Acacia Brinley

Acacia Brinley Kersey ( Clark; born October 22, 1997) is an American influencer. She first rose to fame on Tumblr as a teenager for her selfies. She also found popularity on Instagram, where she’d gained over two million followers by 2016, as well as on YouTube, Vine, Pheed, and Twitter.

Early life Acacia Brinley Clark Her mother, Melissa Dawson-Clark, worked as Brinley's manager throughout her social media career, who starred in the Disney Channel series I Didn't Do It in 2014.

Brinley was raised in Orange County, California. According to her, she was bullied at school as a teenager for wearing "whatever was on sale" instead of "whatever was new [or] hot" like her classmates, which led to her being socially isolated and feeling "like [she] didn't even exist". In 2013, she had more than 138 thousand followers on the pay-per-view social media platform Pheed, where her posts regularly yielded, according to cofounder Phil Haus, five times the engagement of those by Snoop Dogg.

Brinley was featured in the music video for the Chainsmokers' song "#Selfie", released in March 2014. She had more than two million Instagram followers, 460 thousand YouTube subscribers, and 370 thousand Vine followers by September 2014. Also that year, she became the first influencer signed by theAudience, a social media management company founded by Oliver Luckett, with whom she got a sponsorship deal to promote the 2014 Winter Olympics and McDonald's. By 2016, she was known for her makeup and lifestyle posts, which regularly received around 150 thousand likes. Brinley acted in the 2017 films American Satan and Another Day in Paradise.

In October 2021, she announced on Instagram that she would be stepping away from being an influencer indefinitely, describing the career as having thoroughly damaged "me, my relationships, my financial stability and my view of the world". In 2020, Tumblr posts and tweets made by Brinley as a teenager, in which she had used racial slurs, resurfaced online, for which she publicly apologized.

Commentators in the 2010s often remarked on her branding abilities and successful sponsored posts. In 2014, Taffy Brodesser-Akner described Brinley for The New York Times Magazine as a "microstar" whose brand appeal came from being "relatable and willing to use products — just about anything, really — and talk about them", adding, "These days... the Acacia Brinleys of the world have almost as much influence as the Charlize Therons, perhaps more, and they engage better with their audiences too." In his 2016 book The Power of Broke, businessman Daymond John called her "one of the top 'influencers' of today" and a "powerful change-agent... of our times" and wrote that she was known as the "selfie queen" for having "damn near perfected" the act of taking selfies. Samantha Schnurr, writing for E! News, also remarked in 2021, "Acacia's time online was not without scandal." Brinley and Kersey had broken up by December 2022.

Filmography Year Title Role Notes 2012 Code: 9 Herself Episode: "Snow Globe Surprise" 2017 Another Day in Paradise Anastasia American Satan Michelle