Meloche's video hit 1 million views in just four days - that's according to VSCO, whose public relations company emailed me for the first time on June 25, with a pitch to write about the "#VSCOgirl viral video." The VSCO girl trend had already started to take off, and VSCO - although they hadn't pushed the term before - had quickly capitalized. "Just to be clear I've been editing my photos on VSCO for years! Before it was SUPER popular." "It's just a new funnier way of calling someone basic! The average girl just following the trend," Meloche said in an email. Meloche, 18, told Business Insider that she's been regularly referred to as a "VSCO girl" since she started senior year of high school in the fall of 2018. In a 11-minute-long video titled, "the basic VSCO girl transformation," Meloche and fellow YouTube Haley Pham spend the day doing what they describe as "the most basic typical VSCO girl things" - getting iced coffee, going to a drive-in movie, and using the F2 filter on VSCO for their pictures. "VSCO girl" is also the name of a heavily auto-tuned song that was put up on YouTube back in November 2018 from an artist who calls himself Young Dice.īut on June 21, VSCO girl made its way into the title of its most influential YouTuber yet: Hannah Meloche, a recent high school graduate known to her 1.9 million subscribers for her funny vlogs and relatable aesthetic. Over on YouTube, there are only a handful of videos before June whose titles mention VSCO girls, uploaded by creators with minor followings. In the timeless world of TikTok - where #VSCOgirl tagged videos have nearly 2 billion views - it's impossible to tell when the trend caught on there. Mentions of the VSCO girl didn't take off on Twitter until this summer, and the small number of tweets from before often employ "VSCO girl" as a diss or jab. VSCO spokesperson Julie Inouye told Business Insider that the company played no role in the trend going viral, and said that the VSCO girl trend originated "organically" from teens on the platform who are being "unapologetically themselves."īefore the VSCO girl summer revved up in June, mentions of "VSCO girl" were hard to come by across the internet outside of the photo-editing app itself. The VSCO girl has been described as everything from the Tumblr cool girl of 2019 to a 90s-meets-surfer-girl vibe, all while accompanied by accessories like scrunchies, pastel t-shirts, reusable water bottles, and metal straws.īut there's still no clear explanation as to what first drove the VSCO girl's popularity, which started to spike at the beginning of June. VSCO is essentially a minimalist version of Instagram: a place for editing and sharing photos without the pressure of like counts and engagement metrics. Although VSCO has sustained itself since its launch in 2011 on its steady presence as an insider's trick for better Instagram photos, its brand shot into the stratosphere this summer on the coattails of the VSCO girl. Way before the "VSCO girl" became the internet darling of this summer, there was a photo-editing app named VSCO helping teens and influencers add filters to images and shape an artsy aesthetic behind the scenes of their Instagram accounts.