The minute my parents got a divorce was a turning point for me, in terms of going from a girl to more of a woman, even if I was yet to turn 18. I became a lot more independent, doing my own thing and getting a boyfriend. While my parents were together, I could never really bring a boy home. It was very different when my parents divorced; once my dad moved out, I had much more freedom to do what I wanted. Before that, I couldn’t get away with anything!
That’s not to say anything went with my mum. She’s a massive worrier – a real panicker – and I think that was probably due to her job with the police: she’d hear these horror stories every day, and it’s hard to not imagine them happening in your own life. But her big thing was just knowing where I was at all times, and then I was alright to do what I wanted.
Still, I didn’t do anything too wild. I was more focused on what I could do next …
In the same way that I was always doing something different to what my friends were doing – never really wanting to do the same after-school clubs as them, for instance, but instead getting into Irish dancing – I didn’t really want to do the same things as them after our GCSEs. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve always wanted to be that person that people would think of and say, ‘Oh, did you see that Molly-Mae went and did that? Did you see that she went and did this?’
Some people might not like the sound of that. They might not like being spoken about, and they might not think it’s something you should seek out – but we’re all different! I actually think that my attitude of always striving for more has led me to where I am today. My motivation to succeed comes from always wanting to be doing something bigger and better and to exceed people’s expectations of me. Even now, I want to be making moves that have people thinking, I can’t believe she’s doing that at that age! When I was younger, it was just the same – and my decision to go to fashion school was an example of that.
My friends were staying on at our school, the Priory School, for sixth form. And I didn’t want to do that because I thought, I don’t want to be like everyone else. I don’t want to stay on and do A levels. I’d only be doing that because everybody else is doing it. And that’s not the way I live my life.
I knew I loved fashion, so I found something that appealed to me far more than the idea of sixth form. I applied for the Fashion Retail Academy in London, went for an interview – my dad came with me, bless him – and I got in. That was a massive thing for me, and surprised some of the people around me: ‘Oh my God, where are you going – to fashion school in London?’ It was so cool, so different, and I loved that!
Of course, other’s people’s reactions to something like that and the reality of doing it are not quite the same thing … I actually ended up almost quitting fashion school at the start, after just a couple of days.
What prompted that was that I’d had this knot-in-your-stomach feeling where I felt sick and shaky and on edge – what I’d call anxiety. I’ve had it at times throughout my life, like when I went to sleepovers as a kid (and, as my dad mentioned, would want to come home!), and the whole week before my driving test – things like that. When I had to perform in front of people, I’d just get general nerves, which weren’t so bad – but I reckon if I’d got to the level that I actually wanted to with performing, rather than being in the chorus, I probably would have had that anxious feeling then, too.
And I definitely had it as I started fashion school.
I thought, I’ve done the wrong thing in coming here. I felt really out of my depth. Looking back, I was scared. So, I actually decided to go back to my old school for sixth form, to see if that would be a better option for me. Thinking I would stay on for A levels after all, I picked out business, drama and music – but I didn’t study in my spare time, so on some level I knew it wasn’t gonna work! And it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. But I was also thinking, Oh God, I can’t do fashion school. I don’t have the confidence. Part of me just wanted to stay in my comfort zone.
But back at school, everyone was doing the same thing, still in the same groups – it was all very much the same. I realised, Actually, I don’t want to stay here anymore, this is just boring to me. I thought, No, I’m going to do this, I’m going to stick to my guns – I’m going to fashion school!
And I did, I went back to fashion school the very next day. The anxiety did linger for a little bit, but I just told myself, ‘You’ve tried sixth form and it’s not for you. This has to work.’ And, after a week or so, I was fine – I made friends and felt much more settled. I spent two years there in the end and got a level-three qualification in fashion retail. The course covered buying, merchandising, window dressing – it was very broad. But because of my passion for fashion, it came naturally to me. I had to be in college in London two days a week, so I was able to work at home and earn money, too.
Looking back, it was the best thing I ever did, taking a risk to go there. I made some really good friends and have some really good memories. Fashion school also opened horizons for me: I was travelling into London twice a week on the train, then going all over the city, and that really helped me get very streetwise and taught me a lot about being independent. I was meeting new people, networking, doing things that I would never have done if I’d stayed where I was.
When I look back and think about how I was trying to tread a different path to everybody else, my decision to go to fashion school was definitely key to that.
But I don’t regret that one day I went back to my old school, either. I needed to have that moment of realising that nothing’s going to change if you stay in the same situation. And I needed to learn that feeling uncomfortable doesn’t have to mean you’ve made the wrong decision. With a lot of things that I do, I can still go through waves of anxiety and really overthink even my day-to-day choices: Oh God, am I making the right decision? But it’s totally normal to feel nerves – especially when you’re doing new things, but even in your everyday life, too.
You should never feel guilty about that – it’s very normal to second-guess yourself – but remember: it doesn’t mean you’ve done the wrong thing. Sometimes, you need to get out of your comfort zone to get to where you want to go!
Every day I went to FRA, I would try to put together a nice outfit because obviously it was fashion school, and everyone was judging you on what you were wearing! So, I think I learned a lot about fashion then and what suited me.
Essentially, my style is simple and casual. I’m never really dressed up, unless I’m going to an event or absolutely have to be. Day-to-day, it’s tracksuits, trench coats, leather jackets; I love leggings with a jumper, a nice long coat and a trainer or boot. I’m very rarely wearing jeans – if I am, it will be very baggy mum-style jeans, so that they’re nice and comfy. Because I hate uncomfy clothes. I just like my outfits to be very wearable, chilled, not OTT. I didn’t have any money when I was at fashion school and finding my look, and even today other girls can recreate my outfits really easily, because they’re nothing too crazy – mostly high-street in terms of budget, mixed up with some designer items.
And I do put my outfits together myself, at least when it comes to my own content. For shoots with Beauty Works and Pretty Little Thing, I regularly work with the same stylists, who know the kinds of clothes I like to wear and bring options they think I’ll like. But most of the outfits that you see on my Instagram are what I’ve put together, depending on what mood I’m in: sometimes I just want to be casual and sometimes a bit more dressy (relatively!).
On days that I’m struggling to put together an outfit, I love using Pinterest for inspiration. I’ll just have a look around, then look in my own wardrobe and see what I’ve got, to try to find something a bit different to what I’ve done on my feed recently. For instance, if I’ve worn black in the most recent picture, I’ll make sure I’m not wearing black again. But I don’t try to follow the trends on Instagram; I just wear what I want to wear, when I want to wear it.
And my style does change regularly. I used to love, love, love wearing high-heeled boots everywhere I went, because I was self-conscious about my legs. I did a shoe haul video a few years ago, and it was all heels. Even when I was just going into town with my mum, I’d be in high heels. Now, I just don’t feel that way. I’m almost always in trainers.
Ultimately, my fashion philosophy is this: wear whatever the hell you want to wear – don’t try to follow what everyone else is wearing. And if you get it ‘wrong’? When I look back on my Instagram, I still sometimes think, Oh, why did I wear that? Or, What I was I thinking that day?! Everybody gets it ‘wrong’ sometimes – but it probably felt good at the time, so who cares? Fashion should be something to have fun with it, rather than worrying if you’ve got it ‘right’.
Studying in London wasn’t the only way my world was opening up during that time. I know that every single activity I did when I was younger, my parents encouraged me to do in the hope that one of those might become my career (you never know, maybe I’d end up a cellist!).
But as I got older, I was becoming more self-aware and realising I could make my own choices. I didn’t actually have to do every single thing my parents said. One day, I put my foot down over swimming. I just said to my dad, ‘I’m not going anymore – I don’t want to go!’ My parents had spent so many hours taking me to these activities and paying for all these things; for your child to then say they actually don’t want to do all that anymore, I bet it’s quite heart-wrenching. But it was a part of my growing up. I was starting to understand what I was really interested in, and what really appealed to me … and it wasn’t swimming club.
What I’d enjoyed most about the Irish dancing feis – competitions – had always been the dressing up, and doing the make-up, the fake tan, the hair. So, when I was contacted about competing in a pageant here in the UK, I thought, This is great – like a feis, but without having to do the painful dancing! (And yes, it could be painful when you worked at it.) The pageant scene wasn’t really that popular in Britain – it was more of an American thing – but I thought, I want to try that!
So, I did. I The pageant was just an online process at the start. I ended up getting through that initial round to represent my area, making me Miss Teen Hertfordshire. That meant my mum had to take me to the finals in Blackpool, where I competed in my first pageant at age 16 for the Miss Teen Great Britain title – quite a big one.
I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing. I had no idea that you’re meant to present a folder in your interview with the judges, where you explain about all the charity work you’ve done – I hadn’t known about the folder or the charity work, so I didn’t do very well that year. The interview was a massive part of the pageant: in terms of scoring, about 50 per cent related to the stage element (what people typically think of when they hear the word ‘pageant’, where you’re walking in front of an audience in your beautiful dress) and 50 per cent hinged on the interview.
Still, I placed in the top 16 that first year. Afterwards, I said to my mum, ‘Next year, I’m coming back and I’m gonna win it – I really, really want to do this.’ Finally, my competitive side was coming out! The funny thing is, I wasn’t competitive in anything before pageants because with my other activities – swimming, running and so on – I knew I was never going to win. But suddenly I felt I could win this – this was something that I could actually be good at. I could talk a good interview. I could walk well onstage. I could do my hair and make-up really nicely. I could actually do well … and so, for the first time, I really had that hungry desire to actually win something.
And I really set my mind to it. There’s a lot more that goes into pageants than people might know: I raised thousands and thousands of pounds for charity (I did everything, but mostly a lot of cake sales!). I’ve always felt a sense of achievement doing charity work and have always been a charitable person, so being able to give back as part of my pageant work was something I loved to do.
I also made appearances as my county representative; as Miss Teen Hertfordshire, I’d go to car boot sales, church gatherings, all over the place. Unlike what a lot of people may think, winning a pageant isn’t really about what you look like – it’s more about the things you do in the prep for it, showing that you give back to your community.
So, I went back the next year and, now that I knew what I had to do to prepare, I was crowned one of the winners: I won the title of World Teen Supermodel UK 2016/17 – a mouthful!
• • •
After that, I ended up travelling to China to compete in the international round that followed. I spent two weeks over there competing. It was scary; I’d never been anywhere like that before. I hadn’t been anywhere much further than France! But it was an amazing experience. The pageant was held in a place called Macau, which is famous for its hotels and gambling, a bit like a Chinese Las Vegas. I didn’t get to see a lot of it – really only what I saw getting a taxi from the airport to the hotel – as we literally spent two weeks inside its downstairs reception room, rehearsing every morning, afternoon and night. I spent my eighteenth birthday out there, rehearsing for this pageant! I actually did quite well and placed second, so I was first runner-up.
I didn’t do any more pageants after that as I got busier with other things, but I am so glad that I had the experience. The stereotype around pageants is that the girls taking part aren’t very nice to each other, but I made some really good friends through that world, including my friend Misha, who’s actually an influencer herself. I know it sounds cringey, but you do make friends for life when do you do something like that, because everyone has the same interests as you. They want to be the girl in their area that’s doing something a bit different. They want to be onstage, they want to be in the spotlight.
For another girl, it may not be pageants that appeal to them. It might be football, or painting, or camping – anything! But you will meet like-minded people if you get involved with what interests you.
Pageants also really let me explore my love for make-up and hair – and all the glitz and glam that comes with being onstage.
I’m such a girly girl and always have been, and pageants really let me indulge that side of me.
They gave me (even!) more confidence, too, as I was putting myself out there, going for what I wanted and seeing my hard work pay off.
These days, I look back on all the rejections I had when I was younger and see every ‘no’ as almost paving the way for each ‘yes’ that was to come: all those auditions where I didn’t get the role; all the school plays where I went for the main part and I was never chosen. I’ve said to my mum, sometimes I feel like all that rejection that I had when I was younger – never being the one chosen to do the things I wanted to do, or who was the best at everything – is why I’m so appreciative of the life I have now. I’ve realised that it just wasn’t my time then, and I feel so lucky to be where I am today. I really do believe that a negative situation can lead to something positive. When something bad happens, you never know if there could be something positive around the corner.
So, after never really achieving what I wanted to achieve, I think, now, maybe that’s because I needed to go through all that to then get this.
Instagram was, of course, another major focus for me then. At fashion school, I always dressed up for my two days a week – it was fashion school! – and then, on our lunch breaks, I’d ask my friends to take pictures of me in crazy outfits on the streets of London. They were terrible, terrible pictures, looking back – but I was living my London fashion student dream. That’s really when I started to grow on that platform, because I was always trying to post what I was doing on my socials. I guess it was to reiterate, ‘I’m out here doing this really cool thing!’ I always wanted to show everyone that I was up to something interesting – it was, again, that impulse to be different. So, I really began posting, posting, posting, as much as I could, and trying to save as much money as possible so I could buy more clothes and style them for outfits for Instagram shoots.
And it wasn’t just Instagram keeping me busy, either. At 17, I made my first video for YouTube. Sat in the dining room at about eleven o’clock at night, I made a tutorial on how to wave your hair with straighteners. I thought, I’m just going to film it and put it up, and then I posted about it on my Instagram, saying, ‘Go watch my first video.’ It wasn’t my best video. I filmed it on a camera that I’d saved up to buy, but it wasn’t expensive equipment. But with anything like that, you have to start somewhere and just keep posting as much as you can.
I was working as a lifeguard at the time, alongside going to fashion college. When I went into work the next day, everyone was talking about the video I’d made – because no one we knew really did that at that point; no one made YouTube videos. But me being me, I wanted to be original.
After that video, I started filming once a week. I’d use my mum’s debit card to place a big order from PrettyLittleThing or another brand to film a haul video, and promise her that I was going to send it all back once I’d talked through the clothes I was buying. Occasionally, I’d forget to return the order in time. That was a bit naughty. But I didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t afford to do hauls otherwise, which were so popular at the time; they were blowing channels up. I kept thinking, If I get a haul that blows up, it’ll be worth it …
In the end, what eventually got me quite a few subscribers was uploading a hair tutorial on how I did my bouncy pin curls for pageants; in it, I explained how I would cool them and set them. That got about 150,000 views, which was a huge amount then. It’s always the case that one video will blow up a channel and then that’s it: people will just keep coming back to your channel and you’re on your way.
I didn’t know that video was going to go big – you never do! You just have to persevere and hope that one video will take off.
And I really wanted that to happen, for this to become something more than a hobby for me. Those hauls aside (sorry, Mum!), I always wanted to have my own money and to be able to buy things for myself – to, say, be able to go and buy a top I wanted. From following other girls on Instagram and YouTube, I knew social media meant I could turn myself into a business, and that’s what I wanted to do. My entrepreneurial streak was coming out.
So, unlike how I got started on Instagram, with YouTube, it was always This could be a job! It wasn’t a case of I want to do this video just because I really enjoy it. I did enjoy it. I loved it! And I actually still do love it! Even now, with my workload, I still edit my videos myself because I find it really therapeutic. I don’t let anyone else do it, and I do really relish that aspect.
I knew YouTube could be a job. I didn’t do it just because I thought it was a bit of fun. I thought, Something could come from this.
But I was very aware from the get-go that YouTube could be something that could make me money, that could be a job for me. And that’s totally fine to think that way – it’s fine to think about how you want to make a living. It’s a good thing to put some thought into what you want to do! And, in my case, I was beginning to feel like being a successful influencer could actually be the answer to everything I’d always wanted. To be my own boss, to make good money, to have fashion, hair, beauty and make-up all be part of my job? That’d be incredible.
Because I wasn’t that keen to make any of my other jobs my career …
In the swimming club I swam with, when you hit 17, you became a lifeguard – that’s just what you did. So, the minute I turned 17, I did my lifeguard course and became a lifeguard, just as my sister had. I was so happy to be getting paid £8 an hour as it helped me to save up.
It wasn’t a fun job whatsoever. You literally sit on a chair most of the time, just watching the swimmers. There was only one time I had to do something: a boy was choking in the outdoor swimming pool and I had to give him a few backslaps – that was literally it!
So, it was a quiet job, but it still came with a lot of responsibility. They used to tell us that if someone drowned on our watch, it could be taken really seriously – so it was quite a serious job to have as a 17-year-old. These days, my manager, Fran, and the girls I work with have a long-running joke about me being proud of being a lifeguard, because for a while, every time I was asked in an interview to share something people didn’t know about me, I’d mention that! Even now, if ever I’m on a boat and it gets a bit bumpy, I’ll tell people not to worry: I’m a lifeguard! I’m joking, but it is something I’m proud of. I guess it’s quite an interesting thing to say you can save someone’s life and do CPR.
So, on the days that I wasn’t at fashion college, I was lifeguarding in my first year. In my second year, I started working at Boots instead, on the No7 make-up counter. That was just a Christmas temp job at first, then they wanted to take me on; fashion school was Mondays and Thursdays, so I’d work at Boots on the three days in the week I wasn’t at college. It was a good job, but I didn’t love it. For anyone who hasn’t worked in retail or customer service, let me tell you, it can be tough! Some people can be quite rude. But I have the gift of the gab, as my mum says, which definitely came in handy at times.
• • •
With my two years at fashion school up in the summer of 2017, I left Boots to try something different: working at a gym. I wanted to do so many different things when I was younger and, for a while, I thought I wanted to be a personal trainer. At the time, I was really into spinning classes, so I started working at the gym on the desk as a receptionist. I also started learning how to become a spin instructor. It was almost a mini-apprenticeship, so I’d be leading classes myself. I was learning on the job, with the aim of potentially making that my actual career. But from doing all that I definitely lost my love for exercise for a while. My shift would start at 6am, so I’d be up at 5am to get ready, then I’d walk to the gym. Once there, I’d turn on the lights, switch on all the machines and do my shift. By the time it was over, I wouldn’t want to stay any longer to do my own workout because I’d had enough of the machines!
I kind of got fired from the gym in the end. Basically, I had glandular fever, and I was just so, so unwell that I was signed off from work by a doctor for a month. Towards the end of that time, I started to feel a bit better, but I thought, I’ll go back to work when I’m 100 per cent recovered. In the meantime, I had to take part in a ceremony to hand back my pageant crown. I went to get my hair done for that and was spotted at the hairdresser’s by one of the gym members, who then told the gym staff.
The other thing was, I’d left my email account open on the gym computer (don’t do this!), and my manager saw an email receipt that showed I’d gotten an Uber in London at about 3am. I’d been on a night out with my college friends and was coming all the way home after missing the last train! At the time, we were going through a stage when, every other weekend, we’d go to a different club in London – DSTRKT, Libertine, Tape – and try to get in. We made some really fun memories, actually. I’d never do that now, but I was at that experimental age, and my fashion college friends were quite into that kind of stuff. I’d catch the last train home if it wasn’t too late, or I’d stay in London at a friend’s house, or we’d all split a hotel room and share a double bed.
Of course, that all got me into trouble at the gym. My manager asked me, ‘You’ve had all the time off work, Molly. Are you really unwell?’ I had been! But I probably should have gone back to work a bit earlier. It was quite a small team, and I think they’d struggled without me there, so they were quite upset with me. They called me in for a disciplinary meeting and had all this evidence to show that I wasn’t unwell. After that, my dad helped me write a long resignation letter, accepting responsibility for my actions. He probably took it more seriously than me at the time because it was an area that he worked on in the police and obviously anything Zoe or I did reflected back on him. But it did help me to learn that accepting responsibility for things is super important.
Looking back, all those jobs helped me to learn what I didn’t want from a job. I realised that I get bored very easily, which is why I couldn’t stay in a job for long. I was chopping and changing all the time because they just weren’t for me. And that really reinforced for me what I’d always known: I wanted to do something a bit different to what was on offer to me – I just didn’t know what yet.
That’s why what I’m doing now is so incredible to me.