dressing room, sequestered between the bathroom and the kitchen at Spring Studios in New York City, a gaggle of girls are cackling. The noise spills under the closed door, the echo more contagious than the flu. Everyone within a 20-foot radius glances at each other, giggling. The voice at the center of the whirling crescendo is unmistakeable: Taryn Delanie Smith.
We’re on set for Popsugar’s inaugural Feel-Good List photoshoot, where we’re celebrating the people, places, and moments delivering a hit of dopamine right now. Delanie Smith is in the hair and makeup chair, having been crowned our Feel-Good Girl’s Girl, and you’d think she is prepping for a Netflix special. Her voice shifts between accents easily and with confidence, like she’s switching lanes on the highway while on autopilot, her upper lip curling as her pitch deepens. Laughter permeates the air.
Growing up in West Seattle with three older brothers, Delanie Smith became acutely aware of the gift of girlhood early on. “I was a girl’s girl to a T,” she says. “It was never, ‘Oh, well, I guess I gotta be one of the boys.’ No. Y’all can be dirty over there. I will be playing princess in the house with my dolls, making worlds, making forts. My brothers, if they wanted to play with me, they were playing Barbies and we were creating storylines, building entire neighborhoods. There will be loving marriages. There will be scandal.”
She smiles, then pauses. “I feel very grateful that I was encouraged to be a girl and to play. That’s a privilege.”
The Feel-Good Girl’s Girl
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“I’m now 29 and I still feel the way I felt at 7 years old in that pink bedroom,” she says, referring to her career now. “I feel like I never left.”
These days, you might recognize that joy in her viral videos, which notably include straight-to-camera ramblings, often in differing accents, and her fabricated online personas, also in accents. With the latter, they all have a backstory. There is the first character she ever posted online, Bryon, a little British boy with coyote parents; there’s Denise, a receptionist in heaven with a Long Island drawl; and Tammy, Denise’s diabolical assistant. Each one is bizarrely lovable.
Grateful is a word Delanie Smith circles back to often. She thinks back to age 7, when her family moved from a smaller condo in Lynnwood to their first house, and everyone went from sharing a bedroom to getting their own. “We really struggled, but my mom worked her way up,” she says. When they got there, “my mom told me I could paint the walls any color I wanted, because she knew it was such a big deal for us that we finally got our own rooms.”
The answer came so quickly and resolutely that you might wonder if it had lived in Delanie Smith since birth: Pepto-Bismol pink. Everywhere.
After the photoshoot wraps, Delanie Smith breezes into the kitchen. She stops at the table to tell Adrienne Bailon-Houghton how often she blasts “Strut” by Cheetah Girls in her car, and they chat about music and outfits and food. They don’t have their phones, but they promise they’re going to exchange information when they do.
This is the business of Taryn Delanie Smith: making friends wherever you go. It’s actively seeking out connections, and finding the good in others to show some version of that good to the world.
“How lucky am I to be a girl? It makes me emotional talking about it,” she says. “You are part of this really special camaraderie that can’t be fully explained. It’s just known.”
For anyone familiar with the model, actor, and viral internet personality, this is par for the course. Delanie Smith has spent the last half-decade inviting the likes of 2.9 million people across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — fans she lovingly refers to as “chaos goblins” — into her weird, wonderful, indisputably funny world of character archetypes, home renovations, and unfiltered rants. The “Mr. Rogers for adults,” she’s been called. Because, for many, tuning in feels like watching a friend. (Fittingly, she also co-hosts a podcast with her best friend, Tiffani Singleton, called “We’re Your Girls.")
“What I want to do with my career is give women license to take up a lot of space in the weirdest possible way,” she says. “We weren’t born to live within any specific mold, and yet society pushes us to silence that silliness. I decided, if I'm gonna be good at this, I have to let go and surrender to what people might think of me so that I can have fun. If I give even one woman out there the confidence to say, ‘Man, she is weird as hell, maybe I can let loose a bit more’ then I’ve done something pretty cool with my platform.”
and to
lay.
Creative
Talent, Hair: Nigella Miller
Talent, Makeup: Angelica Alberti
HMU: Cami Talbot
Production Designer: Katie Bloom
Set Designer: Miles Bettinelli
Set Assistant: Max Kotsonis
Retoucher: Vianca Maldonado
Director of Production: Alex Friedlander
Associate Producer: Dominique Guillory
Editorial
Sr. Director of Special Projects: Lena Felton
Director of Audience Development: Kaitlin Hatton
Managing Editor: Karen Synder Duke
Editorial Operations Coordinator: Caitlin Oates
Video
Director of Photography: Thomas Jezik
Head of Video Production, Lifestyle: Stefania Orrú
VP of Video, Lifestyle: Stephen Pelletteri
Supervising Producer, Social Video, Lifestyle: Jordan Shalhoub
Associate Social Talent Manager: Mia Marquez
Styling
Look 1: BCBGMaxAzria jacket and skirt, Wales Bonner top, Anonymous Copenhagen sneakers, Jennifer Fisher jewelry
Look 2: Simon Miller dress, New Balance sneakers, Jennifer Fisher jewelry
Delanie Smith’s meteoric rise on social media is in large part because of those comedy sketches (and, “in a way I still feel like I’m just getting started — I think I have a lot of people living inside me,” she jokes) but she has been doing impressions off camera since she could talk. All of her dolls had individual personalities. In school, she would create characters of her teachers to make her family laugh. She’d talk to herself in different voices in the shower, on the way to work, with friends.
This knack for storytelling comes from a genuine fascination with human beings: what makes them tick, how they talk, how they walk. “People are the most interesting part of my day,” she says. “There are many things I’m not good at, and I don’t say that to be self-deprecating. But one thing I’ve always felt confident in is that I really see people and I also really enjoy them. That’s what makes certain characters so funny, because the quirks feel true.”
“I chose a shade that was so bright that, when the door was open in the summer, it would glow out into the hallway. And I said, make the whole room pink — pink curtains! Pink pillows! Pink shelves! Pink sheets! I was color drenching before any of you out there were color drenching.”
In that room, something unlocked within her. It was the permission, and subsequent freedom, to have fun and “embrace the silliness.” This would become the common denominator in her approach to life, personally and professionally, as she moved from Seattle to New York, worked as a waitress and receptionist, competed in beauty pageants, and, eventually, made the jump to full-time content creator.
BY KELSEY Castañon
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NELSON HUANG
WELCOME TO
THE FEEL-GOOD
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Editor-in-Chief: Kelsey Castañon
Photographer: Nelson Huang
VP, Creative, Vox Creative: Colleen Lennon
Sr. Art Director, Vox Creative: Meg Konigsburg
Sr. Visuals Designer: Summer Bockart
Visual Designer, Vox Creative: Binlin Cao
Photo Assistant/Digitech: Ren Jheng
Sr. Style Director: Jessica Andrews
Shopping Director: Sarah Wasilak
Assistant Shopping Editor: Naomi Parris
