The Alpha Phi sorority house at the University of Arizona occupies a professionally decorated Spanish colonial-style mansion just off campus. There’s a chandeliered dining room, two pink-and-baby-blue living rooms and a tanning area on the roof.
It’s where Haley DeKreek, a 20-year-old junior, lives with her closest friends. It’s also the backdrop to her budding career. Her work takes place mostly in her room, but she picks up the rewards in the mailroom just off the foyer.
Perpetually suffused with floral perfume, it overflows with packages, many of them hers: boxes with dresses for formals or matching yoga sets, boxes of makeup, hair products and skin care. Some she ordered herself, but many are freebies from brands that have spotted her potential as a TikTok influencer, a one-girl campus marketing powerhouse. Nearly all are destined to appear in the many-stepped “get ready with me” videos she has posted since she was a first-year student rushing sororities.
With more than 45,000 TikTok followers, a gift for self-deprecating humor, a talent manager in Los Angeles and several paid brand deals (the biggest worth $3,000), Ms. DeKreek says she can now pay for all her own shopping, food, vacations and beauty services, just by doing what she has loved since kindergarten, when she played with her mom’s makeup and recorded videos making slime.
She never attends class — not in person, anyway. Her major, retail and consumer science, is entirely online. Apt, given her chosen career path: influencing.
Football players aren’t the only college students who have learned to sell their images for profit. The boom in sorority TikTok videos known as #Rushtok has proved, especially to marketers, that sorority sisters can command audiences all over America.
Ms. DeKreek’s sorority “big,” or mentor, has nearly 800,000 TikTok followers and a Porsche. Sisters at several sororities on Greek Row serve as brand ambassadors, posting about free products and hosting events like yoga on the lawn with the active wear company Alo. On Alpha Phi’s Instagram, the well-known fashion influencers Brigette and Danielle Pheloung visit to promote a “lower sugar” snack, and sorority sisters model brand-sponsored merchandise in posts accompanied by discount codes.
In a recent survey, nearly four in 10 Gen Z respondents said they would take a million social media followers over a steady 9-to-5 job. At several universities, including at the rival Arizona State University, students can now major in content creation.
For Ms. DeKreek, college coursework appears strictly secondary to the business of being @HaleyDeKreek.
In the days before Arizona’s homecoming football game against Iowa State in October, when fraternities and sororities threw events almost every night, I followed her as she drove around Tucson in her cobalt-blue Jeep with oversized wheels, going from beauty appointment to beauty appointment to prepare for the week’s events.
Not that it feels like work. “I love being a girl,” Ms. DeKreek said.
For all that, Ms. DeKreek is ambivalent about social media and the Botox-and-fillers culture she sees on campus — even as her appearance testifies to its pressures, even as she sells products for upholding it.
“People come here and they’re instantly intimidated by the pretty girls,” she said. “They’ll see these videos online, they’ll see the people around them, and instantly start judging themselves.”
She added: “Being a woman in this society is just, like, so overwhelming even compared to five to 10 years ago.”
Wednesday, 1 p.m.: Eyelash lift and tint
Americans have spent the last year agog at male looksmaxxers, who take hammers to their own jaws and inject themselves with dubious substances in the name of beauty. But women have been practicing time-consuming, expensive, invasive and potentially self-destructive interventions for a long, long time. And they’re starting younger than ever.
Twenty-somethings get preventive Botox. Teenagers get fillers. Preteens crowd the aisles of Sephora, purchasing anti-aging serums in bottles the colors of Nerds candy. In a 2025 survey of American plastic surgeons, 57 percent reported that more patients under 30 were requesting cosmetic procedures or injectables. Older women seek to look like young women, and younger women chase the perfected visions of themselves they can generate on their phones.
At 20, Ms. DeKreek said, she has already had lip filler and breast reduction surgery (her large chest made everyday activities physically painful). There have also been multiple rounds of Botox in her forehead (to keep her eyebrows level), cheeks (to stop nighttime jaw-clenching), armpits (to stop sweating) and upper lip (a “lip flip” that bestows a fuller look).
She has a hairstylist for her extensions and a friend who gives her regular spray tans. At home in Folsom, Calif., an affluent Sacramento suburb, she has a therapist and a go-to aesthetician. Today, a Tucson aesthetician gives her an eyebrow-smoothing treatment, and then perma-curls and dyes her lashes in a procedure called a lift and tint.
Ms. DeKreek’s parents sanctioned her procedures, except one injection she got in high school, said her mother, Sandy DeKreek. Then, she thought Haley was too young. Now, proud of her daughter, she says Haley is mature enough to decide.
You hardly have to be an influencer to want to polish your appearance, even if at great effort and cost; being a young woman tends to suffice. For an influencer like Ms. DeKreek, however, beauty draws attention, generating more motivation to be beautiful, encouraging more procedures, which, when posted online, yield money to pay for yet more beauty.
Wednesday, 5 p.m.: Spray tan
Thursday, 8 a.m.: Morning skin care
Ms. DeKreek starts every day by applying six of the many skin care products stored in the white minifridge on her vanity — the first half of her routine.
Thursday, 8:30 a.m.: Wellness walk
Wearing patches to brighten the barely-voting-age skin under their eyes, she and her friend Lea Gorham set off for their morning “wellness walk.”
Ms. DeKreek and her friends gild their days with healthfulness, adopting trends infused with Make America Healthy Again buzzwords. Seed oils and processed foods are out; journaling, early-morning Pilates, protein, probiotics and gut health supplements are in.
As they power-walk through campus, Ms. Gorham debates whether to get lip filler or just a cheaper lip flip. She doesn’t like the way she smiles.
“I don’t necessarily need it, but it’s like, everyone else at this school has it,” she said.
Both procedures are available at a local med spa, where until a couple years ago, undergraduates could use Cat Cash — student bursary funds, generally replenished by parents — to pay for fillers by swiping their student IDs. The spa takes Cat Cash only for non-injectable beauty services now, but lips keep getting flipped.
Thursday, 9:45 a.m.: Morning routine, part 2
Ms. DeKreek begins the second half of her skin care regimen, running a pink electric device over her face, draining her lymph nodes, depuffing invisible puffiness.
To her, beauty helps her feel like her “best self.” Makeup, she said, is like an “art form.”
The most creative and artistic of the four DeKreek sisters, according to her family, Haley began filming videos of herself as a child of 6 or 7, pretending to cook for an audience. She started getting hair highlights in fifth grade. In middle school, she styled her hair for cheerleading competitions and watched hours of YouTube makeup tutorials. In high school, she worked at a hair salon, earning a discount on hair extensions, and taught herself video editing so she could film school football games and other events for student government.
Before rushing sororities, she watched videos for outfit inspiration and tips. With an older sister’s encouragement, she started posting her own rush outfits and makeup routines.
But she’s keenly conscious of social media’s effect on others’ self-esteem. Pushing back in her own small way, she is open about her stubborn acne. She has posted her beauty procedures, not wanting to present her appearance as natural. Having struggled with anxiety and the adjustment to Arizona’s hard-charging party scene her first year of college, she says she wants to post more about mental health.
Thursday, 12 p.m.: Blowout
As Ms. DeKreek fluffs her freshly blow-dried extensions, her hairstylist sets up a tripod to document the final touches. Ms. DeKreek shoots her own videos in the mirror. “You want to post and I’ll repost?” she asks David Gonzalez, her stylist.
Thursday, 1 p.m.: Quick shopping stop
Thursday, 4 p.m.: Getting ready
It’s Ms. DeKreek’s favorite part of the day: getting ready. Tonight is “Greek wedding,” an annual tradition in which sororities and fraternities stage mock weddings between seniors, complete with funny speeches and parties.
Ms. DeKreek has never had a boyfriend. Though she eventually wants a family, she describes college hookup culture and setup dates as “a waste of time.”
“I just want to focus on myself,” she said, “and the right one will come along at some point.”
It’s a common sentiment among young women, who research indicates are having fewer romantic relationships than past generations.
Nearly three hours after starting to get ready, she heads to Ms. Gorham’s room to finish. It’s crowded with girls in long black dresses and small designer purses, smoothing, spraying, adjusting, asking to borrow one another’s heels.
“Cute!” they compliment one another. “Cute, cute, cute!”
Friday, 1 p.m.: Monthly facial
Saturday, 10 a.m.: Getting ready for Game Day
After an hour of curling her hair, Ms. DeKreek and her roommate deftly paint, blend, dab, brush, spray and dry their faces. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera sing from a speaker. Friends burst in without knocking to rummage through their wardrobes, needing to borrow cutoffs or jewelry.
This is what she means when she says, tenderly, “It’s like girlhood, all of us together.” She loves getting ready so much, she says, she sometimes doesn’t even feel like going out after.
Thinking about how others see her, after all, is “just kind of a dead end,” she said. “I’ve only found fulfillment through taking care of myself.”
If it seems paradoxical to find inner fulfillment through outer enhancement, well, that’s the promise society has held out to women since long before she was born.
She slides on a strapless gingham-and-lace minidress. The others are ready, all of them clomping around in tan knee-high boots, but she’s still dabbing and brushing. She unpins her curls, releasing bombshell cascades. Golden bangles click over her wrists. Before the mirror, she turns this way and that, all alone as a din of voices rises outside the door.
The post ‘I Love Being a Girl’: Inside the Life of a Sorority Influencer appeared first on New York Times.
