No One Can Tell If Nara Smith’s TikToks Are Satire, So We Investigated

You may not know you know Nara Smith, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen her on social media. She is stunningly beautiful, perfectly made up, extravagantly dressed, and making multiple gourmet meals a day from scratch while speaking in a soothing monotone, her neck inexplicably bent at a slight angle at all times. The South African-German model and influencer (whose age is somewhere between 22 and 27 years old, depending on which media outlet you believe) boasts more than 2 million TikTok followers who are fascinated — positively and negatively. For some, she’s aspirational. For others, a chilling stepford wife married to fellow model Lucky Blue Smith. More still are convinced that Nara Smith’s TikTok is satire. We’re curious, so we spent (way too long, TBH) investigating...

Nara Smith is known for showcasing her luxurious lifestyle, impeccable kitchen skills, and doing the absolute most always.

While Smith spends plenty of time showing off beautiful vacations, lavish spending, and luxurious clothes and accessories, she is most famous for cooking aesthetically pleasing dishes in an aesthetically pleasing way. Smith routinely reminds viewers that cooking is her love language and, based on the absolutely beautiful dishes she puts together, she has a lot of love to give.

But her cooking and baking skills are, frankly, besides the point for her fans and haters (there are plenty of both). It’s the fact that she cooks all day long in impractical designer gowns/robes/ensembles, a full face of makeup, and expensive jewelry. Moreover, everything, everything is from scratch. If her children want cereal, she handcrafts the cereal. PB&J (a.k.a. the easiest kid meal on the planet)? Smith needs a few hours to bake the bread, make the jam, and grind the peanuts into butter herself.

Oh, yes, and she has two toddlers, plus a bonus child (more on all of them in a minute) and is pregnant with her third baby.

Her children are named Rumble Honey and Slim Easy.

I’m not going to lie: I was very open to the idea that her account could be satire until I learned this fact, which came to many people’s attention recently on X, formerly Twitter. On Dec. 27, she had posted a video of baby names she liked, but wouldn’t be using. (Spoiler: they are amazing.)

I thought this might be the proof of satire some were looking for, but if it is Smith’s playing the long game: her children’s names were announced in their online birth announcements in October 2020 and January 2022.

I also learned that unique names are a bit of a family trait for Nara’s husband (again: Lucky Blue). His daughter from a previous relationship is named Gravity. His parents, Sheridan and Dallon Smith, have three other children: Starlie Cheyenne, Daisy Clementine, and Pyper America, who are also models and influencers; Starlie’s daughter is named Gogo Valentine.

While many believe Nara Smith’s account is satirical, there’s no hard evidence that’s the case.

Look, does Smith know that the more over-the-top she is the more clicks (and resulting sponsorships) she’ll get? Of course. For all her unrealistic content, she seems pretty self-aware. The fact that she’s continued to one-up herself, reuse a lot of the same phrases over and over again to solidify her brand (“I was feeling like/my daughter asked for ... so that’s exactly what I made.”), and oh-so-casually share the brands she’s wearing/using/eating/drinking seems to be, as is the case with a lot on social media, calculated.

There’s a good chance someone helps out with her filming. Also very likely there’s someone has to be on-hand to wrangle her children while she spends four hours making them a PB&J (there’s a reason loads of us toss our kids Uncrustables and call it a day). I’m not saying the food she makes isn’t real or the general messages behind her “luxe life from scratch” content isn’t sincere. But there’s surely more to her videos than we see on our end. Of course, that’s true of just about anyone posting to social media. Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken a selfie, then taken a second one after scooching the overflowing laundry basket out of the way. But Smith, clearly, has more resources to make her social media even more perfect.

But satirical? Probably not. If her account is satire, she doesn’t appear to be inviting us in on the artisanal, made-with-love-from-scratch joke. She might just be the foremost practitioner of a very particular genre. And for that, we salute her.