Kombucha Girl

Origin: one sip, no dialogue¶

On August 6, 2019, Brittany Tomlinson — then in her early twenties and working in trust and investment services at a bank in Texas — posted a TikTok of herself tasting kombucha for the first time. The clip runs about twenty seconds and contains no speech. She sips, recoils into an involuntary grimace, pauses, tries it again, and then lands on a flat, unreadable expression of genuine indecision. Every stage of the reaction is legible on her face, which is why the video needed no explanation in any language.

The numbers moved immediately: reportedly 1.8 million likes and 336,300 shares within three days, and around 12 million views on TikTok itself. Reposts on Twitter carried it further — commonly cited as more than 40 million views there — and it landed on TikTok’s own list of the platform’s top viral videos of 2019. At the time TikTok was still treated in the US as a novelty app for teenagers, and the clip was one of the first pieces of TikTok content to break out across every other platform.

The format¶

What made it a durable meme rather than a one-off video was that it cuts cleanly into stills. The standard form is a two-panel stack: the disgusted first face on top, the reconsidering “wait, actually?” face below, with labels applied to each. That structure captures a very specific feeling — not approval, not rejection, but the honest wobble between them — that most reaction images cannot express. Side Eye conveys suspicion; Surprised Pikachu conveys mock shock. Kombucha Girl conveys ambivalence, which is rarer and more useful than it sounds.

Typical uses:

• A plan that sounds terrible and appealing at the same time.
• News that is equal parts bad and interesting.
• Food, music or opinions the poster is genuinely torn on.
• The second face used alone, as a mood.

What happened next¶

Tomlinson reportedly lost her bank job in the aftermath, and turned the attention into a career. She signed with United Talent Agency in November 2019, and now works under the name Brittany Broski. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022. Her podcast The Broski Report launched in May 2023, with its debut episode reportedly ranking as the fourth most-streamed podcast episode in the US on Spotify. Her YouTube talk show Royal Court premiered in July 2023 and has hosted guests including Charli XCX and Saoirse Ronan.

She has been candid in interviews about not wanting to be defined by twenty seconds of drinking fermented tea, and the fact that she is now better known for her own work than for the clip is, by the standards of accidental internet fame, an unusually good outcome.

Legacy¶

Kombucha Girl is one of the small number of 2019-era TikTok memes still in circulation years later, and one of the clearest early proofs that TikTok could mint internet-wide reaction images rather than just dances. It is also a rare case where the person in the meme kept control of it: she is credited by name almost everywhere it appears, which is far from standard for viral reaction faces.