There’s popular… And then there’s Abby Roberts popular. The British makeup and beauty influencer, singer, businesswoman, and general social media star has a mind-blowing 16.8 million followers and 1.5 billion likes on TikTok. Add a further 2.1 million Instagram followers and 734,000 YouTube subscribers, and you get quite the outreach. Since exploding across TikTok thanks to her unique-but-relatable content, she has become a spokeswoman for Gen Z, proclaiming them fearless when it comes to self-expression and challenging society’s standards.
Roberts was born and bred in Leeds. She taught herself to become a makeup artist thanks to YouTube and soon grew a sizeable following on that platform and Instagram for her makeup tutorials and general content. She began posting on TikTok in 2019, and on her third upload, things blew up, big time. Within two years, she was on the front cover of Glamour magazine as a face of her generation and had generated more than a billion likes for her content. She had also launched a music career, and her quirky alt-pop tracks (mostly made with Yungblud’s producer) have been streamed millions of times. She released her debut album, Ashes, in 2022. That year also saw the launch of her signature makeup brushes, made in collaboration with Morphe Brushes.
Currently living in a shared house in Los Angeles with her best friends and fellow TikTok influencers, Roberts has come a long way from being driven to beauty events in Yorkshire by her dad, but she remains as committed to the issues she cares about as ever and features links in her account where people can donate to the likes of LGBTQ+ charities. Her content continues to generate off-the-scale engagement as soon as it is posted, and she continues to be a voice for a bold generation.