In January, a TikTok video by a 23-year-old model and mother of three making a peanut butter sandwich for her kids went viral. Now her kitchen posts are watched by millions of teenage fans around the world. Just don’t call her a trad wife.
On TikTok, 23-year-old Nara Smith, impossibly beautiful in a black silky peignoir with long, feather-fringed bell sleeves, is pouring flour, salt, water and yeast into an electric bowl mixer.
“This morning the first thing my daughter said as she stumbled into my room was, ‘I want a PB & J [peanut butter and jelly – jam to us] sandwich, so that’s exactly what I got started on,” she says, in a voiceover so soporific it sounds as if she’s swallowed five Valiums.
To date, more than 25 million people worldwide have watched this 90-second video in which Smith, hitherto a successful – but not stellar – model, makes dough. While that proves, she boils down raspberries for jam. She spreads peanuts on a baking tray to roast, then blends them with salt. The dough rests for several more hours and then goes into the oven. From the loaf that emerges, Smith cuts out tiny triangles, spreading them with her peanut butter and jam. “[My daughter] ended up having a few of them and wanted more,” Smith breathily concludes.
@naraazizasmith who remembers the other bread and jam video I did? #homemadebread #jam #peanutbutter #toddlersoftiktok #fypシ #easyrecipes
♬ Chill Vibes - Tollan Kim
When this clip, hashtagged #easyrecipes apparently without irony, appeared on Smith’s TikTok in January, she became an overnight online sensation. To date, she has 9.8 million TikTok followers and 4.2 million on Instagram. Smith followed up her PB & J video by making her daughter Rumble Honey, 3, and son, Slim Easy, 2 – she was pregnant at the time with Whimsy Lou, now 6 months old – a cheese toastie.
“I made the bread, the cheese, the butter and the pesto – they like pesto on cheese. It was the best-grilled cheese ever,” she tells me now. How long did that take? “Seven hours.” The kids must have been starving. “They were fed in between.” On Oreos, I say jokingly. “We don’t keep Oreos in the house,” Smith reprimands me. “I don’t actually remember … Probably apples and peanut butter. I don’t make cheese from scratch every day. Obviously.”
If TikTok’s ever produced a character most likely to provoke watercooler debate it’s Smith. Parents may be baffled as to her appeal but to their Gen Z and Gen Alpha offspring, it’s obvious her watchability lies in her divisiveness. You either love to love or love to hate watching Smith, whose feed provokes simultaneously admiration, hilarity, envy or – in many cases – fury.
Many enjoy escaping into the regressive but gorgeous domestic fantasy she creates: a Gen Z Martha Stewart figure, always dressed to the nines and with an aura of total calm – an antidote to most “momfluencers” ranting about lives of permanent exhaustion and chaos.
“So many people send me the cutest messages about being inspired by me, how they wear dresses to cook now and how their daughters want to make jam. That makes me so happy,” Smith enthuses.
To others, Smith is a source of endless amusement as she diligently makes her versions of additive-laden American classics so much more easily bought in a shop: bubble gum or Coca-Cola. When the Smiths ran out of toothpaste and sunscreen, she knocked some up with bentonite clay and coconut oil, and zinc oxide powder and beeswax respectively. She’s inspired thousands of “from scratch” memes, such as Smith melting ice cubes to make water.
Yet many find Smith – who’s married to the male supermodel Lucky Blue Smith – positively sinister. Dozens of podcasts and chatroom threads proclaim she’s a puppet of the Mormon Church (Utah-born Lucky grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) stealthily converting her followers. Others name her queen of the “trad wives”, influencers pushing a Handmaid’s Tale agenda where women ditch careers to focus on breeding, housework and looking pretty.
They complain Smith makes other mothers feel inadequate for not wearing Chanel to make mozzarella and fume that she’s the epitome of rich, white (even though she’s mixed race) privilege.
Others maintain Smith’s simply the luckiest Tiktoker of the age, “a girl boss” who’s hit the jackpot with her couldn’t-make-it-up formula of glamour, Zen and wacky recipes.
“What I did was never premeditated. It doesn’t have a hidden agenda. I just slipped into it,” says Smith, who – if she is the brainwasher many claim – successfully dupes me into finding her down-to-earth, friendly and clearly smart, but not to the Dr Evil genius level her detractors suggest.
Smith knows what she’s doing – that the zanier her content, the more likely it is to go viral. Such an online presence, after all, is now vital for models to accrue lucrative contracts, which she’s gained with the likes of Charlotte Tilbury, Hourglass and Marc Jacobs – for whom she brilliantly makes a handbag “from scratch”. A cookbook deal’s inevitable.
@marcjacobs The Tote Bag, made from scratch by @Nara Smith
♬ original sound - marcjacobs
Yet, she’s also bemused at the tin-hat theories she attracts. “In the beginning, I got frustrated or entertained by people’s opinions. But [feedback] really picked up just before I gave birth in March and post-partum I was in a really vulnerable state. So I just stopped reading any of it and didn’t really care about it any more, because 99% of people’s opinions were false. If I commented back or tried to correct that started a discussion involving 500 people telling me I’m lying. So I didn’t even try.”
It’s 9am on a Sunday and we’re sitting alone in a bar at Claridge’s hotel, where she and Lucky are staying courtesy of Burberry, whose London Fashion Week show they’ll attend the following day. The couple and Whimsy arrived very late the previous night from Frankfurt, the city where Smith grew up, where they left their older children with her parents.
As with anyone you’ve encountered purely online, Smith in the flesh is a bit of a shock. That she’s tall (183cm) and gorgeous goes without saying, but instead of wearing one of the frothy white ballgowns she favours to mandolin potatoes for homemade crisps, she’s dressed unassumingly in Levi’s, a polo neck and YSL loafers.
A bigger surprise is Smith’s voice, which is far more lively than her infamous TikTok monotone.
“The voice started because my kids were asleep on me or next to me, so I needed to talk very quietly not to wake them up. Then I got a few comments of people loving it and I was like, ‘okay, let’s stick with it.’ " Smith’s also a “huge fan” of autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR, the term used to describe the blissed-out state some experience in response to soft sounds, videos of which clog the internet. “I listen to ASMR a lot, so if I can tap into that, why not?”
Smith’s obsession with “from scratch” isn’t an affectation – it’s central to her German heritage. “I still feel a little foreign in America,” she says softly. “The food culture there is insane: everything’s so processed. I grew up going with my grandma and dad to the grocery store every single day. It was normal to make fresh bread, sometimes fresh pasta. Food in Germany goes bad in two or three days, whereas in America … We bought a lettuce in Costco once and three weeks later it was still as good as new. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it, wondering what might make it last so long.”
She’d always suffered from eczema but after marrying Lucky aged 19 and settling in the United States, the condition flared. “I felt really lethargic; my hands were always purple. I knew I had to change my entire lifestyle just to function, so that led me to make more and more and more from scratch. I naturally shared what I was doing in my content.
“The only thing I struggle with making from scratch is sourdough. It’s quite a science: my starter is great – it’s the proving time in the heat of my kitchen that’s the problem.”
The hours needed to concoct her creations are “probably doubled” because she’s filming the process herself – “Setting up my tripod, moving it around, getting different angles.” How much time does she spend beautifying herself? (Her haters insist she “shames” other mothers by always looking so chic.)
“I get ready every single day anyway. Every time I put on makeup and a good outfit, I feel I can conquer the world. My dad told me growing up, ‘Don’t wear sweatpants – people will think you’re slouchy,’ so I don’t. Even post-partum, I tried my best: I couldn’t fit into many of my outfits but I wore flowy dresses or a good pyjama set – it has to be a good one.”
Does she worry about spilling oil down her designer outfits? “It’s a shock every time I’m done cooking that my white dress isn’t stained. But miraculously it hasn’t happened yet.”
When she eventually splashes tomato sauce on vintage Dior it will break the internet. “I know!” she laughs.
Born Nara Aziza Pellman, the daughter of a South African nurse and a German father (“he does something to do with finance”), Smith grew up bilingual, addressing each parent in their native language. The eldest of three, she was a diligent schoolgirl, but at 14 was scouted by IMG Models in a shopping centre and began travelling the world, chaperoned by her parents.
She met Lucky at a fashion show in Milan at the age of 18. He was 22 and had been modelling since 10, becoming the face of Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford. Within months they were engaged, and married a few weeks later on a beach in California, when she was just pregnant with Rumble. (Lucky already has a 7-year-old daughter, Gravity, with an ex-girlfriend.) Just 15 months later, she gave birth to Slim.
When the average age of a first-time mother is 30 in Britain (it’s 27 in the US), many see the Smiths’ youth and fecundity as a rebuke to their lifestyle. “Nowadays it’s shifted to prioritising a career first and having kids later,” Smith says. “I feel I can do both. Dad was 45 and Mum 35 when they had me, and he always said he regretted having kids really old. So when I discovered my husband and I were on the same page about having kids young, we were like, let’s do it, and then they get to grow up with us.”
Her critics shout she’s too young for domesticity. “They say, ‘She should be in a club living it up, coming home drunk.’ But I’ve been to the clubs. I’ve experimented. I’ve been a teenager. Now I would much rather be at home reading a book or having friends over to play a board game. That’s so much more fulfilling to me than coming home at 4am.”
What bothers Smith most is the trad wife label. “I’m not a trad wife. I’m a working mum,” she says with a sigh. “I’ve addressed it several times, but people still want to run with that narrative. I wanted kids, but I did not want to compromise my career. I do work that allows me also to be home with the kids. I know that’s a privilege.”
Far from being subservient to Lucky, the couple divide childcare and chores 50-50. “It took us five years to get to this point but now we make sure his needs are met and my needs are met by splitting our days.”
Usually, she spends morning with the children while he works and vice versa in the afternoons. The cooking’s not a way of frittering away empty hours; it’s vital to her job. “I’m in the kitchen filming for at least five hours, sometimes nine, every day. Once the kids go to bed, I edit.”
That’s not to say she doesn’t love cooking. “It’s my love language. Taking care of my family makes me happy but I can do that and work – it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
Still, Smith’s messaging can be confusing. Of late, Smith’s Instagram has emphasised her modelling, with footage of fashion shoots and shows. Yet suddenly she’ll fan trad-wife flames, cynics would say to keep that part of her algorithm buzzing. Recently – in a prime example of the internet eating itself – she posted shots of her visiting quintessential trad wife Mormon Hannah Neeleman, known to her ten million Instagram followers as @Ballerina Farm, and her eight children at her Utah homestead. “We were visiting my husband’s family in Utah and thought it would be fun to hang out. Hannah and I always get looped in together for some reason. We share similarities, like being mums and having a passion for cooking, but really we are quite different.”
The Smiths moved from Los Angeles to Dallas during Covid, but don’t love it there so plan to move again, to Connecticut, where they want a house with a garden. “I’d love chickens and to grow my own vegetables.” That’ll cause further outrage. “God forbid I grow my own food and know where it comes from,” Smith says.
Living on the US east coast would also make it easier for Smith’s family to fly in to help with childcare. Another internet “truth” is the couple employ hordes of staff. Smith shakes her head. “We used to have a nanny – well, more a babysitter – but she stopped working for us about a month ago. We didn’t want to have kids to pass them off to someone else.” Her brother’s arriving shortly from Frankfurt to mind Whimsy while they attend fashion shows. “But I’m still exclusively nursing [breastfeeding], so it takes lots of juggling.”
What about religion? Lucky’s plain he is a practising Mormon and occasionally Smith’s videos have featured Mormon texts in the background. The church banned black people from the priesthood and temple until 1978, so a beautiful, mixed-race convert would be a PR coup. “That’s a pretty wild take,” Smith says softly. “I was baptised when I was younger – as a Christian. I love learning about different religions and because of my husband’s background, I’ve explored Mormonism. But I don’t wear garments [special underwear worn by Mormons]. We didn’t get married in the temple. I drink tea [against Mormon tenets]. I’d never mention my faith – it doesn’t need to be broadcast over social media. I’m not pushing anything on anyone. Just do your own thing.”
The couple will stop at three children. “Babies are so cute, but I feel I can’t be the best mom to my kids if I keep having more.” After all, as Smith says, she likes to do everything to the best of her ability. “If I want something, I will work tirelessly to make that happen. I am a very ambitious person.”
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
