KelsyKarter/InstagramIn viral news which shouldn’t shock you, the singer who got a tattoo of Harry Styles on her cheek says it’s actually a fake, all staged in a PR stunt.
Welcome to 2019.
Kelsy Karter made headlines around the world when she shared the photo of her new face ink on Instagram. A lot of people interpreted the tattoo as the worst kind of ‘Stan’ culture – and ink artistry – and Kelsy quickly went viral.
You can see why:
The singer, who hails from New Zealand, had tweeted to say that she was planning something special for Harry Styles’ birthday today (February 1) as he completes a quarter century of life. Well done Hazza.
Kelsy shared the photo of Harry’s face tattooed on her cheek a few days ago with the caption:
mama, look what i made me do
She even enlisted the help of a make-up artist and celebrity tattooist, Romeo Lacoste – who has previously tattooed the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Swae Lee and Justin Bieber – to make it look real (read: really, really bad).
They took inspiration, loosely, from this Harry Styles Rolling Stone magazine cover shoot:
She’s now admitted it was a stunt to publicise her latest single, which is about the former One Direction singer. To be fair, tattoo aside, the song alone is lyrically alarming enough to be a rather unwelcome birthday gift for Styles.
Kelsy, who now lives in LA, sang:
Harry, I’m gonna make you love me. You gonna make me breakfast. It’s a secret just between us.
We can keep it low-key. I ain’t being funny. You should be so lucky, to put your velvet arms around me.
The song is accompanied by a video which Kelsy says she directed, produced and edited for just $300 (£229) – and you have to admit the hustle is real with this one, even if the tattoo isn’t.
Now Kelsy has explained the whole stunt in a Youtube video you can watch below:
In the video, the viral star explains she was going through a bad break up in 2018 and she lost her little dog, Diva.
She says she was sick of writing sad songs – something I’m sure Harry himself can relate to on a profound level since the release of Sign of the Times – so instead Kelsy decided to write about Harry Styles.
Just goes to show the lengths young artists have to go to make it in the music business… Or how far fans are willing to push pranks to get noticed by their superstar crushes – after all, we live in a time where this was momentarily believable.
Either we’re all gullible idiots or Stan culture has reached peak toxic.
In the video, she defends the prank, adding:
BTW, we know it looked ridiculous. That was the point. The tattoo has gone. All that’s left is the music, which is what my rockstar team and I had planned all along.
Rockstar team aside, here’s betting her mum is just really relieved the tat was only a temporary trick.
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A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.