Nara Smith has pushed back on the tradwife label attached to her, telling the Guardian there is “no secret agenda” behind the scratch-made recipes and couture outfits that have built her online following.
Smith, a 25-year-old model, actor and influencer, said in an interview published by the Guardian that the assumptions made about her are wrong on several counts — including that she is a tradwife, an ex-tradwife, a Mormon, or a woman broadcasting hidden religious messages through her videos.
She was speaking at Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a fortnight short of her 25th birthday, according to the Guardian.
Smith told the publication she is unconcerned by those who dislike her output. “Those that get it, get it. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’s totally fine,” she said, adding that anyone who wants to block her should do so for their own peace of mind.
During the interview she also disclosed that her daughter Whimsy Lou was diagnosed with cancer. The illness was first spotted by Smith’s mother-in-law, who noticed something on the child’s body during a family photoshoot for the holiday season late last year.
“My mother-in-law was, like, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but maybe you should go to the ER,'” Smith recalled. Doctors ran biopsies and ultrasounds before telling the couple their daughter had cancer and needed to begin treatment immediately, she said.
Smith described her world as having “flipped”. The couple had no childcare at that point, and suddenly had to balance work, four children and chemotherapy appointments while, in her words, making sure they were not falling apart for their daughter.
Roughly five days out of every fortnight, depending on her blood count, Lucky Blue Smith stayed in hospital with Whimsy during treatment while Nara remained at home breastfeeding their youngest child. Whimsy was under two at the time, Smith said, so there was little she could understand, but the couple explained the situation to their two older children and used children’s books to describe hair loss and other parts of the journey.
Smith said she found a community of mutually supportive parents in hospital, which is why she chose to speak publicly about her daughter’s condition once it was in remission. “People speaking about it makes you feel less alone,” she said.
She described being dazed as she recounted the upheaval that preceded the diagnosis — a new house, a new book, a new baby and what she called a big dose of postpartum anxiety. Her mother Joyce, a nurse who had recently finished her own treatment for breast cancer, flew in from Germany to help, and Smith said her family rallied around her.
Smith told the Guardian the experience changed her. She said she now takes more pleasure in mundane moments and has grown tougher, and that she thinks harder about how much of her children’s lives she puts online. She said she has always drawn a boundary around them, showing as little as possible while acknowledging they are part of her life.
Asked whether her children will be allowed phones, she reacted with horror. She said she intends to give them a basic communication device and a camera, but sees no need for social media or video games, and deliberately moved somewhere with nature so they can explore outdoors. Pressed on an age limit, she suggested 18.
On her own career, Smith said she sometimes wonders how her life would look had she never made the videos — “All. The. Time.” — and that the social media landscape has changed so much that she had to learn the hard way and reconsider what she posts.
Her clips, in which she narrates each step quietly and recreates supermarket staples from scratch, have drawn 12.5 million TikTok followers and 879 million likes, plus 4.8 million on Instagram. A grilled cheese video has been viewed 49.6 million times, and she has also made Nutella, ketchup, Cheez-Its, Pop-Tarts, Skittles, Snickers and bubblegum.
A cookbook of scratch-made recipes, Homemade, is coming out. Smith also acts and has two films in post-production: an indie project she cannot discuss, and Tyrant, described as a culinary thriller starring Charlize Theron, Demi Moore and Paapa Essiedu. She also referred to a forthcoming consumer goods brand without giving details.
Smith told the Guardian she handles her own styling, makeup, art direction, video editing, voiceover and mixing, spending more than eight hours a day on a single 90-second clip. She said her agents and managers urge her to take on help, but she refuses, describing herself as very type A, rigid and scheduled, and saying she is still working out where to relinquish control.
Her outfits have become part of the appeal. She wore a $5,000 Prada cashmere suit to make chicken drumsticks and a $10,000 Schiaparelli to grate tomatoes for gnocchi sauce, and a custom-made $900 white satin corset dress to make frozen yoghurt.
She said her earnings come from advertising and brand work including Marc Jacobs, Miu Miu and YSL. Asked whether she makes more money than her husband, she called it a loaded question and answered with a broad smile.
Smith, who has four children — Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, Whimsy Lou and Fawnie Golden — said unusual names build character, noting her husband had one.
She was born in South Africa to a German father who taught history and biology and a Mosotho mother who grew up under apartheid, and the family moved to Frankfurt after her birth, where two younger siblings followed. She recalled childhood allergies including to eggs, two hospitalisations for eczema and later an operation on her toes, and described herself as a child who preferred the company of adults.
Barred from Facebook by her parents, she joined Instagram, which they had never heard of, and used it to enter modelling. IMG Models scouted her at 14 through an online programme and her parents took her to castings. She said the experience was largely positive but taxing on a 14-year-old mind because of pressure to look a certain way, and that maintaining the required measurements became hard as her body changed.
She said she would support her children if they chose the industry, but would not recommend it over other interests.
Smith said she knew who Lucky Blue Smith was before they met, having had a crush on him at 15. He messaged her on Instagram years later, initially asking where she was from, and after a delayed reply asked to arrange a phone call. They spoke through the night between Los Angeles and Frankfurt and continued daily, sometimes for seven hours, falling asleep on the line.
She was drawn to his calmness, she said, and to how mature he seemed, adding that his looks were a bonus. They decided to marry not long after their first meeting, and posted photographs of the couple in bath towels and of the ring.
Smith said the couple married at 18 and now have so much life ahead that they attend couples counselling in person when needed, framing it as prevention rather than cure. She also had individual therapy and read self-help books.
She attributed some misunderstandings to translation, saying German phrasing can land harshly in English. She recalled telling her husband she did not care about something, meaning she did not want to discuss it further.
On domestic life, Smith said she has a cleaner twice a month for deep cleaning while she and Lucky handle the rest. She steams rather than irons and keeps cupboards ordered because systems make life easier, and said mess overstimulates her. She said her eldest daughter has good taste and is opinionated, so she usually does not intervene in outfit choices, though she will bargain over extreme combinations.
Her bedtime routine includes clean linen sheets, which she changes about twice a week, a nightly shower, skincare and working in bed until her eyes close, and she gets up around six. She said she insists on doing nights with her youngest, partly out of guilt over travelling and partly because the baby is her last. Their dog Archie, a pyrenees-pitbull cross, is adopted; she vetoed Lucky’s wish for a puppy. She said she does not exercise.
Three months after her Connecticut kitchen was finished it flooded because of an ice dam on the roof. She said ripping it out was not the headache it sounds because she had disliked the designers’ decisions, so the couple redid it the way she wanted.
She described the style of her home as “grandma chic with an English twist”, saying she wants people to feel a grandmother lives there rather than a 24-year-old, and that Ridgefield reminds her of the Cotswolds, where she would have moved in a heartbeat.
COMMENTS