Those who remember the lawless, pre-algorithm days of TikTok will recall its original two modes: dancing-meets-lip-sync chaos and the sacred Get Ready With Me (#GRWM). If you weren’t renegading or pounding your face with a Beautyblender, you simply weren’t getting views. And then Alix Earle showed up.

Everyone talked about “authenticity” online, but it wasn’t until Alix that anyone actually proved it worked. The story goes like this: a 21-year-old business student at the University of Miami, posting flashes of her party-girl life, suddenly decides to show the internet her cystic acne — Accutane, no filters, no softening effects. At the same time, she started to quietly reinvent the GRWM. While other creators recited their routines like a script, she turned makeup into background noise and let the real show be her college drama, delivered in meticulous, messy detail.

In a landscape ruled by hyper-curation, her videos felt almost startlingly human — too intimate to look away from. They pulled millions of views and sent her follower count into orbit. Soon she teamed up with Alex Cooper for the video podcast Hot Mess (now her solo operation). The show cracked her life open even further: dating, family dynamics, the unglamorous realities of being Alix. And then came Ashtin.

I can tell you exactly where I was when I first met Ashtin — parasocially, of course. The sisters were perched beneath the Eiffel Tower, dressed like Parisienne princesses during Ashtin’s study-abroad stint in Italy. It wasn’t their first video (their earliest viral moment, “sisters bullying sisters,” reportedly hit nearly two million views), but Ashtin had the same magnetism as Alix. Different packaging — dark hair versus Alix’s bleach-blonde Barbie aesthetic — but the same willingness to be uncomfortably honest online.

Let’s start with the basics: Ashtin Earle, three years younger, one of five siblings, and the only one who shares both of Alix’s parents. She studied psychology at Tulane University before moving to New York, where she now works full-time as a brand ambassador.

“One thing about [Ashtin] is she’s cool,” Alix said in a viral Hot Mess clip. “Everything she does, everything she wears, everything she says… She’s just cool, and I want to be her.”

Alix’s career has gone full Hollywood — she’s currently in the Dancing With the Stars semi-finals — yet her content still leans on chaotic relatability. Ashtin, meanwhile, feels like the quieter sister with sharper edges. Her biggest hits are the glossy outfit videos: Rodarte at the CFDAs, effortless downtown moments, and then the whiplash of her comedic, deeply zillennial DGAF takes.

The difference makes sense. Even if the sisters share fans, those fans expect different things. Nobody wins by trying to be a carbon copy — least of all Ashtin. (If she tried a straight “copy-paste” of Alix’s persona, the internet would sniff it out instantly.)

But what really keeps people watching is the sisterhood. Ashtin’s first pinned TikTok — now sitting comfortably above four million views — features Alix’s dog and a caption that’s basically a love letter. “Omg she loves u,” Alix commented.

Because the truth is, most of us don’t relate to their apartments or their brand trips or their loaned-out designer gowns. What we do relate to is two twenty-something sisters trying to grow up at the same time, in the same industry, under the same spotlight. It’s messy, it’s strange, it’s sweet — and it’s the sincerity, not the spectacle, that keeps people watching.