NEW YORK – Nara Smith is tired, but she'll never show it.
She's been on a press blitz promoting her new cookbook, "Homemade", and has been making stops around New York City before landing at the USA TODAY office, where a few onlookers stared at the paparazzi as their cameras flashed right outside the revolving door. Smith, who commands attention at a statuesque six feet tall in a black Moschino Couture minidress embellished with gold cutlery, trades her model smize for a warm smile and a greeting a few octaves above the signature hushed tone reserved for her viral TikToks.
She amassed an online following in the late 2010s as a model, posting photos on Instagram. But over the last few years, she's become known for her wildly popular ASMR-adjacent
videos, in which she cooks food from scratch as a 25-year-old mom of four while wearing elaborately chic outfits. They've taken over the For You pages of her 17 million followers across TikTok and Instagram – becoming a lightning rod for the debate about perpetuating traditional gender norms.
"My growth on social media was so rapid that I didn't necessarily understand what would come with that and what that would mean," she tells USA TODAY.
She met her husband Lucky Blue Smith online, as she describes in her cookbook, and they married months later. They had their first baby, Rumble Honey, in 2020; their second, Slim Easy, was born in 2022; their third, Whimsy Lou, in 2024; and their most recent, Fawnie Golden, in 2025.
"I moved to an area that was very remote and quiet so that I would have that perfect balance of working and being home with the kids and cooking and doing everything that I need to do work-wise, and then when I step out, I can be public-facing and do press, shoots, work with clients, and then I can go home to my kids and have that grounding space," she says.
How Nara Smith changed her relationship to food by making her own
Smith started posting all sorts of videos on TikTok (though she refused to do any trendy dances), including outfit checks, her morning routine, and easy recipes for foods she enjoyed cooking, as her diet was becoming more restrictive due to health issues.
"There was a time when I was younger where food was fun and exciting, and I would watch my parents and my grandma cook and see food as this magical, fun thing that can be played with," Smith says. But after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, she developed severe eczema that "became crippling," so much so that she "couldn't function or eat or do anything."
She spent hours researching and found that she "started to see food as the enemy," she writes in the introduction of her cookbook. She became more diligent about what she ate and limited herself to a handful of foods that wouldn't cause her any issues.
"My curiosity drove me to start making more things from scratch – not to achieve some impossible perfection, but to know exactly what I was eating, to feel I had some control over my body that seemed beyond my control," Smith writes.
Nara Smith weighs in on 'tradwife' title
Smith learned to cope with her fears, and instead of being afraid of food, she decided to make it "whimsical," which ultimately led her to start making food from scratch.
"I could control what's in it, how to customize it, how to make sure it was good for my body," she says.
While she's undoubtedly become revered by people online who commend her for cooking complex dishes, she's also faced backlash and been accused of being a "tradwife," someone who promotes or embraces stereotypical gender norms by being the homemaker and main caretaker of the kids.
Smith reflects on making content in an increasingly negative internet ecosystem: "I do it for the love of the craft rather than getting any sort of validation from the comments. I always say the people that get it, get it, and those are the people I do it for."
She continues, "I don't really pay attention to anything else but honing the craft and entertaining people and teaching them things, hopefully, and inspiring an outfit, maybe? That would be fun."
In her July interview on Alex Cooper's "Call Her Daddy" podcast – the episode's titled "Nara Smith: Stop Calling Me a Tradwife" – she read out the definition of the term and rejected the premise of being labeled as such ("I'm none of that," she said, expressing concern over the "very narrow boxes" women are put into).
Smith views her content differently from her critics who accuse her of promoting traditional gender norms — to her, she's just having fun in the kitchen experimenting and pushing her culinary boundaries.
The first video she made that went viral was her making every component of a jam sandwich by hand – the bread, the butter and the jam. While doing the voiceover, Smith says she spoke quietly because she was putting her kid down for a nap and wanted to make sure she didn't wake them. This turned into her making increasingly difficult snacks for her kids like Capri Sun, Pocky, Milk Duds, and Skittles, the latter of which she says she'll never make again. ("They took me so long to make.")
"I started making more things from scratch because my culinary experience kind of evolved because I was a home cook," the mom of four explains, which kickstarted the idea of putting together a cookbook of her favorite recipes from family members over the years and those she developed.
She is in the midst of a multi-city book tour including stops in New York, California, New Jersey, Texas, Missouri, Connecticut and Illinois – in addition to her work duties and motherhood.
But she says at the center, it's about approaching everything she loves with passion – and enjoying the chaos of her life, even if that means working 20-hour days. "Social media is such a huge part of my career, and it's so fun, and that's nothing that I want to give up anytime soon," she says. "I love every part of it, both motherhood and being in the industry that I am."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nara Smith shares the 'crippling' reason for her wildly popular cooking videos
