"The larger question, of course, is why the people steering a high-end skin-care brand want to market their products with jokes about dog behavior, among other seemingly random topics. Walia says that beyond simple engagement, brands want to seem more human. “It helps them as a thought exercise to think about who their brand would be as a person out in the world,” Walia explains. But when that exercise turns outward and companies start what she calls “cosplaying personhood,” things can get awkward—or exploitative. “There’s a lot of cases where rooms of marketers think something is just slang but it has a deeper history on the internet,” she says. Walia cites Peaches Monroee, the young woman who invented the phrase Eyebrows on fleek, as a prime example of how companies mine the humor of marginalized people to bolster their own “authenticity.” The joke from Monroee, a black teenager, was quickly repurposed by beauty brands worldwide, almost none of which ever paid its de facto copywriter a single cent."