Where Are They Now? Here's What TheyLoveArii, Also Known As The 'Stan Twitter Girl,' Has Been Up To Since Her Musical.ly Days

There was much hubbub on Stan Twitter in recent weeks after people realized that one of K-pop and Stan-adjacent Twitter's most popular memes wasn't just a random girl picked off the internet — she was @TheyLoveArii, one of Musical.ly's first tween stars.

The image in question shows Arii making a duck face and standing with her hip cocked against a plain wall. She's dressed in a reflective "Realist" hoodie and black tights with a Michael Kors bag hanging off her elbow, but in the meme, she's often edited to reflect someone's pop music or fandom affiliations.

The photo was taken in 2016 during the height of Arii's fame as an influencer on Musical.ly, a proto-TikTok platform that was hugely popular with American teens in the mid to late 2010s.

But Arii's come a long way since her days making faces and lip-syncing to Nicki Minaj. A famous meme, a failed clothing line and a modeling career later, here's what TheyLoveArii, real name Ariana Renee Trejos, is up to today.

Who Is Arii, AKA The "Stan Twitter Girl," And How Did She First Go Viral?

To unravel the two threads that connect Arii and the Stan Twitter Bag Girl, we have to go back to the year 2015 when Arii first started posting to the lip-sync platform Musical.ly.

Arii was born Ariana Renee in the year 2000 in Miami, Florida. She was childhood besties with Baby Ariel, another Miami-based teen influencer, who inspired Arii to start making videos on the platform in 2015.

For those not in the know, Musical.ly was the lip-sync app that went on to become TikTok today. Stateside, the app was filled with teens and tweens miming popular pop and rap songs while taping themselves with their phone cameras using carefully choreographed movements. It's the hack Arii used to gain over 6 million fans on Musical.ly by 2017, all before she was even 18.

Arii also regularly posted her fit pics to her Twitter / X — the archive of which is one to behold as Arii manages to capture the very essence of late 2010s teen dressing from wholesome to tacky to stylish, all with the confidence of a supermodel. It was this collection of posts that gave us the Stan Twitter Girl meme.

What Is The Stan Twitter Girl Meme, And When Did People First Realize It Was Arii?

On February 14th, 2016, during the height of Arii's Musical.ly fame, she posted a set of four fit pics in which her 15-year-old self can be seen wearing a white hoodie, black tights, red sports shoes and a big Michael Kors bag. Her slicked-back hair and duck face gave off the confidence of someone at the Met Gala, even if the image was just a flash photograph taken inside her own house.

realist 💋 pic.twitter.com/2zZRtJwqzq

— ari (@arii) February 14, 2016

While it's not clear who exactly took Arii's photo and edited it into a meme, one of the earliest examples was a Tumblr post from October 2016, which showed Arii edited to look like she stans Chinese rapper Zhang Yixing. Another early meme appeared on Twitter that same month, this time showing her stanning popular K-pop band Twice.

Arii never really kept her identity as the meme under wraps — she even made a Twitter post dressed up in the exact same outfit four years later in 2020.

4 years later pic.twitter.com/9DLcbilIm4

— ari (@arii) May 27, 2020

Still, it took another four years for the wider public to connect the dots between TheyLoveArii and the Stan Twitter Girl meme, with Arii's duck face photo going viral on TikTok again in early December 2024. Arii responded to the jokes, saying that the outfit was a classic fit for her and that she loved going viral as a meme.

@arii #stitch with @Hi ♬ original sound – arii

So What Has Arii Been Up To Between Being A Musical.ly Star And Going Viral As The Stan Twitter Girl?

Arii was huge on the tween internet in the late 2010s. She and fellow Musical.ly star Baby Ariel would make their lip dub TikToks, but they would also share YouTube vlogs and give people tips and tricks on how to make their own lip-sync videos.

Arii had gathered over 2 million followers on Instagram by the year 2019, a few months after Musical.ly was converted into TikTok. Eager to branch out from being a career influencer, Arii's biggest media splash happened when she tried to launch a clothing brand but failed to sell the 36 pieces she needed to get her brand off the ground.

The story became a huge topic of conversation on, of all places, the business side of the internet, which promptly concluded that Arii's failed clothing brand heralded the "End of Influencers" once and for all.

Arii mainly works as a model and influencer these days, posting mostly on Instagram, @arii, and her TikTok, @st00pidshmacked. She uses her Twitter mainly to interact with her fans and reminisce about her days as a teen influencer, taking the time to laugh when people call her and Ariel the "OG Charli and Dixie."

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For the full history of Arii, aka the Stan Twitter Girl, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information. To see the rest of our "Where Are They Now" series, you can find them all here. Stay tuned for next week's editorial!