Alex French is an American social media influencer who gained fame on TikTok overnight in late 2019 for a video of herself saying “hi” several times. She further showed off her lip-sync and dance skills, and also made comedy videos. Nevertheless, her rapid growth was short-lived as many criticized her content as “low-effort”, which were not enough in sustaining continuous growth.
Early Life
Alex French attended the McKinney Boyd High School in Texas. She actively participates in Christian youth programs and traveled to Brazil on a mission to learn about poverty and the condition of the Amazon there. She visited South America in 2019 to provide aid to underprivileged children.
Career
Alex French had initially joined TikTok in the mid-2010s, when it was still called musical.ly, and followed people like Jacob Sartorius and Loren Gray. She used to post lip-syncs and considered herself very good at it. After musical.ly became TikTok, she started to use it again in April 2019 and only became regular in November. She gained popularity after one of her videos went viral. Alex, who has mentioned “greeting people” as one of her special talents, along with catching food in her mouth, accordingly went viral for a video of her saying “hi” over and over again throughout the course of a week. She herself was surprised to find that such a video could amass over two million views within a couple days.
Within four weeks, she had over 1.3 million fans and was dubbed as the next Charli D'Amelio. Moreover, her girl next door demeanor was described as a mix of Emma Stone and Elizabeth Banks by Distractify in December 2019. While in her videos she could often be seen doing equally mundane chores, like jumping up and down, pantomime and sing-along, she has also participated in dance challenges. She showed off her moves dancing to the Lil Mama song Lip Gloss and celebrated surpassing 400k followers by dancing to the Ray J song One Wish. She has also gained popularity for her lip-sync and comedy videos.
Controversy
Despite receiving high praise almost overnight with tabloids predicting how far Alex French will go in three months with 700k followers a day, her rapid rise on the platform was short-lived. Back in December 2019, she was criticized by YouTubers like Rayhart Twins for lowering the bar too low even for TikTok with her low-effort content. They further criticized her goofy videos and pointed out contradictions, like her videos showing a privileged upbringing, while she called herself broke in one video. She had also showed off a lake house for the “Rich Girl” trend, although she deleted the video shortly after.
Family Life
Alex French was born to Stephanie and Bart French. Her father is the vice-president of development at a real-estate firm. She has three younger brothers named Owen, Charlie, and James, whom she has featured in her videos. She loves to travel and has been to destinations like Rosemary Beach, Florida; Manaus, Brazil; and Tofino, Canada.
