Many of us dream about becoming famous. After gawking at our favorite Hollywood stars, it’s hard not to wonder what it would be like if the entire world knew your face. But what if that happened and it nearly destroyed your life?
Chloe Clem isn’t exactly a household name. However, you probably recognize her by descriptions like “the side eye girl.” You see, Chloe was at the heart of an early viral internet meme, and it completely changed her life. In many ways, it destroyed her…and in a very real way, viral fame remade her life for the better.
Who is the real Chloe? How did she become famous, and what is she doing now? Keep reading to find out!
A meme takes the world by storm
Some of the younger readers out there might need a brief introduction to Chloe Clem’s viral meme. That’s because the meme came out 12 years ago, making it practically ancient in internet terms. We’re talking, of course, about the meme of the little blonde girl who looks completely bored and is rocking some serious side eye.
Interestingly, many who love this meme still don’t understand the original context. It all started when David and Katie Clem posted a video to their YouTube channel. On October 3rd, 2011, they uploaded a video where they were taking their two children to Disneyland. One of the children, Lily, literally burst into tears because the family was returning to the happiest place on Earth.
Chloe, however, gave the camera a bit of side eye worthy of Jim from The Office. It was perfectly timed comedy, and it didn’t take long for someone to take a screenshot that became a popular meme. Afterward, neither Chloe’s life nor the internet as a whole would ever be the same.
Fame and a trip around the world
You’ve seen the meme, and now you know a bit more about the backstory. But that still leaves a major question: what did Chloe and her family do with all this newfound fame? For one thing, they got to sit back and watch this grumpy-looking girl become the face of the internet. Her eye roll became a common reaction image that allowed users to give the digital equivalent of a “can you believe this?” look.
That reaction image is still used online today. But at the early outset of her fame, shortly after going viral in 2013, Chloe began spending a bit more time in the one place where she was most famous: Brazil. Her mother confided to People that “South America is absolutely obsessed with Chloe.” After comparing her daughter’s fame to Beatlemania, she concluded, ”She’s ridiculously famous in Brazil. I have no idea how or why, but it’s true.” Because of this, the young girl had ‘billboards everywhere in São Paulo” and was recognized wherever she traveled!
Irony and the side eye seen around the world
These days, you might look at Chloe Clem’s viral image and wonder why she got so famous in the first place. The kid looked bored and incredulous…heck, most of us look that way first thing in the morning! However, our theory is simple: Chloe became famous right around the time the internet started running on irony.
In the early days of the internet, memes were quite basic…usually nothing more than pictures of cute cats with goofy captions like “I can have cheezburger?!” By the time Chloe became famous, platforms like Tumblr had normalized cool, ironic detachment. If your friend sent you a goofy meme, you needed to have your ironic response noting how uncool they were being.
That’s what made Chloe perfect: her side eye spoke for us all. And that’s why we still use this image to make our friends think twice before sending us something stupid!
Cashing in on her viral fame
Unfortunately, Chloe Clem and her family discovered a bleak truth early on: that you don’t necessarily get rich by getting famous. Certainly, the family got a huge bump to their YouTube subscription count, and that helped improve things financially. But Chloe’s face being so famous didn’t immediately translate to an easy paycheck. That might be why they felt compelled to take an easy money offer as soon as it was on the table!
In 2021, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, had become very popular. If you don’t remember this weird fad, NFTs were bits of digital art that were supposed to be valuable like actual works of art. Mercifully, the NFT fad went away, but not before Chloe sold her image for $74,000. Speaking for us, that’s an amount of money we’d never roll our eyes at!
These days, Chloe is 14 and trying to enjoy viral fame while being something of an introvert. However, she has expressed interest in creating some online content of her own. We’re sure that it will be a hit and also quite the ego boost. After all, who gets to break the internet twice in a single lifetime?