Who the hell are 2girls1bottl3?

A girl with synthetically blue eyes, which peek out from under a massive fuzzy bear hat, approaches me in a McDonald’s. It’s 9:08am in South London. The girl, known to the world only as Munchie, is late. Mixie, her co-conspirator, is still on the way.

Earlier that day – like, way too early – Munchie called to give me the address of this McDonald’s, with instructions to grab a specific booth. This booth is Munchie’s favourite, a location for many of the videos that have made her and her best friend a special flavour of TikTok star. Mixie and Munchie are the twentysomething creators of 2girls1bottl3 (807,000 followers and counting) – an account where it’s always happy hour.

About a year ago, the TikTok algorithm delivered a video it thought I might enjoy. Two gorgeous, otherworldly girls with long fake nails and little emotion on their faces sit in a #maccyds. Working quickly, one of them slides a margarita glass in front of the screen. She salts the rim, slices a lime, dumps in a sunset-coloured McDonald’s slushie, materialises a bottle of tequila with a spigot, pours generously, then garnishes the excellent-looking drink with a strawberry.

The other girl, unbothered by her friend’s gently illicit behaviour, nibbles on a Happy Meal. Two straws are added. Both start to drink. They finish by staring into the camera suspiciously, inviting you to join them. Today, that video has more than four million views and the pair have a cult following that goes way beyond those with a passing interest in mixology or a Friday night enthusiasm for a mojito. Their 2girls1bottl3 videos – all 43 to date – follow the same formula: a drink is quietly mixed by Mixie and a snack is quietly munched by Munchie.

The girls never talk, preferring to let the diegetic sounds of their chosen fast-food joint fill the silence. But over the duration of each aesthetically riveting TikTok, anything can happen. Mangoes filled with ice cream grow on cactuses, whipped cream is plucked off the top of a drink and magicked away. With something for everyone (escapism meets foodie inspo meets cosplay meets mukbang meets ASMR meets comedy), they’re addictive. The girls are the best friends you wish you had. But are they mates or are they siblings? Are they family or are they dating? You want that drink, you want to know what the fuck is going on, you have to watch till the end. And then you watch another.

Up until now, there’s been nothing concrete placed in the public sphere about 2girls1bottl3. No names or ages, no biographical info, no brand deals. No sense of how, or even if, they make money. Just a barren YouTube, infrequently posted TikToks and piles of fan theories. Their comments section buzzes with TikTok fanatics squeezing out tiny clues. ​“Is that a European ringtone?” one says of a beep in the background. But after identifying themselves as English through a casual BTS on their Insta (185,000 followers, the same handle), the girls adapted. Now their videos are set in seemingly different countries each time. That calculated instability defines them: assume nothing, question everything. While Mixie has a separate Instagram in character (@starbaby477, no bio, four posts), Munchie is a ghost, tagged on their shared selfies as @blue_ice22k, an account with no profile picture and no photos.

After a round of failed pitches to other, lesser publications, I tweeted in desperation: ​“I literally keep pitching about these girls and nobody BITES. I’m sick of it. I’m obsessed with them I want to write about them they’re GENIUSES”. With more than 2.6 million views, the tweet went the type of viral that made my Twitter glitch. A new phase of life began: searching for Mixie and Munchie. Their anonymity, I’d come to find, was a deliberate move from two people who are a new kind of hyper-pop performance artist. When I did finally find them and they agreed to an interview, their conditions were upfront and clear: they’d only speak to me if they could remain anonymous.

Now, months of waiting for texts from an unknown number have led to this moment, sitting opposite Mixie and Munchie as I burn my mouth on a catastrophically hot coffee. They’re in full glam and matching Heaven by Marc Jacobs outfits. If they were born in this McDonald’s, they have a timeshare in Uncanny Valley. They ask me shyly to be in their latest TikTok.

Munchie begins by pulling a bottle of Malibu out of a shiny pink bucket. It’s now 9:30am, a lawless time in any McDonald’s, and people have apparently seen crazier things here than two pagan mixologists in gyaru make-up. Nonetheless, the fact that nobody thinks anything going on here is out of the ordinary gives me the dizzy sensation that I’ve hallucinated everything. Is anybody else seeing this? They’ve whipped out a bar set!

They’ve only gotten into serious trouble during shooting once, when they filmed in a Domino’s wearing staff uniforms. Mixie tells me how staff ​“came up to us and were like: ​‘You filmed here last week and someone saw you drinking alcohol in uniform. So, we have to call the police.’” Munchie finishes the story when Mixie trails off. ​“We were like: ​‘Wait, wait, wait!’” Faced with the prospect of arrest, they finished filming their video then dashed.

The drink they’re making now looks like bong water with tiny floating tennis balls inside. Munchie brings her hand to cover her mouth when she laughs, and her chin tucks frequently. Mixie’s inscrutable squint is imitated by die-hards on TikTok. Of the choice not to speak in their videos, Munchie expresses fatigue. ​“Honestly, the internet is too loud. The feed is too loud. TikTok is too loud. I’m scrolling and I just want everyone to shut the fuck up.”

In a video posted on 11^th July 2023, Mixie rolls fake ice cubes like dice on the table. She holds one up, beauty guru-style, using the inside of her palm to pull focus like Jeffree Star or NikkieTutorials might. There are no numbers on the ice cubes, but the gesture is clear: these are the winning ​“dice”.

It’s a bizarrely soothing experience, like watching someone divining the future from chicken bones in an internet age. For another video, they go pastoral. Munchie grinds an Oreo in a pestle and mortar then sprinkles the dust into a medium-sized pot of what appears to be dirt. Daintily, she digs into the biscuit-dust and pseudo-soil, then eats it. It has the same appeal as being a child and creating a potion, or actually eating earth in your garden.

Since starting 2girls1bottl3 on 15^th September 2022, the props have gotten more elaborate: taller glasses, pinker drinks, the goops somehow goopier, the slimes and salts more involved, the themes campier, the nail art more intricate, more talon-like. While the cocktail assembly is still treated with blank-faced seriousness, there’s more surrounding slapstick. Munchie’s in the back going into mannequin mode. Munchie’s doggy paddling in a pool using a pink floaty. Munchie’s in a chicken shop wearing a chicken costume. Munchie’s wrapped in Christmas paper, emerging as a present. Like the work of any creative mavericks, M&M’s content has an instantly identifiable gloss.

Separately, the actions they do are nonsense, but together they become a pastiche of nonsense. What becomes clear in their symbolism is that we’re not in this world anymore. In our world, dirt isn’t edible. Entering Mixie and Munchie’s realm, you have the haunting sense of witnessing something important, peering through the veil and accidentally glimpsing something you’re too un-special to understand.

Here are some facts about Mixie: her favourite smell is petrol. Her favourite musicians are Korn, Slipknot and Gorillaz. She’s obsessed with conspiracy theories and disasters and space – so obsessed with space, in fact, that she has a degree in astrophysics. Her favourite book is If Not Now, When?, a 1986 novel by Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. When asked if she believes in aliens her black eyes (contacts combine her pupils and irises) narrow. ​“Of course. The fact that we are here proves it. We literally are aliens.” It’s unclear whether the ​“we” refers to Mixie and Munchie, or humanity. Her celebrity crush is Brian Cox, the astrophysicist. She’s a Scorpio. Munchie, however, doesn’t care to comment on her own sign. Revealing it would invite bad energy.

Where Mixie is measured, Munchie is frantic and warm, darting from thought to thought. Munchie’s favourite smell is a JoMaloneEnglishPear&Freesia. She tells me to write it as one word. Her favourite treat is Xxtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which are hard to find in the UK. Her favourite drink is a passion fruit margarita – it used to be a piña colada but now they make her sick. Her favourite directors are Sofia Coppola, Harmony Korine and Wong Kar-Wai. Her favourite film is Korine’s Spring Breakers, in which four bikini clad girlfriends commit armed robberies.

I ask the girls what they believe in. They answer in unison: ​“The law of attraction.” Munchie leans toward me, conspiratorial. ​“We’re, like, hard-arse Abraham-Hicks stans…” She rattles off several other names. Noticing my blank look, she says: ​“Do you know who these people are?” I don’t. ​“They’re life coaches on YouTube where they help you manifest your dreams through all these talks. We binge-watch that shit so hard.”

Again, the girls laugh, aware they’re telling me something strange. Esther Hicks is an American spiritual teacher and author who ​“channels” a non-physical entity she calls Abraham. In one video, Munchie is reading a copy of her bestselling 2006 book The Law of Attraction, published with Hicks’s late husband, Jerry. Mixie backs Munchie up. ​“Whenever I’m out walking, I’m listening to these affirmations.” She rarely speaks above a whisper. Both in their videos and IRL, the girls communicate with each other through a constant trade of blinks and meaningful eye contact. They frequently debate in whispers and sidebars whether to let me in on something important. Mostly, they decide not to.

According to Mixie, the most insane fan theory she’s heard is that they are actually AI-generated. ​“People don’t think we’re real.” They giggle. Unlike other influencers with contour-sculpted cheekbones, IRL the girls drift softly into the flatness of digital perfection. Similar to AI influencer Lil Miquela, Mixie and Munchie are beautifully nondescript and constantly changing. Considering their faces after leaving them is like remembering the people you see in a dream. I was sitting opposite the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in a McDonald’s, but who were they?

They’re most comfortable defining themselves through their references. In the funniest 2girls1bottl3 video so far, the girls wear full black bodysuits in an homage to Kim and Kanye’s 2021 Met Gala Balenciaga moment (Munchie sniffs a fry through the suit). Paris and Nicole’s fingerprints are everywhere, from their velour hoodies to their fast food filming locations. The references keep coming: lifestyle content creator Avani Reyes is an inspiration, as is Euphoria, the Twilight saga, gyaru and other global subcultures, generally. ​“Japanese street style mag-azines like Fruits,” says Munchie.

If they ever filmed a movie, Munchie tells me it would be inspired by ​“this Japanese porn studio that gets all their girls dressed up in schoolgirl outfits. They do all these silent videos of them playing Jenga and doing yoga together. The way it’s shot is really creepy. It would be us doing mundane activities silently.”

In a recent meta video, the girls cosplayed K‑pop idols cosplaying 2girls1bottl3. They’re now shaping the culture they draw from. Trisha Paytas is another major reference point. The Domino’s video that almost got them arrested was an homage to the American internet personality. Munchie particularly enjoys Paytas’s mukbangs, a trend originating in South Korea where influencers eat large quantities of food. ​“A lot of it, especially with Trisha, is the loneliness of her life, although not so much anymore, of just consuming so much food in this mansion in LA on the beach,” she says. ​“She has a Christmas video where she’s alone, no family with her, having dinner alone. She orders five different takeaways. I don’t know, it highlights how human [she is] and how much you can relate to people you don’t know. That’s what I like about it: the loneliness.”

Microtrends, memes and other viral content make us feel like we’re connected to something despite the reality being that we primarily experience those things in isolation, while many internet subcultures cater overtly to the knowingly isolated (mukbangs for the lonely eater, ASMR for the insomniac).

Some of the best content of recent years has forced us to acknowledge our comfort with surveillance, simulation and loneliness. Look at Nathan Fielder’s meta hit The Rehearsal, a documentary series in which the comedian helps real people prepare for tricky conversations or situations. Writing in The New Yorker about the HBO show, Naomi Fry says: ​“What hap- pens, the show asks, when people who struggle to find connection and meaning attempt to achieve it by layering their lives with the scrim of performance?” The internet is that scrim. In a culture steered by constant performance, there’s comfort in a clear fake. Mixie and Munchie are, right now, the high priestesses of that very-online performative plasticity. For the majority of their videos, the pair sit in artificial places eating artificial food. Their eye colour isn’t real, neither is their hair, nor their apparent ethnicity. For anyone who might comment on their interest in Asian culture, Munchie says with conviction: ​“I mean, we’re Asian. I’m literally cosplaying a white girl.”

Because of how tight-lipped they are with biography, any personal reveal feels extra-important. But the question isn’t ​“do they look like sisters or friends?”, it’s ​“do they even look like themselves?”

When they take off their make-up and wigs they are unrecognisable, their cosplay drawing out the distance between character and creator, as well as the awareness the girls have over their perception. They’re not cosplaying a specific white girl so much as tapping into an amalgamated version of what a viral influencer might look like – the ​“Instagram face” of a deliberately vaguely-ethnic-yet-white influencer type that’s everywhere. They’re ​“performance artists for the influencer era” according to one TikTok comment. If that’s the case, their artists’ statement is how they approach privacy. Being hyper-online makes them crave it. They’ve cracked something, being able to enjoy the internet on their own terms.

​“There’s that Shakespeare quote…” says Munchie, half taking the piss, half serious. The quote, from As You Like It: ​“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The Bard was alluding to the role of fate in our lives, but in the digital age, it’s a metaphor for self-invention. ​“That’s how I see social media. Instagram, I look at it now, is the stage. Pick who you want to play, look how you want to look. Create a character of your own because everyone online is fake, anyway.”

From our public figures, we demand everything – process, constant contact, explanations for conscious uncoupling. This is exactly what Mixie and Munchie play with. Their art is a facsimile of celebrity. The empty gestures (holding a fake ice cube up like a make-up palette or using a pink hourglass to measure time) become interesting because they’re empty. Mixie and Munchie speak to how we experience the internet; to be unique but remain connected, to be understood but as an enigma. But the more one engages with the internet, the more one is absorbed into its processes, symbols and tropes, the more one loses oneself, digested into the anonymity of everyone else. Sometimes fans compare them to Marina Abramović, Munchie says. Mixie looks confused. Munchie nudges her: ​“You know, the artist who stares at people and makes them cry.” It’s a funny comparison, not only because I can’t imagine them making anyone cry. If Abramović strips down to give herself completely to the audience, these girls do the opposite. By erasing themselves as individuals you’re forced to only look at their work. The artists are not present.

Mixie toys with her fake lashes. ​“I always go back to the law of attraction. Everything that you consume in the universe, but also each video, even on TikTok, has an energy. When I watch a video and I feel satisfied with how it has turned out, I want people to feel that energy.” The pleasure the girls derive from their work is clear, and enviable, to the average social media user – they have fun with it, then they walk away. That energetic spell makes sense to me, as does the belief in manifestation. Where but digitally can you truly create your own reality?

In a video posted on 20^th July, Mixie and Munchie sit on the floor of a train station. A woman in business attire descends an escalator and sits behind them. At the end of the video, they add straws to their glass, but this time, the woman gets one too. They all drink. Mixie and Munchie wear hoodies that read: ​“It’s all just a simulation.”

The silence of the girls behind 2girls1bottl3 forces fans to do a lot with little. Their fans talk about the girls like a Panglossian gamer would The Legend of Zelda – happy to play the game and excited by tiny developments. When musician Savannah Hudson makes a cameo on their alternate spam account, that’s a new character unlocked. (“That’s going to be you after today!” Munchie tells me.) A video filmed in what looks like a mall somewhere in Southeast Asia is the girls hatching in a new location. In fact, for fans, they weren’t created, but ​“spawned” into existence. And their universe is expanding. For Munchie, the dream cameo is obviously Trisha Paytas. ​“She’s the queen. How she’s survived the internet for so long…” Munchie shakes her head in wonder. The internet is something to be survived, only fun once you’ve gamed it, and they’ve literally gamified it.

That sense is there in the significance of their TikTok handle too. It’s a nod to that benchmark piece of gross internet lore 2girls1cup, a video where two scatological porn stars consume, excrete and repeat. For my generation, it was our first brush with the taboo, and the pre-teen punchline to every joke. The homage is provocative, but most importantly, it’s all just a joke. These girls are consuming the internet, merging online fibres to create something new and then metastasising them. Everything they watch has a place in their videos, because Mixie and Munchie are personae built on reference. They’ve escaped the pixels and popped up in your local chip shop. They were fed online and now they feed us. They ate and they are eating. Yeah, they’re often taking in superficial and vapid content but we all are. So what if it’s shit?

Their names? Ages? Backgrounds? They’re just Mixie and Munchie. Here in this South London McDonalds, as Mixie swirls the murky drink and Munchie laughs, there is magic and mystery and enjoyment in it all. Mixie slides the glass towards me. It may as well have a ​“drink me” tag on it, I’m so far down the rabbit hole. They finish filming their TikTok and the girls go silent. New characters unlocked.

HAIR Masayoshi Fujita MAKE-UPAlice Dodds SET DESIGNER Ellen Wilson MANICURIST Angel My Linh PRODUCER Sophie Hambling PHOTO ASSISTANT Sasha Vanner STYLIST ASSISTANT Elizabete Pakule and Stefania Gertis HAIR ASSISTANT Kei Takano MAKE-UP ASSISTANT Saaya Toshiro SET ASSISTANT Annie Alvin MANICURIST ASSISTANT Amber Ting PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Nicole LeBlanc