One day in 2020, a 29-year-old woman named Christina Najjar stepped onto what felt like a conveyor belt.
It was a fairly short ride to the other side, and when she stepped off, her hair was better, her skin was shinier.
She wasn’t Christina anymore.
She was Tinx, a bonafide social media star on the hottest new social platform, TikTok, with more than 1 million followers hanging on her every word.
Everyone wanted her at their party, to sample their new product, to hold up her iPhone and say their name.
She used to fangirl over Tom Ford on Twitter; now she was getting an invite to his runway show during New York Fashion Week.
Within six months, The New York Times highlighted her appeal for “all generations” and Coveteur called her “the influencer to end them all.” She had more brand deals than she knew what to do with and more money than she had ever dreamed of.
She had transformed, she thought.
But when you reach a certain level of notoriety online, nothing is a given.
In April 2022, old and—she openly admits—abhorrent tweets on her personal Twitter account were uncovered and splashed across the tabloids, and endlessly dissected on Reddit and social media platforms, driving thousands of ill-wishers into her DMs.
The same places where she was once lauded as the girl everyone wanted to be were now minefields.
She apologized, but it was too late to stop the negative headlines and thousands of hate messages and comments.
Tinx was, to use internet parlance, swiftly canceled.
This could have been the point at which she called it quits, or at least, took her foot off the gas so as not to rile up the people who, she says, threatened to come to her home and kill her, among other things.
But there’s no way to reap the rewards of influencing and not be held accountable for the mistakes you’ve made in the past and could make in the future.
Many people may have decided that wasn’t worth it, and Najjar could have hung up Tinx and all her associated baggage and gone back to being Christina.
But she kept going.
While it may be rare to achieve the type of overnight fame on social media that Najjar has, it’s much harder, and even more rare, to keep that initial momentum going for the long haul.
Tinx is no longer TikTok’s It girl.
Depending on what corners of the app you lurk in, that honor belongs to Alex Earle or Sofia Richie.
But Najjar says she is ready for this next chapter.
If she wants to build a sustainable business from her social media platform, and she is emphatic that she does, it’s time to reintroduce herself.
“I had the big TikTok moment,” she says.
“Now I have these new projects I’m passionate about, I feel a little bit more grown-up.
I think that my community sees that and that’s where I am now.” Before the Twitter drama, Najjar had been writing The Shift, a self-help and women’s empowerment book aimed primarily at her millennial and Gen Z audience, which comes out today.
Now, as she sets her sights on the future, the book is a clear signpost..
