Jools Lebron: How the viral TikTok trend 'low key, mindful' changed the creator's life

The beauty influencer behind TikTok's “low-key” trend has revealed that she can afford her gender reassignment surgery thanks to the success of her videos.

Jools Lebron, who identifies as a transgender woman, shared a satirical clip about why women should present themselves conservatively in the workplace, recommending that employees opt for a “reserved, modest and respectful” look. The video now has almost 3 million likes.

“See how I do my makeup for work? Very understated. Very attentive,” Lebron said in the video. “I don't come to work with a green eyelid. I don't look like a clown when I go to work. I don't do too much. I'm very attentive while I'm at work. See how I look very presentable? The way I came to the interview is the way I go to the job.”

Encouraging her followers to post their own TikTok content, the creator said in a post this week: “One day I was playing cashier and making videos on my break and now I'm flying around different countries hosting events and I'll be able to fund the rest of my gender transition.”

She added tearfully: “I finally said it without crying.”

The “low key” trend has exploded on TikTok in the past week, with over 32,000 videos now using audio from LeBron's original post to create their own content.

“A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson, and you go to work looking like Patty and Selma,” LeBron says in the short video that brought her fame and fortune.

“Not demure. I'm very modest. I'm very careful. See my shirt? Just a little chee chee out, not my cho cho. Remember why they hired you.”

“Here's your reality check, diva,” she added. “What name should I put on it then?”

As the video went viral, LeBron began creating more content exploring the meaning of modest, creating satirical videos about how to be modest in different situations.

In one video, she thanks her hotel staff “modestly,” in another video she eats her midnight snack “very modestly” and “mindfully”—the content creator has made the word “modest” her entire brand.

Thanks to LeBron, internet users everywhere have expanded the meaning of the word by putting it in entirely new contexts, like eating donuts and grocery shopping. She now has 1.5 million TikTok followers and nearly 100 million likes on the videos on her profile.

The “demute” joke seems to poke fun at influencer trends like the “clean girl” aesthetic, which focuses on minimalism and self-imposed elegance. The “demute” trend has thus been interpreted as the antithesis of Charli XCX's “brat” mentality, the latter preferring to be sassy and bold.

Not surprisingly, “low key” has become a buzzword on TikTok and X/Twitter.

“I always recognize a new TikTok keyword because I saw 73 tweets today with the word 'restrained' in it,” said one person wrote on the platform, while another joked: “Naughty summer, modest autumn.”

Meanwhile, “low key” has become so popular that LeBron claimed she was “low key” in public, noting that fans would come up to her and recognize her in person.

In another TikTok post, she recalled that she simply “made a silly video” and that it completely “changed” her life.