Negative vs. Positive Social Media Influence on Celebrity Siblings

There’s a certain expectation around how celebrities are supposed to act, look and just exist in our society. Social media has an increasingly huge influence on these expectations.

Here are two examples: Gemma Styles and Lottie Tomlinson, sisters of wildly popular One Direction members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson.

Styles is 28 and Tomlinson is 20 and their ages raise the questions: Are younger people more influenced by social media? It is even worse when you’re a part of a famous family? 

When One Direction formed in 2010, Tomlinson was only 12 years old and Styles was 20. In Tomlinson’s case, social media is essential to the person she has become. She started as just a “normal” kid who looked up to her big brother, but as One Direction’s fame grew, Tomlinson seemed to travel down a slippery slope. 

She started looking different in her social media posts — and at first it was minor. Oh, she lost a little weight. Oh, she’s going to beauty school. None of that was a problem.

The problem came when plastic surgery happened and not that it’s a bad thing, but isn’t the point of plastic surgery to look better and not look blatantly obvious that you had plastic surgery?

It’s easy to go back to the beginnings of her Instagram and see that she did not look like she does now a couple years ago. In some circumstances, if you put a picture up of Tomlinson beside Kylie Jenner, it’s not so easy tell them a part. 

Now why would someone want to look like Jenner? She plays a huge role in society of being the essence of what “perfection” is supposed to look like. Have a young teenager exposed to that and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Every young person is striving to fit in somewhere, and when they compare themselves to all these celebrities that seem flawless, insecurities can increase ten fold. 

Styles was in college when all of this began, so she was already building her own life away from the famous part of her family. She went on to finish college and get a job in journalism.

She has used some of the fame to her advantage, but it’s in the ways she does it. You can look at photo of Styles from ten years ago and she looks roughly the same, unlike Tomlinson.

The most notable advantage Styles has used is this past year was she released a line of sunglasses. It didn’t really have a name-up-in-lights feel when she released them, it was just…there. 

The difference in fame entering your life as an insecure, impressionable teenager vs. as a young, grown adult with a good head on your shoulders. Social media can be an incredible tool when used right. But moderation, in anything, is unbelievably important.