It is one of the great mysteries of the modern world. Why does Molly Mae, a glorified reality star have such a hold over my generation of Gen Z women?
Because you certainly can’t escape the Molly-Mae effect.
When, as a 25-year-old, I look around my peers, it’s there in what they are wearing, what they are carrying and what they look like.
In the sea of nude-coloured lounge sets they’re all dressed in, the Stanley Cups they take everywhere, the perfectly manicured nails, the Gail’s coffees they buy and their scraped-back bun hairstyles held in place by gel.
This is the aesthetic championed by Hertfordshire-born Molly-Mae, one of the most successful stars ever to come out of Love Island after she was placed as runner-up in 2019.
But surprisingly, given the supposedly shallow world of social media and influencers, the ‘Molly Mae effect’ runs deeper than simply one’s appearance.
It’s an approach to business, to friendships, romance, family and life that she shares at length with her two million YouTube followers.
For countless women my age, she is the guru who has it all; a £4million mansion, an adorable baby, a strong network of friends and family and, most importantly, an incredibly healthy head of platinum blonde hair.
Molly-Mae Hague is one of the most successful stars ever to come out of Love Island after she was placed as runner-up in 2019
We trust and take in everything that Molly Mae says partially because of her success – she has after all just been selected for the Sunday Times’s Young Power List, for Heaven’s sake!
More importantly, she has always pledged to be open and honest with us.
In a world where every influencer and their cat are flogging some dodgy product on social media just to make a quick buck, she comes across as different. ‘You guys know I would never suggest anything I didn’t fully believe in,’ she insists.
That has been the beauty of Molly Mae – she’s always appeared warm and reliable as well as being aspirational. The internet’s favourite older sister or, as she was once dubbed, ‘the people’s princess’.
As one 20-something told the Mail: ‘Me and my friends have said it feels like we’re on Facetime with her when she uploads a YouTube video.
‘She’s so relatable and real even though she’s rich – and everything she has recommended, I’ve bought and loved.’
Last week, Molly-Mae delighted fans by posting a black and white image of Tommy Fury and their two-year-old daughter Bambi in Center Parcs, the first official picture confirming they are back together
Last week, she delighted fans by posting a black and white picture of Tommy Fury, 25, and their two-year-old daughter Bambi walking down a wooded lane in Center Parcs.
The pair had parted ways last summer and this, for the first time, was official picture confirmation they were back on.
Molly Mae later posted her usual Vlog – video blog – on YouTube in which she sits in a room, stares down the camera and chats with her two million subscribers.
Beaming, she said: ‘I’m not actually at my house, I’m at Tommy’s.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot today about how I skipped a massive chapter in this… story. It’s not a story, well it kind of is a story, but that doesn’t sound right saying it like that.
‘But I skipped a massive chapter in everything that went on in the breakup.
‘Where I would be so open with you guys, it’s just so not me to not be so unbelievably open and share every inch and detail of my life.’
After months of will they, won’t they, this should have been a great moment.
Molly-Mae on the show in 2019 with her Love Island sweetheart, Tommy Fury
The couple on holiday with their daughter, Bambi. In August, Molly-Mae announced to her nearly eight million Instagram followers that she and Tommy had split up after five years
But, I had to stop watching. I felt she had broken her word.
Nothing about the past few months and Molly Mae has been anywhere close to ‘open’. I’m bored of it and switching off – and there are plenty of others like me doing the same.
The reason is the murky way she’s treated us over the breakup and then reunion with her Love Island sweetheart, Tommy Fury, 25.
The entire saga from start to finish has gone against everything that made her stand apart from the sea of cookie-cutter influencers.
In August, she dropped the now infamous bombshell statement to her 7.9million Instagram followers: ‘I am extremely upset to announce that mine and Tommy’s relationship has come to an end.
‘After five years of being together, I never imagined our story would end, especially not in this way.’
And then went on to refuse to tell us what had happened.
The pair had been due to get married that summer, for Heaven’s sake! And the shock of the statement coupled with her ambiguous response to the devastating news sent social media, and quite frankly the entire UK news cycle, into meltdown.
I find it hard to believe that someone as well versed in the internet as Molly Mae didn’t know she would garner this reaction.
Speculation began to roll and she let it continue. No doubt aware of the hunger for answers, Molly Mae released a YouTube video titled ‘Hi’ which netted 3.8million views despite the fact it offered no clarity about her and Tommy.
But, hey, at least she made around £9,000 from it.
This was the first blow for me – I’d been utterly loyal until then but she now seemed to be milking her fanbase by NOT being ‘open’.
For weeks afterwards, you couldn’t move on the internet without seeing wild theories about the reason for their breakup. It was exhausting, and at some points quite toxic and damaging to innocent parties.
Amid rumours that Tommy had been unfaithful, a woman in Dubai had to prove the father of her newborn was not the semi-professional boxer by posting a picture of her real partner on TikTok in the hospital room with her.
A Danish woman was roped into the scandal because she had once met Tommy when he was on a lad’s trip to Macedonia.
Both had received an inordinate amount of trolls due to this break-up post.
This was by no means Molly Mae’s fault but all this could have been solved by a simple and honest statement from the woman who preaches her honesty with followers.
Molly-Mae’s decision to remain silent about the rumours surrounding the break-up created a perfect environment to reel in more followers, more viewers and more attention. Every time she posted a video, people click to find out any morsel of information
For clarity, Tommy and Molly came out months later and confirmed it was nothing but the boxer’s drinking that had forced a wedge between them.
But, like millions of Molly Mae fans, I watched every one of her YouTube videos amid the ongoing break-up because I wanted to hear from her about the cheating allegations.
Her decision to remain silent on the matter created a perfect environment to reel in more followers, more viewers and more attention. Every time she posted a video, people click to find out any morsel of information.
And Molly Mae took complete advantage of this.
She decided during this period to do a ‘Vlogmas’ – a term coined by YouTube stars to document every day in the run-up to Christmas and share it with fans.
We were therefore getting more Molly Mae content than ever before but she refused to address the ongoing situation with Tommy.
That’s not to say she didn’t hook people in with hints about her feelings – in one video she cried admitting that Christmas and December were ‘long’.
But even if you watched every 40-minute video, and there were many, you were no closer to the truth about her and Tommy.
Not very ‘open and honest’.
Instead, she pointed people in the direction of her upcoming Amazon Prime Documentary for answers.
The couple, pictured last week, looked ever the doting parents as they both held hands with their two year-old before swinging her in the air
Questioned about the state of affairs with Tommy by the Daily Mail, for instance, Molly Mae’s answer was: ‘We are doing the best we can, but I really do think the documentary is going to answer a lot of questions. We touch on that situation. You’ll see a snippet in the trailer.
‘The last thing I ever want is any confusion.’
When the three-part series dropped at the end of January, Molly Mae supporters raced to finally see if the cheating allegations which had ravaged the internet for months, were true.
At one point, Molly Mae: Behind It All shows the mother-of-one, sitting alone on her plush white sofa, declare the ‘breaking news’ of her Instagram post about breaking up with Tommy in the summer.
Fans have been left wondering if the break-up was just a publicity stunt to create peak interest amid the launch of her clothing line, Maebe
Explaining why she wrote the post and shared it with her millions of followers, she adds: ‘I decided I don’t have another night left in me crying in bed upset. It was the situation of, if I don’t post this statement, I’m not going to do this.
‘I am not going to walk away unless I put this out.’
Is she saying she involved the public in her break-up because she would not have been able to split from Tommy on her own?
That’s not only absurd but scarcely believable. And if it really is the case, I say leave us out of it.
Wouldn’t it have been the more adult thing to do to deal with it, like most celebrities, behind closed doors to avoid the constant and damaging online speculation for your family?
What good could come from having the father-of-your child relentlessly bashed for weeks by trolls on the internet as a ‘scumbag’ and a ‘lying cheat’?
Was it all a publicity stunt to create peak interest amid the launch of her clothing line, Maebe?
Whatever the case, something has just felt off about the whole sordid ordeal.
We had to endure months of toxic speculation, secrecy and hints – and that went against everything I and many others loved about Molly Mae.
She could have maintained our loyalty if she could have just kept it simple, saying something like: ‘We are going through a rough patch at the moment, please give us some space.’
Instead she made the most of it, exhausting us all and wasting our time.
So when she appeared beaming in her latest video laughing that ‘I’m at Tommy’s house actually today’ and explained herself, I was just fed up with the whole thing – and switched it off.
Sorry, but nice try Molly-Mae.