TikTok Made Me Buy It: Life Hacks For My Home
I first came across life-hacking TikToker Rachel Meaders in the middle of the pandemic last year. I was home, bored, and wanting to buy helpful, hackey products that made my monotonous days feel more purposeful. Turns out, I wasn’t alone. The TikToker, who amassed a following of 1.9 million over the past year (with some single videos garnering up to 26 million views), specializes in the things you didn’t know you needed from Amazon. Meaders has a knack for finding products from the depths of Amazon that are as helpful as they are random, like a machine that instantly transforms any fruit into frozen yogurt, a portable sealer so you never have to fumble around with a chip clip again, a waterproof, sand proof, and solar-powered phone power bank (admittedly more run of the mill than her other product suggestions) or a ball that makes homemade ice cream after “kicking it around” for 10 minutes—the epitome of something I didn’t know I needed.
Meaders can’t-look-away videos follow a simple format: she films in selfie mode and follows a script along the lines of, “Things you didn’t know you needed off Amazon.” Then, the camera pans to reveal her seemingly equally Amazon-savvy partner, who smiles, or waves, or embraces Meaders as she leans into his chest. The camera then cuts to all the glorious Amazon finds that her viewers so eagerly await.
“When it comes to finding the products that we feature on TikTok and Instagram, we want to ensure that every item is a clever resolution to a minor issue we have learned to ignore,” Meaders tells Vogue. “There are so many small businesses that have wonderful innovative product ideas that never get noticed by the masses. We find items that solve an everyday problem, and highlight them on our platforms because we believe in their idea and their product.”
Over the course of a year, I realized I had collected quite a few things I didn’t know I needed off Amazon, myself, and some of Meaders’s suggestions have indeed proven to be life-hacking, or at the very least, fun. Here, the things you didn’t know you needed off Amazon.
The Sponge That Cleans Your Makeup Brushes
I am not a huge makeup person. In fact, I am notoriously lazy and only have a few brushes that I use for many purposes. This sponge cleans brushes easily and comes in handy when changing pigments or going from bronzer to blush—all in all, much easier than the whole brush-washing to-do.
