Smith is done building is her family. She says she won't be having any more children. "We wanted six kids initially, but then we had our first, and I was like, 'Maybe we only have four.' We had our second, and I'm like, 'Actually, I think I'm done.' But then Lucky was like, 'What about a third?' It just felt like our family wasn't complete. We had Whimsy, and I was like, 'Okay, we're good now.' Lucky was like, 'Yep, we're totally good now.'" They try to keep the kids' faces off-screen in their content. I'm surprised a designer hasn't gotten them all for a family runway turn, I tell her as we survey the shoe offering at Tory Burch. "I want to avoid putting them out there unless it's a larger campaign moment," she tells me.

The next day, I watch Smith transform for the Who What Wear shoot in an Italianate-style manse on the precipice of the Pacific Palisades that most commuters confuse with the Getty Villa. Yesterday's sleek bob has become a voluminous Old Hollywood wave thanks to Chris Appleton's expertise, and her gamine style (gingham capris, a Miaou tank top, and Saint Laurent black loafers) has been replaced by a distinctly glamorous aesthetic TikTok would likely identify as mob wife: a leopard-print pillbox hat and veil, crocodile-embossed leather, big furs, sleek skirts and stilettos, and a razor-sharp cat eye. It's briefly hard to remember this is the woman who yesterday enthused about her new house tucked away in Connecticut and how she plans to keep chickens, grow her own vegetables, and fix up a vintage car to drive her brood around town. As the camera flashes, she cuts her eyes at the lens and kicks her leg high up the mirrored wall. "Why not, right?" she winks. Why not? That's what you call "in on the bit."

Talent: Nara Smith
Photographer: Daniella Midenge
Stylist & Editorial Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist: Chris Appleton at The Wall Group
Makeup Artist: Tasha Reiko Brown With Chanel
Manicurist: Queenie Nguyen
Director, Video: Samuel Schultz
DP: Samuel Miron
Gaffer: Charles Schaefer
AC: Taha Sobhani
Grip: Caleb Czuszak
Video Editor: Collin Hughart
Art Director: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Producer: Luciana De La Fe
Designer: Allyson Quirk
Copy Editors: Jaree Campbell, Alyson Boragno