The 24-year-old influencer with 12.5m TikTok followers clarifies she's not a tradwife, addresses her daughter's cancer battle, and reveals the grueling work behind her viral luxury cooking videos.
By Adam Makins·
Nara Smith wants to set the record straight: she is not a tradwife. Not an ex-tradwife either, despite what the New York Times might suggest. She’s not Mormon (her husband was raised that way, but that’s beside the point). She didn’t abandon her biracial heritage with a sleek bob. There is no secret religious agenda hiding in her content. She simply wants you to stop projecting narratives onto her and accept what she actually is: a model, actor, and influencer who makes extraordinarily high-production cooking videos in couture while remaining utterly expressionless.
“Those that get it, get it. Those that don’t, don’t,” Smith told me over soft serve in Connecticut. “And that’s totally fine.” Her casual dismissal of the noise surrounding her online presence masks something more interesting: a woman who has experienced real trauma and emerged with sharper boundaries about what she’ll share.
Most people know Smith for her mesmerizing TikTok videos where she makes everything from scratch in haute couture. Her grilled cheese video has been viewed nearly 50 million times. She’s made Nutella, ketchup, Cheez-Its, Pop-Tarts, and bubblegum while wearing designer gowns that cost thousands. A $5,000 Prada suit to make chicken drumsticks. A $10,000 Schiaparelli to grate tomatoes.
What’s less visible is the infrastructure. Smith spends upwards of eight hours creating a single 90-second clip. She does all her own styling, makeup, art direction, editing, voiceover, and mixing. Her agents beg her to hire help. She refuses. “I am very type A,” she says, which is her understated way of describing someone who can’t sleep when a detail isn’t perfect, who tosses and turns bruised like the princess in that fairy tale about the pea.
She’s launched a cookbook called “Homemade.” She has two films in post-production, including a culinary thriller with Charlize Theron and Demi Moore. She works with Marc Jacobs, Miu Miu, and YSL. She makes significantly more money than her husband, which she confirms with a smile and excellent teeth.
And she has four children: Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, Whimsy Lou, and Fawnie Golden.
Her daughter Whimsy Lou was diagnosed with cancer before her second birthday.
Smith’s world flipped. The family didn’t even have childcare until suddenly they needed to juggle work, chemotherapy appointments, and holding themselves together for a child too young to understand what was happening. Lucky’s mother spotted something on Whimsy’s body during a family photoshoot. One ER visit later, the doctors delivered the diagnosis. Immediate treatment was required.
For five days out of every fortnight, depending on blood counts, Lucky stayed in the hospital with Whimsy while Smith breastfed at home. They found children’s books about cancer. They built community with other parents. When Whimsy entered remission, Smith went public about the diagnosis, because silence felt complicit when so many families were suffering the same news alone.
“You don’t realise how many parents or children go through similar experiences until you’re in that situation,” she said, her voice still carrying the weight of those months.
The experience changed her calculus about what belongs online. She’s always had strict boundaries with her children, showing as little as possible while acknowledging they exist. She won’t give them phones. She’ll give them a Brick or Firefly, something that communicates. Maybe a camera. No social media until eighteen, if she can help it.
“I would have done it so different,” she admitted when asked if she ever wonders what her life would look like without the videos. “All the time. All. The. Time.”
This is where the news gets interesting: Smith isn’t abandoning her career or apologizing for success. She’s simply learning, publicly and painfully, that virality has costs measured in ways her spreadsheet never captured. The internet didn’t care about her family’s private devastation while she was working eight hours on a 90-second clip.
She’s tougher now. More deliberate. More protective. And maybe that’s what actually separates her from the tradwife archetype people kept trying to force her into: she’s not performing domestic perfection for an audience. She’s building a life with real consequences, messy boundaries, and the hard-won wisdom that not everything that photographs beautifully deserves to be seen.
This article is based on reporting from The Guardian
