Kylie Perkins faces the camera in a pink quarter-zip, hands clasped to reveal a blue manicure. “Are you doing your best, or are you lying because it’s easier?” she asks. “If you tell the truth, you are gonna be forced to make changes?”
The 27-year-old TikTok influencer has amassed most of her 2 million followers in a matter of weeks — half of them in just the past few days — by posting motivational videos from her home in North Carolina aimed at young mothers like her who may feel behind on housework, urging them to essentially get their shit together. In some, she demonstrates her morning routine of drawing the curtains, opening the windows, and making the bed. In others, she wipes down her kitchen, folds laundry, or simply addresses the camera. In many of them, she’s yelling.
“You’re capable of so much more than just scrolling on your phone and not getting anything done,” she says. Her aim, she explains, is to help women experience clearer minds through uncluttered spaces.
Women seem to be responding to the tough love. “Kylie Perkins has yelled at me enough that I finally got up and started to do something about my depression,” a 30-year-old Kansas City woman named Heather Richard said in a voice-over for a recent video. In her post, Richard described the challenge, and ultimate relief, of deep-cleaning her home while newly sober.
“pov you introduce your teenage daughter to Kylie Perkins and this is what her room looks like this morning,” reads the text over a video from another woman, who filmed herself entering a tidy bedroom with a neatly made bed and raised blinds.
The conversation around Perkins has quickly become about more than cleaning. When, in recent days, an influencer made a video alluding to Perkins and suggesting she supported Donald Trump, conservatives quickly rallied around Perkins, following her in droves and flooding her comment sections with support. “Following you because of the way the left is trying to cancel you,” one woman wrote.
@sociallykylie Telling the truth will break you free. #toughlove #cleanyourhouse #stayinmotion #stoplyingtoyourself #doingyourbest
Perkins’s rapid ascendence seems to mark, if not the start of a new era, a return to an old one: “bootstraps”-style self-help is back. That means no wallowing allowed. In her videos, there’s a relentless focus on the individual as the agent of change, regardless of context. If you feel shame or guilt about your mess, you probably should, she says — that’s a message from your brain to get going and fix it. (Perkins didn’t respond to requests to speak for this story.)
Part of the reason Perkins isn’t compelled by conditions that may make it hard to be productive, like depression or ADHD, she’s suggested, is that she has overcome some difficult personal circumstances of her own. In her videos, she has mentioned parents who suffered from drug addiction, a period as a teen when she experienced homelessness, and later, as a mother, a challenging time when one of her children was having seizures and Perkins struggled with suicidal ideation.
As such, she seems to have little patience for people who point to some sort of circumstantial disadvantage as an explanation for flagging motivation or functioning. If she has come through all that, she suggests in her videos, you can get off the couch and do the dishes. “I have had to be tough my whole entire life,” Perkins says. “That’s why I come on here and I’m tough with you guys.”
In a video in which she folds laundry as she discusses her recent diagnosis with PCOS, as well as her symptoms like fatigue and brain fog, she says, “A diagnosis is an answer; it’s not an excuse.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Perkins has rubbed some people the wrong way. KC Davis, a licensed professional counselor and cleaning influencer, recently made a video critiquing Perkins’s message as “shame-based.” We’ve been here before, Davis points out: Perkins’s message, she says, recalls that of Girl, Wash Your Face, the 2018 best-selling book by Rachel Hollis, whose exhortations to choose “positivity” over excuses resonated largely with conservative and Christian women while striking others as “toxic.” “I made a promise to myself and I don’t break those, not ever,” Hollis writes in the book, recounting a time she ran on the treadmill after going out for dinner and drinks.
Davis told me she worries about what happens when the novelty wears off and the yelling stops working for people. “Many, many people who find that motivating in the moment will not sustainably be motivated by that because what they’re doing is entering a fight-or-flight state in the face of this idea of ‘the way I exist now is shameful and disgusting and pathetic and lazy’ — those words are moral failings,” she told me. “And when I can’t get it done, I’m being lazy and pathetic and all these things.” Because of the ensuing emotional fallout, she said, people may return to old numbing behaviors.
Instead, Davis said, it’s important to build skills and routines for the long run, such as performing evening “closing duties” in the kitchen or “resetting” a room. Those skills can exist — and are easier to maintain — within a gentler philosophy that neither coddles nor hinges on hostility, she told me. (Meanwhile, newly minted Perkins fans have been posting videos and comments blasting Davis.)
Not to mention that Perkins’s drill-sergeant shtick tends to sweep under the rug issues that I would be curious to hear her talk more about: her household division of labor, ideas for women who work outside the home. She will occasionally shout out “strong” single moms or give her husband kudos for helping out around the house. She has also acknowledged that her videos, some of which feature afternoon cleaning, aren’t aimed at women who aren’t home during the day. And if you’re physically ill, disabled, seriously mentally ill, or pregnant, well, she doesn’t mean you.
Other than all that, though, Perkins wants women to understand that taking care of themselves and their families isn’t actually hard — they are just making it hard. But with more eyes on her, it may be increasingly difficult to tout a message of individual agency as all but universal when, by her own admission, it requires so many caveats.
Perkins’s online fame is so new she doesn’t yet seem to have figured out how to monetize it; an existing social-media-marketing course, an Amazon storefront, and a merch line currently populate the link in her bio. In a TikTok Live on Wednesday night, she said she has signed with a talent agency with podcasting in-house. A book deal can’t be far off.
For now, though, she seems largely to be selling an attractive fantasy: that the only thing standing in your way is you.
