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“People are super understanding of how quick the growth has been,” says Vanilla about her meteoric rise.
Vanilla Mace is seated in her car holding a butter pistachio donut from Old Ferry Donut in LA’s Koreatown. She takes a bite and pulls back to stare deer-in-headlights-style at the vlog camera, buttery streusel dusting her lips. A celestial track plays as she reacts — a hand comes to her head, she chews quickly then stops, the gates of heaven briefly appear on screen.
“I’m not kidding, this is the best donut I’ve ever had in my life,” she says.
This was my first introduction to 28-year-old Vanillamace — the username for the Twitch streamer, YouTube vlogger, and content creator Em, which she chooses to share mononymically to protect her identity and peace — who has grown from 300,000 followers on TikTok to 3.8 million in just three short months. Even the now-famous donut reaction has been clipped hundreds of times, with the top handful of videos racking up millions of views. At the time, I double-tapped. Then my algorithm flooded.
Compilation clips of “Vanillamace Best Moments” appeared in my feed, one after the next, and after each new video (the devastation of the “f*ck ass Christmas tree” Skullpanda unboxing, the Target toy debacle, meowing at the Roblox bar) I found I liked her more. I noted we both lived alone, had two cats, enjoyed trinket culture, were virgos, were weebs. But there was something effortlessly authentic in the way she streamed and spoke. And, what I found most delightful: an innate unselfconsciousness.
Vanilla tells me she was a born entertainer. As a child in Connecticut, she begged her family to film her performing sketches or “sometimes just nonsense” on their camcorder. In high school, people would often tell her that she should consider doing standup. “I just loved to tell stories and make people laugh,” she tells Teen Vogue. “It’s just so funny that it was so apparent from a young age that I wanted to just talk in front of the camera.”
Her interest in gaming parallel-pathed her reputation as “class clown” (Vanilla’s senior year yearbook superlative). While her youth was spent playing Luigi’s Mansion with her cousins or Guitar Hero on the family Wii, it wasn’t until her brother started playing Minecraft that Vanilla became more invested in PC games, and eventually purchased her own Xbox.
At the time, gaming was a hobby, not a hustle. For much of Vanilla’s adult life, she worked as a dancer at a strip club in Boston, before deciding in 2024 to “[hang] up the boots” after finding some traction on Twitch. She pivoted to full-time content creator, never doubting that she could make her online presence a career. “In a weird way, I’m one of those people that’s confident, and so I believe in what I really, truly think is meant for me,” she says. “When I essentially quit my job to do this full-time, there were a lot of people in my life that were questioning that, like, well, what if it doesn’t work out? And I was like, it’s going to work out. I know it’s going to work out.”
Vanilla attributes her meteoric rise in 2025, in part, to her consistency. “If I’m a face that people are going to see on the internet, I want it to be so that you see my face often enough that you recognize [me]…but that was easy for me, because I love to do it,” says Vanilla. “My whole tagline on the internet is: a girl who doesn’t shut up. I’m just a girl who doesn’t shut up! That’s really it.”
But the explosive growth has come with a shift in lifestyle for Vanilla, in both challenging and meaningful ways. “People are super understanding of how quick the growth has been,” says Vanilla. “I did take a week off a few weeks ago, and just to be able to do that in itself was such a blessing…And it didn’t feel like people were pressuring me. I feel like a lot of people just see a funny person on the internet and they’re like ‘okay, more.’ Like you’re a content machine. And for people to really see me as a person and respect [my time off] has been really awesome.”
As with any viral figure, public recognition has become Vanilla’s new normal. In general, Vanilla says the interactions are mostly “just people getting really excited and wanting to take pictures with me.” And when she speaks about these interactions, I can tell that she genuinely is open to her fans sharing those moments with her.
“I feel like I get approached more than people who have a bigger following and bigger reach …because of the fact that I feel like people just feel like I’m very approachable,” says Vanilla. “It’s not something that I’m like ‘Ugh.’ I love it. I’m like, this is so much fun. If you like my stuff, what are the odds that you run into me? You might as well come say hi and have a conversation.”
But there is something parasocial that Vanilla seems to elicit. She radiates with a kind of older sister energy. In early June, she read a fan note aloud on a livestream, in which the fan thanked Vanilla for being a beacon of body neutrality. “She never demonizes what she eats…she enjoys it and she moves on.” (The full hopecore edit of this reading is worth a watch or two.)
Vanilla says when she first read this, she had never thought twice about her eating habits on livestream. “At the end of the day, as long as I still feel like I’m being healthy…if I want to eat this donut every now and then, I’m going to eat the damn donut,” says Vanilla. “Now that I’m aware that more people feel that way, I’m like, wow, there’s so much stuff that sticks with people about my content that I never intended for it to be, which is amazing.”
Incidentally, Vanilla’s video deterring people from visiting certain locations of ICE in LA in early June was one of the first of its kind to appear in my TikTok algorithm. “I have a platform,” she clearly states in the video. “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.” But Vanilla is very clear on her audience knowing where she stands. “People come into my chat asking, ‘oh, do you support x, y, z?’ If you are actually someone who watches my stuff, you would already know the answer to that question. It feels like rage bait.”
I ask Vanilla about whether cancelation or the classic loved-to-hated pipeline feels unnerving to her, (ironically, only a few days before she found herself in a debacle with a small tooth gem business over a gifted service).
“I feel like anyone in this space, you’re just worried that somebody’s going to interpret something the wrong way or try to just do anything in their power to make you look like a bad person,” says Vanilla. “If you’ve watched my stuff for a while, and even the stuff that I was posting when I had 300 people watching on my Twitch…the content never changed. It’s still very much the same whether I have 10 people in front of the screen or 10,000. And a lot of people that are actual supporters of me know that…People know where my heart is.”
As for what’s next for Vanilla, she says she’s considering jumping into sketch comedy. Something where she can have fun with it, while also still being herself. She wants to stay in LA for the foreseeable future. She’s been DJing and hopes to someday have her own events or parties where people can just dance and have fun.
“I really love the idea of the whole iCarly thing, or the Fantasy Factory, where they just had a budget and did whatever the hell.”
Whatever it is, the Vanilloids/Maceheads will be tuned in.
Photo by Sophie Chan Andreassend
Photo Assistant Mei Kobayashi
Design Director Emily Zirimis
Assoc. Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Senior Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Associate Visuals Editor Bea Oyster
Source: Teen Vogue
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