The Beauty of Vany from Essen

bebe Young Care, the skincare brand, had this idea: put young women in shared apartments and let the internet watch and vote on who gets in. It’s 2009’s version of aspirational content—before that phrase meant anything—and the machine was already running smoothly. Hundreds of girls applied. Now strangers get to decide.

I spent longer than I should have scrolling the Berlin applicants list. There’s a girl named Vany from Essen who looks unsettlingly like someone I know, just rendered in a different color palette. I am absolutely not calling for votes on her behalf. I’m just noting that she exists and that I noticed.

What gets me about this whole format—brand-sponsored communal living as entertainment, beauty products as the price of admission—is how cleanly it maps a real desire onto a product. You want connection, friendship, a nice apartment, attractive women in proximity. The brand provides the stage; everyone agrees to the fiction. Nobody in 2009 had the vocabulary for it yet. Influencer wasn’t a noun. Content wasn’t a job title. But here it already was, fully formed and functioning.