Alyssa Sheil has what any would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. all day, an Amazon transportation truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that let you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number erstwhile I ask.
Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might yet make it into 1 of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summertime shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.”
Sheil’s own Amazon purchases don’t so much decorate her home as they do service as a set for her online content. erstwhile I visit her home in a quiet, clean subdivision outside of Austin, Texas, the first thing I announcement is the avalanche of beige and neutrals. Everything around me — the rugs, the art, the books on the shelves — are shades of white, black, or cream. Dainty gold bracelets and necklaces hang undisturbed off an ecru display rack. Fuzzy benches and chairs in shades of eggshell and oyster seem like they have never been sat on. Sheil shows me a circular birch-colored side table that I admit from countless videos of hers. The table and cream chair next to it are surrounded by cool bare white walls, everything bathed in soft natural light filtered through semi-sheer snow-colored curtains. After a fewer minutes of walking through her home, it starts to feel like I’m browsing paint chips at Lowe’s: Extra White, Grecian Ivory, Shiitake, White Heron. She likes it this way.
“It’s definitely very calming,” Sheil, 21, says of her decor. “Growing up, my parents had a bunch of pictures on the walls, they had rooms that had different colors… So erstwhile we moved into this place, I was like, ‘I don’t want a bunch of stuff on the walls. I don’t want mismatched things. I just want it to all be cohesive and plain.’” It is not just Sheil who prefers her space to be colorless — a generation of women dream in beige and cream.
Sheil in her home office, where she searches and reviews Amazon products.
Sheil runs what is fundamentally a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they frequently don’t truly need. all time individual purchases something utilizing her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. buying influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off individual else’s impulse buys.
She demonstrates how she might evidence a video showing off a pair of white mesh kitten heels: attach a telephone to a tripod and angle the camera toward a corner in her home office where there is nothing in the background, just a blank wall and part of a chair. The shoes pop against the nothingness, fresh and clean and buyable. To show off an outfit, Sheil drags a full-length mirror in front of her and snaps into a pose; she is — rather virtually — a pro.
The only item in her home not from Amazon is an all-white canvas poster handmade by Sheil that hangs above her work desk. In large block letters, it reads, “I AM SO LUCKY.” Perched below this mantra, Sheil plugs distant at her computer searching for Amazon products that fit her colorless world.
But all of this — the videos, the large house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is presently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas suit in which she is being sued for damages that could scope into the millions.
It has been stressful and confusing to navigate lawyers, having to defend herself against accusations lodged at her by another Amazon influencer: copyright infringement, tortious interference with prospective business relations, misappropriating another person’s likeness, among another accusations. Even with the suit looming over her, Sheil is inactive assured that the manufacture is ripe with opportunity, that below all these ivory stools and black paintings is simply a gold rush.
“I do think that there’s space and definitely adequate money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the net that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context.
The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.
Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a acquainted palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of colour in sight. The home is inactive and silent, a vessel for content creation. In another words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s home — individual just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.
Gifford, pictured in her home, is suing another Amazon influencer.
Laura Gifford is closely active in her daughter’s business — she works as her manager, handling email communications, booking travel, and more.
Gifford and her parent are clearly close, and Laura has watched as her daughter has lived out years of her life online. At 12, she was making stop-motion videos and uploading them to YouTube, Laura tells me, and then her platform as an influencer took off 4 or 5 years ago.
Gifford seems relaxed as we talk in her airy, spacious home filled to the brim with Amazon products.
“I think I feel more calm in neutral spaces,” Gifford says, echoing what Sheil told me the day before. “Now my favourite colour is beige.” She’ll sometimes hashtag her social media content with #sadbeigehome, she adds, laughing. “It is a sad beige home, and I like it.”
I have no malice toward the Sad Beige Home, but I, personally, am thrilled I do not live here. Despite the light pouring in from the oversize windows and the electrical fireplace glowing in the surviving room, it feels cold, austere, not suited for life. It reminds me of staying at an Airbnb, with the charms of lived-in coziness — cute window shutters, lots of throw pillows, the setting sun casting gold rays into the kitchen — but where all drawer is empty and bath towels inactive have price stickers on the inside. Gifford has only lived here a fewer months, so not everything is set up yet, but the black, white, and cream foundations of the home are settled.
This aggressively neutral aesthetic is wildly popular — it’s so ubiquitous online that I might be the weird 1 for not liking it. This minimalism is besides aspirational; millions of people have seen Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos, and thousands have likely purchased products from their affiliate links. What I was not prepared for, even after watching hours of their content online, was that it wasn’t just their social media profiles that were monochrome: their lives and their homes are precisely the same. It’s like you grabbed the corners of your telephone screen and expanded a TikTok video out into a planet of neutrals.
Ironically, there is color at Gifford’s home today, albeit temporarily. On the afternoon I visit, she is filming content for an upcoming video on her favourite fall decor items. She pulls out a cardboard box of autumnal products, any of which are fresh and any of which are from the year before: a soft orange throw blanket, pillows, and miniature stuffed pumpkins. If a product is no longer sold on Amazon, there is no reason to feature it in a video — people watching will just ask where it’s from, and Gifford will have nowhere to send them to (and no way to make money on the item). Gifford orders quite a few stuff, and unsurprisingly, a fair condition of products are “not up to par,” she says. In her office, she has a white drawer filled with flops that she will return to Amazon.
Gifford is simply a pro: she knows the exact shots she needs for social videos.
Gifford knows, from experience, the exact angles she must capture to sale the items she features in videos: a slow, top-down panning shot of her coffee table; a fewer seconds of her stepping into the corner of the frame and placing cream ceramic pumpkins on her fireplace mantel. Laura acts as a second set of eyes, standing behind the iPhone on a tripod and telling her daughter whether she’s in frame or whether anything in the shot looks off. Gifford darts around her home, grabbing brief clips that she will later splice together in the choppy, rapid-fire editing kind that has become instantly recognizable as “shortform video.” She can tell immediately if her disembodied hand plopped a mini plush pumpkin somewhat awkwardly. The camera keeps rolling as she picks it up and does the motion again.
In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to circumstantial frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily akin content yet cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.
Walking through the space, I can’t aid but admit a fewer furniture items that I besides saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before:
that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear frequently in both her and
.
In another world, these 2 parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned advice algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and inexpensive home goods — are now entangling them in a legal conflict around ownership, style, and the creator industry.
Gifford in her surviving room.
Sheil in her surviving room.
Sheil and Gifford aren’t simply 2 strangers with akin taste. They have a short but applicable past together, as described in court papers and interviews.
In late 2022 and early 2023, erstwhile they both lived in Austin, they hung out together in individual twice. The meetups were casual, possibly akin to an outing for networking: both say the goal was “supporting” each other’s business. The first time, in December 2022, the 2 women — along with a 3rd influencer friend of Gifford’s — met in person, at a buying mall in Austin.
“It was fine, nothing besides crazy,” Sheil says. “I was a small tense to go into it, just due to the fact that it was her and a friend that she already had. And I was kind of like the outsider, in a sense. I’d never met either of these girls before.” Sheil’s attorneys compose in their answer to the suit that, on this first day out, Gifford “began quizzing Sheil on Sheil’s strategies and techniques” and made “passive aggressive” comments about her young age. They allege that after that day, Gifford’s content started looking more like Sheil’s, a claim Gifford says is “meritless.”
Still, the outing went well adequate that the group of 3 met for a second time in early 2023 — this time at a parking garage in the area, with the intention of taking photos together. Accounts disagree on how this second outing went, according to interviews and court documents. Sheil says she felt “excluded” by the another women and left the meetup with a bad taste in her mouth.
“I wasn’t spoken to for the first hr of getting there. There were small things here and there where I was just kind of made to feel unwelcome,” she says.
Gifford and the another influencer say they both left the outings with the impression that things had gone well. The 3rd influencer — whose name is redacted in court filings — writes in an affidavit that there was nothing “rude” about the group’s interactions.
Gifford and her mother, Laura, outside Gifford’s home.
“We had what I seemed to think was a great, professional, friendly relationship,” Gifford says. “So it was blindsiding to have all of this happen, and then even more blindsiding for her to go and make these immense claims all over the place about bullying and harassment,” Gifford says, responding to Sheil’s claims in her consequence to the lawsuit.
Regardless of what happened at the outings, everyone agrees on what happened next: Sheil blocked Gifford on social media.
“I didn’t truly feel a request to keep up a relation via social media erstwhile it wasn’t that large in real life,” Sheil says.
Gifford took no offense — despite its glamorous sheen, the influencer manufacture can wreak havoc on creators’ intellectual wellness if they spend hours a day comparing themselves to another people. So she carried on, unfazed, for 10 months. But then she started proceeding from followers that Sheil’s content had begun to closely match hers.
“It was brought to my attention by individual who saw [Sheil’s] post on their For You page, thought that it was my post, and then saw that the account name wasn’t my name,” Gifford says. She heard of apparent confusion from “numerous” followers, she says, and then noticed how akin their posts were: the videos and photos didn’t just have the same vibe but besides promoted the same Amazon products, according to Gifford’s lawsuit. Gifford besides says Sheil had changed her appearance in any ways, like coloring her hair and wearing it in a different style. Gifford hired an attorney, began sending cease and desist orders to Sheil, and registered her social media posts with the US Copyright Office — an different step not taken by most influencers.
“Once I got [the cease and desist], I was just so upset. I was crying, I was shocked,” Sheil says. “I was very confused, due to the fact that [Gifford’s] name hadn’t even come into my head since I blocked her.”
Sheil and Gifford are but 2 among the many influencers making money through Amazon’s program, but their case could have paradigm-shifting consequences for everyone else. Gifford is suing Sheil for a litany of offenses, stemming from what she sees as the 2 women’s strikingly akin videos and photos on social media. The case has possibly wide-reaching implications for influencers and creators, but it stems from a familiar, even ordinary, complaint: Gifford says Sheil won’t halt copying her.
In a complaint filed in the Western territory of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, individual website, and another platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In 1 instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the form of a bow, modeling them by mildly swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a fewer days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, likewise photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a fewer weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.
“It’s evidently very frustrating due to the fact that I put quite a few time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like individual took a part of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”
A case like the 1 between Gifford and Sheil was a long time coming
Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer manufacture has become, there are comparatively fewer norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do be are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negociate with tremendous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public frequently has small sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are frequently exploited, and so they stay unprotected. erstwhile things go incorrect for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their full existence. Influencers may turn on another influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is simply a direct consequence of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the 1 between Gifford and Sheil, in another words, was a long time coming.
According to data that Gifford has compiled, and a illustration tracking earnings that she shared with me, as Sheil posted more and more akin content, Gifford’s commissions took a hit: months that were historically her biggest earners made much less, up to “a small little than half” of what she ordinarily could expect.
Gifford’s suit includes a wide scope of charges beyond copyright infringement. She besides accuses Sheil of the misappropriation of her likeness — that is, changing her appearance to look more like Gifford — and profiting from it. Gifford besides says Sheil replicated her content kind that has come to be associated with her brand and public image.
“I think there aren’t adequate clear boundaries in the influencer industry, and unfortunately, quite a few people don’t treat this as a business,” Gifford says. “Which is why I’m having to file a suit to defend my work and my brand.”
Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s circumstantial videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys compose in a consequence filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”
Her consequence to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade due to the fact that they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.
Sheil promotes clothing and accessories from Amazon.
Sheil and Gifford have a akin online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s frequently set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.
They are what the net calls “clean girls.”
The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — 1 that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most celebrated clean girl is possibly Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is simply a reasonably apparent slippery slope erstwhile you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially erstwhile components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not adequate to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend quite a few time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align precisely with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational.
Where another young women might watch Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos and dream of a akin home for themselves, Sheil’s invocation of Kardashian is apt: the 2 women owe a large deal of their look and online persona to the individual many consider to be the first actual influencer. (“You see why they call me Kris 2.0 at all the events?” Gifford’s mother, Laura, quips at 1 point while she instructs her daughter to adjust her hair as we snap photos. That’s Kris, as in Kris Jenner, the Kardashian matriarch, of course.)
Gifford and her mother, Laura, movie a video promoting autumn decor from Amazon.
Rewatching Kim Kardashian’s multiple home tour videos, the most fresh of which is from 2022, it’s clear just how influential she’s been for generations of women. Her home, like Gifford’s and Sheil’s, is completely monochromatic in beige and cream. In her tours, she’s wearing neutral clothing that matches the decor. A bouclé armchair that Gifford has in her home appears to be a copy of a akin chair that’s featured prominently in Kardashian’s tour. Kardashian speaks of a minimal, quiet home that makes her feel calm — I’ve heard that more than erstwhile before.
These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs; they are $800 decent-looking dupes
Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In any ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where all item appearing onscreen is an chance for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to supply data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company yet profiting from the sale is 1 of the largest retailers in the planet makes the full enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, mostly low-quality products that look large in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will yet end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them advance are besides imitations of individual else’s work.
Every post is shoppable, subtly nudging viewers via captions like “All items linked in my amzn sf!” — algo-speak for “Amazon storefront” to evade content filters.
The storefront is simply a customizable landing page on Amazon where influencers can collect and organize all the products they buy and recommend, sorting them into categories like home decor or beauty. erstwhile shoppers navigate to product pages from these links and make a purchase, the influencer gets a cut of the sales. It is simply a zero-sum game: if you buy pots and pans from 1 storefront, you (probably) won’t buy the same product again from individual else’s.
Here, too, Gifford accuses Sheil of copying her. During the Cyber Monday sales event in 2023, Gifford claims Sheil listed “a crucial number of the exact products” on her storefront shortly after she did, including a four-piece bowl set and checkerboard throw blanket. On Amazon itself, Gifford says Sheil posted photos modeling a knit sweater set a fewer days after her — striking a akin pose and promoting the same product, according to exhibits filed in her complaint.
“Searching for fresh products on Amazon takes a long time. I personally choose all product. I acquisition all product myself from Amazon, and I only make content around products that are authentic to my brand,” Gifford says. “So it’s not a coincidence erstwhile another creator reviews the same products in the same kind after I do it.”
Exhibits filed by Gifford, purporting to show Sheil’s akin content.
But Sheil says this misrepresents how Amazon influencers operate: many of the products influencers feature in content are pushed at them by Amazon itself. Around sales events like Prime Day or Black Friday, creators receive giant spreadsheets of hundreds of thousands of items that will be on sale that influencers are encouraged to advance — it only makes sense that 2 people with a akin niche would feature the same products. 1 of the posts Gifford says Sheil copied shows a cream-colored cable knit sweater and short set, but this item was in 1 of these Amazon-promoted spreadsheets, Sheil claims.
Amazon besides shares more curated information like lists of trending keywords and circumstantial products that fall into categories like beauty products or fashion. In addition, there’s an influencer hub that tells affiliate partners trending searches (“fall dresses” or “headphones for school,” for example) along with related products to promote. Featured items end up in affiliate content through various avenues, not just the individual influencer scrolling through thousands of pages of listings.
“A lot of it is from these spreadsheets, and then the remainder of it is either found by me or the brands are reaching out asking me to advance it,” Sheil says. Brands sometimes send products unsolicited, hoping Sheil will make a video about it.
Gifford maintains that she handpicked all of the items named in her suit and that she didn’t trust on Amazon-issued lists around sale periods to find the items she says Sheil copied from her.
“They were purchased sporadically throughout the year due to the fact that I chose them. So it just doesn’t make sense,” Gifford says.
It’s plausible, in theory, that Sheil and Gifford just happened to choice akin items to review and advance on social media, especially with Amazon’s guiding hand. But erstwhile presented side by side, 1 can’t aid but announcement the overlap.
Still, even with akin or nearly identical posts, it’s unclear whether Sheil actually infringed on Gifford’s intellectual property — Sheil didn’t repost any of Gifford’s actual images or videos. The posts just feature the same products, in akin settings.
“I can see how this is incredibly infuriating and frustrating, but besides truly hard to combat, due to the fact that most of what an influencer is doing in terms of content creation is not protectable,” says Alexandra Roberts, prof. of law and media at Northeastern University. “You inactive request to get truly close to [the first image or video] to actually infringe it. And erstwhile I say truly close, I mean, fundamentally indistinguishable [or] identical, due to the fact that the protection is thin for something like a image of a doormat in front of a store and somebody’s ft is simply a small bit in it.” Roberts says that, for the most part, the copyright claims feel like “a immense reach.”
If Gifford’s legal argument is successful, it could mean any influencer making content in an established genre could be liable — even though, in general, copyright law limits liability for use of genre tropes.
“I hope that it changes how people make content,” Gifford says. “I hope that it makes people more mindful, due to the fact that there are so many instances of another creators I’ve seen getting their content completely replicated by people. This is not the first time that this has happened, and that’s why we’re here.”
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Some of the exhibits submitted by Gifford to court.
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Some of the exhibits submitted by Gifford to court.
But she has an uphill conflict in proving there is something in her work that she has legal ownership over in the first place. Sometimes, you can be so basic that copyright law doesn’t even defend you.
“The truly hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate prof. of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are comparatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains.
And due to the fact that the images are not exact replicas, you gotta look alternatively at how a creative thought was expressed and executed: what angle the photographer used; how they staged the image; and all the another “gory details” of creative choices.
“It’s judges playing art critic.”
In 1984, Co Rentmeester photographed Michael Jordan leaping midair toward the basket with a ball in his left hand. His legs are nearly in a divided as he flies toward the net. It’s a acquainted image for most of us — not due to the fact that we’ve seen Rentmeester’s first photograph but due to the fact that Nike utilized a akin silhouette of the athlete as the logo for Air Jordan products. The silhouette in the logo is not from Rentmeester’s image but from a separate, later photograph that Nike created where Jordan is again leaping toward the basket. His legs are outstretched but perfectly consecutive and at more of an angle, and his right arm points down sharply. Behind him is the Chicago skyline at dusk. Rentmeester sued Nike in 2015.
“It’s judges playing art critic,” Reid says. “What is the creative importance of all of these different aspects of the photograph?” Nike prevailed over Rentmeester in the case, with a court uncovering that the images weren’t substantially similar — the photographer didn’t own Jordan’s pose, and only creative choices like the angle of the photographs and camera shutter velocity could be protected.
Reid says the result of Gifford’s suit will depend on whether a justice or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On 1 hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s suit could be seen as an effort to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t truly for. But a justice might see influencer content as having adequate creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.
“It depends a lot on what justice lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.
“This is national law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to kind it all out?’”
“There are hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic, and I’m the only 1 that’s having to go through this.”
What Gifford says is theft feels like unequal scrutiny to Sheil. Neither female created the neutral, monochromatic look, nor were they the first to take a photograph of cellphone cases arranged against a white background.
“There are hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic, and I’m the only 1 that’s having to go through this,” Sheil says, her voice breaking. “It’s coming across very gatekeep-y… Like, ‘I’m the only 1 that’s allowed to be successful in this program, I’m the only 1 that’s allowed to put my ft in the door.’”
Complicating matters is the fact that Gifford, who identifies as a white Hispanic woman, is suing Sheil, a Black Latina woman, for misappropriation — the unauthorized usage of a person’s likeness. Gifford says that Sheil “imitated outfits, poses, hairstyles, makeup, and the manner of speaking” to produce “a virtually indistinguishable replica of [Gifford’s] likeness.” Gifford besides says that Sheil got the same tattoo in the same place as her — a flower on the left bicep. Asked about her tattoo that closely resembles Gifford’s, Sheil says the dainty image of a bouquet of flowers represents her household members. She says she got the thought for her tattoo from browsing content on Pinterest and that the resemblance to Gifford’s is simply a coincidence, plain and simple.
Older social media posts show Sheil frequently wore her hair curly in the past but at 1 point dyed her hair a akin shade to Gifford’s a fewer months after Gifford changed her hair color. Gifford argues that erstwhile the 2 women took mirror selfies with their phones covering their faces, “it absolutely looked like a very akin person,” despite them being different races.
But it’s impossible to ignore the optics of a suit in which a Black Latina female is accused of looking and acting besides much like a white counterpart — to put it bluntly, in pop culture, it is usually the another way around. Apart from ensnaring her in a monthslong legal mess, the misappropriation claim dredges up larger questions around the digital and social spaces that creators of color, and especially Black creators, must navigate.
Influencing, especially erstwhile it comes to the clean girl aesthetic, says Sheil, “is a predominantly white industry.”
When I interview her in person, it’s clear the subject has struck a nerve. She is visibly upset. “As a individual of colour who is on the fairer side, I feel like I’ve never truly fit in with the darker crowds or the lighter crowds,” says Sheil. “I’m besides dark for the lighter crowds and then besides light for the darker crowds. So it’s just a weird place to be in.”
Exhibits submitted in court that show Gifford and Sheil with a akin hair color.
Gifford’s first complaint doesn’t mention the racial identities of either party, though Sheil’s answer filed to the court does. Responding to the misappropriation claim, Sheil’s attorneys write, “It is hard to fathom how individual could confuse Sheil (a Black-Latina woman) with a white woman.” Elsewhere, Sheil’s attorneys compose that Gifford has “a predominantly white audience” — information that Gifford says Sheil would have no way of knowing, due to the fact that even Gifford doesn’t have access to data on the racial identities of her audience.
“I never brought race into this, and the fact that [Sheil’s side] did … honestly disgusts me, due to the fact that that is specified an crucial topic, especially today,” Gifford told me. Gifford’s own household background includes roots in Spain and Puerto Rico. “That is besides offensive to me, that you’re saying I’m just a white girl. You don’t know my background and my history.”
Sheil’s and Gifford’s appearances have diverged since the timeframe captured in the first filings in the lawsuit. At the time we meet, Gifford has dark, slinky hair that cascades down her back, and Sheil has shorter hair with blonde highlights, frequently wrapped in gentle curls.
“Obviously she can do whatever she wants with her hair. It looks great. It looks awesome,” Gifford says of Sheil. “We [currently] look nothing alike, and she’s rocking the hairstyle. It looks large on her.” There seems to be an edge to her delivery, and I can’t rather tell if it’s coming from frustration or relief.
Sheil is being sued for misappropriation, or the unauthorized usage of a person’s likeness.
Without any facial features visible, it’s conceivable that social media audiences might mix the 2 women up. I do a reverse image search for 1 of the cited examples, in which Gifford and Sheil are wearing baggy grey sweatshirt and short sets, their iPhones blocking their faces. If I were individual who followed a smattering of influencers who had akin shticks, I probably would have a hard time telling anyone apart. I don’t know that that is simply a bug — more than it is simply a feature — of having a occupation that is mediated by an algorithm.
In Kyle Chayka’s 2024 book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, he writes about Nigel Kabvina, a TikToker who blew up on the platform during the covid-19 pandemic. Kabvina iterated on his content based on the feedback the platform spat back at him: he avoided talking and adding text so his videos could transcend language, for example, and optimized his content based on erstwhile engagement data showed that viewers scrolled away. He meticulously built his virality as much as he stumbled into it.
Exhibits submitted to court show Gifford and Sheil modeling the same sweat suit.
“For independent creators, the algorithm takes the place of bosses and performance reviews,” Chayka writes. “It’s a real-time authority gauging your success at adapting to its definition of compelling content, which is always shifting.” This in part feeds into a sameness that permeates not just our feeds but real, tangible spaces, too.
Kabvina’s process of trial, error, and adjustment is part and parcel of the occupation of influencer — there is most likely no another business where you are forced to know what another people think of you at this frequency and intensity. The platforms themselves are fierce enforcers of norms and standards, throwing fuel on advertiser-friendly trends while limiting the scope of content deemed “ineligible for recommendation.” It’s in this bubble that content creators are developing their kind and image, and overlap is bound to happen.
K., a lifestyle influencer who makes part of her income via Amazon sales, says she regularly comes across another people who make remarkably akin content to her. “Unless you’re an alien, you’re going to have that experience,” she says. (K. is not active in the suit between Sheil and Gifford and requested anonymity in order to talk freely about her experience in the Amazon program.)
Platforms driven by trends, memes, and viral sound bites accelerate homogeneity
“[As a creator] you want to feel like you have unique value that you’re giving out into this world, and you want to be appreciated and respected and compensated for your unique content, energy, value, [and] personality,” K. says. But there’s a process of refining videos that naturally occurs as a creator builds a following.
“You start off throwing so many ideas at the wall — just like, ‘I like this, I like this, I like this, I like this,’” K. says. “And then as you go your way kind of narrows and narrows … and you kind of mediate yourself out.” For certain types of content niches, there’s a convergence that happens, K. says. Things do start to look the same.
Social platforms driven by trends, memes, and viral sound bites accelerate this homogeneity. Instagram, for example, allows Reels creators to straight-up copy and paste editing choices like sound, text, or jump cuts from 1 user’s video to another, using a feature called Templates. On TikTok, creators can search for trending hashtags and topics and specifically tailor their videos to what people are searching for — a kind of SEO for the shortform video world. If 1 individual reviews “the viral Amazon office chair,” it’s only natural that others will follow suit. How much of the overlap between Gifford and Sheil is simply the strategy working as intended?
Sheil’s home, like Gifford’s, is full of neutrals.
“I truly strive to choice products that are unique,” Gifford says. “And while any products, of course, are going to be viral and multiple people are going to review them, the beauty of social media is typically erstwhile individual reviews a product, you can see that creator’s unique style.”
But there is simply a tremendous amount of repetitiveness erstwhile it comes to which Amazon products influencers decide to post about. For one, Amazon itself has a firehose of recommendations it directs to creators — K. says she gets weekly emails from the company with “personalized” recommendations for products she should consider featuring, along with regular automated Instagram DMs with links to products. There is besides the apparent fact that the influencers themselves are discerning shoppers: if they’re scrolling through Amazon for a pink headphone case, they’re most likely going to choice something that already has good reviews.
“When it comes to most products on Amazon, there is simply a clear winner,” K. says. “There is the Amazon choice, there is the bestseller, there is the five-star product with 50,000 reviews, versus the 4.5 with 5,000 reviews. You’re always going to go for something within the top 3 links.”
Many of the images that Gifford filed to the court as examples of Sheil’s unlawful copying are what many would consider standard shots of this kind of content. And any videos presented
by
may seem the same erstwhile looking at just 1 frame but actually have very small in common erstwhile played all the way through. A fewer moments of looking akin doesn’t necessarily mean there is deliberate replication happening — just that this is what creators, viewers, and advertisers have come to anticipate out of influencer content.
“Basically everyone in the [Amazon] program does [unboxing videos],” Sheil says. “They unbox something on a bed, they then effort it on in a mirror, and then that’s the entirety of the video. If you search Amazon right now, you would most likely find hundreds of those videos.”
Amazon has stayed out of the legal spat between Sheil and Gifford, but the company does have any vague rules for content creators promoting its products. Its guidelines for influencer content that is uploaded straight to the marketplace warns, “Do NOT plagiarize content in any way … While you may draw inspiration from existing sources, straight copying or minimally altering individual else’s material is unacceptable.”
Amazon declined to comment on the suit between Sheil and Gifford.
Gifford v. Sheil is not the first time an influencer has accused another of copying them — copyright itself is frequently weaponized in inter-creator conflicts through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime. Gifford’s suit, which takes the conflict out of the realm of platform-level DMCA adjudication and into a national territory court, importantly raises the stakes. possibly the suit will service as a serious informing shot to another influencers, but it mostly strikes me as a last-ditch effort by individual who has exhausted her another (few) options.
Content creators are gig workers with a fancier occupation description, operating like an army of freelance one-person marketing firms, navigating an manufacture where just about anything goes. erstwhile there are disputes — and there often are — it’s the individual influencers who are left holding the bag, even if they’re not the ones actually producing and selling the products, managing content creators, or hosting the storefronts. It doesn’t substance if it’s Sheil or Gifford who convinces you to buy the throw pillow; Amazon gets paid either way.
Sheil’s Amazon storefront, where her followers find and buy products.
Whether Sheil, in fact, carefully imitated Gifford’s posts as a way to siphon off any of her sales is an open question — the answer is likely unknowable without combing through Sheil’s browsing past on TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon. In November, a justice ruled that Gifford’s case could proceed, including any claims that Sheil’s attorneys had moved to dismiss, like the argument that Sheil is liable for vicarious copyright infringement due to the fact that her followers had access to content that was allegedly copied.
Gifford says her earnings have mostly gone back to normal, which she attributes to Sheil making less videos that look like hers, but Gifford has changed how she films videos in an effort to have her content be more clearly identifiable as her own. She’s stopped filming unboxings on a set of circular tables akin to those that appear frequently in Sheil’s clips, and she says she’s started including her face in videos more to differentiate herself.
Gifford filming an autumn decor video.
“I’m going to effort and make the black couch a thing,” Gifford says as she arranges a selection of pumpkin decorations in her surviving room. “Hopefully that becomes identifiable as my couch.” It’s a conviction that would sound absurd on its own, but this is the minutiae that can preoccupy the minds of influencers — especially if they live in a constant state of unease, worrying individual else will copy their life. The fierce competition of this manufacture means you can’t be average about your surviving area furniture.
Gifford is about to embark on a fresh era in life and online content. She goes by Sydney Nicole Slone on social media now, after late getting married, and she is expecting a baby boy. (The nursery will break with her neutral aesthetic and will have a blue theme, she tells me.) Gifford’s black and white surviving area is all over her videos, and the comments are filled with strangers asking where she got all possible item in her house. Everything must be perfectly consistent, prepared carefully for consumption by millions of eyeballs — and wallets.
Sheil, too, is beginning a fresh chapter: shortly after I met with her, she moved into a fresh home, and she’s started sharing videos with titles like, “
.” For many influencers, life’s proudest, most precious moments are besides excellent fodder to usage to pump out content — possibly even more so if you have something to sale your audience, like fresh kitchen gadgets or bedroom furniture.
Gifford with her 2 dogs, Yoshi and Maci.
Sheil with her 2 cats, Akira and Karma.
Both Sheil and Gifford are young women who’ve made careers on the backs of digital overload, acting as individual shoppers to millions of strangers. They’re so good at their jobs that they just bought homes. Sheil has 2 cats and Gifford, 2 dogs. At times, these comparatively average parallels between the 2 are what strike me the most: it’s like gathering individual else in the same audience section that advertisers usage to send you targeted ads. I say I might be a small freaked out by my digital doppelganger, too.
At this point, I’ve watched so many Amazon product advice videos in the course of reporting this communicative that my personalized For You page is starting to look noticeably more beige. I callback something Sheil said about her own Amazon homepage: the more you store for neutrals, the more cream items the site will show you. If you buy a cute loungewear set, it will propose others. Influencers likely are finding the bulk of their products on their own, but the ecosystem that they — and the remainder of us — store in is built on what another people are doing.
Eventually, I encounter so many akin videos that they all begin to blend together. I don’t callback anyone’s name, face, or distinct manner of speaking. I don’t even remember what product they say they “absolutely love.” But I, and generations of shoppers hooked on fast, cheap, and frictionless shopping, relentlessly optimized for the lowest common denominator, will know where to buy it.
