Before Meghan Markle joined the royal family, she had her own Instagram. She posted overly-saturated travel photos with her back to the camera, yoga poses, peonies, and inspirational quotes in millennial pink like “find what you love, love what you find.” Nearly everything was followed by a hashtag.
By the way, so did everyone else: in the mid 2010s, it was common to pose in front of dramatic backgrounds before slapping the Clarendon filter over it, and to share things that today wouldn’t warrant a post at all. (Back then, we didn’t have stories or slideshow features—and it showed.) The aesthetic Meghan had was the defining one of the social media platform.
But then in 2018, she logged off.
It took her seven years—and a dramatic move from the United Kingdom—to log back on: this time, under the username of @meghan. But while the rest had moved onto a candid, darker-toned, photo dump style of posting, Meghan went right back to the highly saturated filtered-ness.
Her haters might call her presence cringey. Her stans might call it endearing. But no matter where you fall on that Markle spectrum, you can’t deny its disarming. It’s hard to have strong, angry feelings about a woman who posts cheesy quotes about Nutella, awkwardly dances in a hospital room, or posts captions about her children that says “love you more than all the stars in all the sky, all the raindrops, and all the salt on all the french fries in all the world.” (Side note: What?)
And while I don’t think that Meghan’s Instagram is putting her in the top echelons of envy-inducing lifestyle influencers, I do think it could actually be a net positive. In the United Kingdom, her popularity is at an all-time low, according to YouGov. In the United States, it hovers around 39%. By posting like, well, a slightly un-hip mom, it actually makes her seem… a slightly un-hip mom. And guess what slightly un-hip moms are? Likable.
How many of us have effortlessly cool Instagrams anyway?