Belle Delphine

Early life Delphine was born Mary-Belle Kirschner in Cape Town on 23 October 1999. After her parents divorced, she moved to England with her mother and settled in Lymington, Hampshire. As of December 2020, she was living in Hove, one of the two main parts of the city of Brighton and Hove. In her adolescence, she was "an avid watcher of the anti-political correctness genre of YouTubers like iDubbbz" and also enjoyed watching the parody character Filthy Frank online. Around this time, she was treated for depression. In July 2016, she registered a YouTube account. The following month, she uploaded her first video, a makeup tutorial. In 2018, Delphine began to regularly upload pictures of her modelling on Instagram, using accessories such as pink wigs, thigh-high stockings, and cat ears to help create what she described as a "weird elf kitty girl" aesthetic. She also regularly produced cosplay-related content, Complex stated that she "posted clips of herself coyly eating a raw egg, shell and all. A scroll through her feed is just as likely to find colorful thirst traps as it is to see photos of her playing with a dead octopus".

As her popularity grew, Delphine began to draw controversy for her content. In January 2019, adult content creator Indigo White alleged that, while underage, Delphine passed off the photos of other sex workers as her own. A later February video, in which Delphine danced to a song about suicide while holding a gun, also drew controversy. Shortly after it was posted, false rumours of her death circulated online.

Pornhub account and GamerGirl Bath Water stunts In June 2019, Delphine made a post on Instagram in which she promised to create a Pornhub account if the post reached 1 million likes. Pornhub responded to the post, calling it "the best news". Each of the videos received poor like-to-dislike ratios, ranging between 66% and 77% dislikes. Pornhub Insights published a statistics report detailing that Delphine's videos became the most-disliked in the website's history. One of the videos, titled "PewDiePie goes all the way Inside Belle Delphine", was a minute-long clip which featured "a cat ear-clad Delphine eating a picture of YouTuber PewDiePie, winking throughout". In December, Pornhub's annual statistics report listed Delphine as the most-searched celebrity in 2019; "Belle Delphine" was also the site's fourth-most-searched term in general during the year.

On 1 July 2019, Delphine launched her online storefront, including a product dubbed "GamerGirl Bath Water." She announced the product on her Instagram account, where she posted an image of herself in a bathtub, with the caption "bath water for all you thirsty gamer boys." The product was marketed as the remains of her bath water in a jar and was priced at $30 (£24). @BakeRises, a since-banned Twitter user, fabricated a headline alleging that Delphine's product caused a herpes outbreak, which was debunked. YouTube video responses also sprung up featuring individuals supposedly drinking, cooking, and vaping the bath water. Patricia Hernandez of Polygon opined "What's curious about Delphine's side hustle here is that it seems to be a mixture of business and next-level performance art. In the video advertising the bath water, she outright calls this a stunt. And if you look at her wider Instagram oeuvre, Delphine's work is defined by her willingness to go there". Shortly after Delphine tweeted about the situation and several media outlets contacted PayPal about it, the company released the funds and returned the money to Delphine. A spokesperson for Instagram stated that her account had violated the community guidelines, though the specific post or reason was not provided. At the time of the ban, her account had accumulated over 4.5 million followers, according to Business Insider and Social Blade. Business Insider reported that there "appeared to be a coordinated effort to report Delphine's account". In late August, Delphine became inactive on her social media platforms, making many Patreon supporters believe they were being scammed out of previously promised upcoming content.

On 7 October 2019, Delphine tweeted an image of her mugshot, with a caption detailing that she was arrested. Online publications and users questioned the authenticity of her claims, while the Metropolitan Police stated they were "unable to disclose any information" regarding the arrest due to the Data Protection Act. The video also promoted her newly launched Instagram, TikTok, and OnlyFans accounts. The Spectator and Business Insider reported that her OnlyFans account draws in over $1.2 million (£1 million) per month. She uploaded "eat my ass", another music video in July, which also served as an announcement for "gamer girl"-branded condoms. In September, Delphine uploaded a music video for Doll.ia's "Plushie Gun" song, which featured her twerking, licking a razor blade, and playing with toy guns. The termination drew criticism from both Delphine and her fans, who questioned if there was a double standard between mainstream celebrities and independent content creators like Delphine. Around this time, Delphine started posting adult and explicit content on her Twitter account. Her erotic posing was often accompanied by gaming paraphernalia. On 25 December, she uploaded her first homemade hardcore porn to her OnlyFans account.

In January 2021, Delphine posted images of a staged-kidnapping fantasy shoot on Twitter, which led to several users accusing her of promoting rape. Delphine defended her post, stating "there is nothing wrong with enjoying power-play and BDSM where both people are consensual". She took another hiatus from the Internet in 2021, sharing on Twitter that she "vowed never to do porn again," wanting instead to live in a cottage and travel. However, in April 2022, she resumed making online content. During a 2024 interview with Louis Theroux, Delphine once again expressed a desire to "disappear" from the internet, stating she is not interested in fame and once "it's run its course, I'll just leave it".

Media reception and public image Surrealist eroticism of content Delphine's ahegao face attracted considerable online media attention. Delphine's persona and content has garnered curiosity and scrutiny from online users and media outlets alike. Various outlets, including Business Insider, The Cut, Kotaku, and Polygon have described her as a "troll", and several instances of her activity online as "stunts".

The intentionally "weird" aspect of Delphine's social media presence has been often noted in media coverage of her. Kotaku and Business Insider have described Delphine as a "peak self-aware e-girl", and as a figure that some may point to as "a symbol of the first wave of e-girl", respectively. Kitty Guo of Vice also noted that over time, Delphine "moulded herself into the platonic ideal of an e-girl," as her content began leaning more into "a carefully crafted pastel-fairy-princess-anime aesthetic". Guo also labelled Delphine as an "Extremely Online" person. Madeleine Aggeler of The Cut concurred, commenting:

Delphine herself has become something of an online Rorschach test, a figure in whom people see either a brilliant performance artist making a scathing commentary on the expectations of women online or someone cravenly taking advantage of misogynistic tropes of women gamers and appropriating Japanese cosplay culture. Rolling Stoness EJ Dickson described Delphine's posts as being more "bizarre" and "ridiculous", rather than "overtly sexual", and opined that "Such content appears to indicate that Delphine is leaning into—if not overtly parodying—the perception of the ideal girl as a hot, innocent young thing whose desire to play Fortnite is only eclipsed by her desire for nerdy gamer boy dick". Dickson also opined on why Delphine attracts much controversy, writing that: