It’s a universally acknowledged truth that a particular breed of former popular girl has a tendency to sign her life over to a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme. Now, one TikToker, @tinadangerbelcher, is using the power of data science to track (via spreadsheet, natch) all the popular girls she went to high school with as they join various MLMs, and the results are illuminating.


Advertisement

She explained that the goal isn’t to make fun of them, but that she just really likes collecting data and this particular dataset is fascinating. She concluded with, “The horse girls really like Scentsy,” referring to an Idaho-based MLM that specializes in wickless candles and scented wax.



@tinadangerbelcher sorts the women into a few categories based on their personalities in high school — the aforementioned horse girls; mean girls; church girls; brainiacs; and jocks. She also keeps track of a few key data points: Did they marry young (by 23); did they marry a law-enforcement officer; are they a stay-at-home parent; and did they continue to live in a small town after high school.


She then gets into the good stuff: the data. Her pie chart shows that one-third of the 72 MLMers from her high school are former mean girls, while one-quarter are horse girls and just over 22 percent are church girls.



The MLM that’s most popular with her former classmates is Arbonne, which focuses on skincare, cosmetics and nutrition and is one of the older MLMs around, dating back to the 1980s. The second most popular is Scentsy, thanks to the strong horse girl contingent, followed by Herbalife.


@tinadangerbelcher’s data ended up proving some of her hypotheses wrong, though. Seventy-five percent of women she tracked didn’t get married young, and 61.1 percent weren’t stay-at-home parents, although 83.3 percent did continue to live in small towns after high-school graduation.


Responding to feedback from commenters who said that 23 was too young a cut-off age marriage-wise, @tinadangerbelcher upped it by a year, and suddenly, 63 percent of the women did get married young after all. She also clarified that all 72 subjects are now married.



Although horse girls like Scentsy and church girls favor Arbonne, brainiacs and jocks stayed true to their roots — brainiacs prefer Usborne, an MLM that publishes children’s books, while literally all of the jocks shill for Beachbody, which specializes in at-home workouts, nutrition plans and supplements. Mean girls are the most diverse group of MLMers according to @tinadangerbelcher — half sell Herbalife, but the other half is split between Arbonne, Younique and Beachbody.


In her latest video, @tinadangerbelcher reveals the results of even more data that she collected: the level of education MLMers have received, and whether they had kids when they first joined the MLM. She concludes that finally seeing the data spell it out for her made her realize that MLMs are even more predatory than she initially believed — she argues that they’re designed to target young moms who might be struggling to find an identity outside of their children or marriage.


Considering about 75 percent of MLMers in the U.S. are women, she’s probably not wrong.