Meet Daisy Chaussée— a twenty-three-year-old Microsoft consultant with the most perfect naturally curly hair you’ve ever seen. Her feed is a hypnotic blend of color, from pastel hues to earthier grey’s and brown’s. We sat down with her to chat all things social (and can confirm that her curls are just as perfect IRL).
#pursuepink
What would people be surprised to learn about your feed?
That I’ve never hired a photographer. I think it would be cool to do that but my photos are mostly unplanned, spontaneous, so its hard to hire someone and fit that brief at the same time. I definitely put a lot of thought into the outfit and the location of my shoots, but not so much that I need to hire a photographer to do my shoots with me.
What do you use to get such great shots?
I have an iPhone 8, which I use a lot, but sometimes when I’m traveling I’ll take my Sony A6 with me, for better quality holiday photos. I’ve always used VSCO for editing, and I’m still using it. The filter “A6” in particular is one of my go-tos.
What’s your experience been like working with brands?
It’s an interesting thing. There’ll be times when I’m working with all these home brands, clothing brands, lifestyle brands, all at once— and then sometimes months will go by and I won’t have worked with anyone at all. It’s hard to always put out ads— I mean, really every post is an ad in the end. It can be tough to always put out sponsored material. But I do love working with brands for the most part. I’m working with Urban Outfitters right now, to redo my apartment, and it’s a ton of fun. I’ve worked with them before, and also consistently I’ve worked with Glossier. There’s a very strong sense of community there, and I consider a lot of the people that I’ve worked with to be my close friends. I used to work with J. Crew a lot, about three or four years ago, and they’d invite to parties, to New York Fashion Week, it made it easy to make friends at these events, which is an important part of this field.
Are there any Instagram trends you think we should be looking out for in our feeds?
Over the summer I definitely felt like there was effort made to make people’s skin tones look significantly more tan in their photos, like darkening the orange tones and saturating them. Some people have a generally orange feed, and it could have just been because it was summer, but it felt noticeable to me. Also, there seems to be an abundance of overlays used in photos recently— stuff like sun flares and beams of light— just a lot of over-editing, which is interesting cause that sort of phased out some time back, but it looks like people are into it again. Also, this is funny— I guess this isn’t really a trend thing, but I get very limited DM’s, and when I do get them, they almost always ask what app I use and I always tell them— I love sharing helpful information— it’s Unfold. I particularly love the 8mm filter.
How interested are you in the idea of being a full-time influencer?
I’ve contemplated going full-time with Instagram, but every time I think about it, I just don’t know if it would be enough to fulfill me— I’m a very academic person, too, so there might be some yearning for something more left if I only pursued a career as an Instagram influencer. I definitely want to go in a creative direction whatever I choose to do, but I just feel like I need something else, in addition to Instagram, to put my brain-power into. Ideally all my passions would fuse into one, the dream job, the perfect salary, the perfect location— I’d just really like to find that balance at some point.
Would you mind taking us through some of your “saved” photos on Instagram?
Daisy: Not at all! Mine is mostly a mishmash of random things, or so it seems, when you look at it. But if you scroll here, you’ll see a bunch of Italy photos all stacked together— this is obviously when I was preparing for my Italy trip. I also save a lot of portraits, for inspiration. I mean, even Taylor Swift stuff I’ll save sometimes, honestly a whole bunch of random things get jammed in here.
Your Instagram stories are so creative and unique! How long does it take you to get a series of stories right?
It doesn’t take too long, maybe 30 minutes, if I’m doing a bunch of them, like 10 or so. I enjoy it so much though! I’d rather be working on my stories than a lot of other things, so I don’t mind the time and effort spent on it. I feel like I’ve got my method down,with the templates, how I’m going to edit the photos, the GIFs that I’ll use— it’s really quite fun.
That’s an interesting trend that we kind of expected— that Instagram stories can be way more inviting and interesting than a feed itself.
I kind of agree. I didn’t like the feature when it was first rolled out. It felt like such a direct copy of Snapchat’s main feature. But then I really grew to like it and started to use it more. Bloggers and photoshop experts are constantly creating their own templates to use— it has so much space for creativity. I don’t know if I could do that, create my own template, just because Unfold is so great, does so much work, but it is cool that it can be made so personal.
