Who owns Sydney Sweeney?
Because I am psychologically incapable of staying away from the colossal, smouldering wreck that is Elon Musk’s X, I found myself numbly scrolling the platform yesterday, when I encountered a tweet. “Sydney Sweeney teaching maths better than anyone,” it said. “No children will skip class.” It was accompanied by a video of the 27-year-old actress explaining, perfectly, how to “find the size of a 3D vector.”
Of course, as you’ll have already realised (because it’s 2025, and nothing is real anymore) this wasn’t actually Sweeney delivering a perfect maths lecture. It was an AI learning tool, being pioneered by some YouTubers who wanted to test the thesis that a woman like Sweeney would be capable of doing what generations of American public school teachers could not: getting students to actually engage with their education. Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a major US VC firm, tweeted that the videos were “a weirdly effective way to learn new concepts”. She went on to add that they were also “insanely viral”, having mustered 5m views in just two days.
The premise of the experiment is simple. Young men love to look at Sydney Sweeney – she’s Hollywood’s bombshell du jour following a superb turn in Euphoria, and movies including Reality, in which she’s excellent, and Anyone But You, in which she’s, you know, Sydney Sweeney. Aside from being a bankably appealing TV and movie actress, Sweeney has also become a sort-of meme of modern sexuality. “The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits,” she said in an interview with Glamour UK, which has been replayed, millions of times, around the internet. “I’m naturally brunette.”
Last month, she made international news when she partnered with an American brand called to Dr Squatch to produce a new soap. What’s so exciting about an actress having a brand deal with a soap company, I hear you – someone who hasn’t been online since 1999 – ask. The twist to Sweeney’s soap was evident in the product title: Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss. The soap was, the company announced on their social media, “a limited-edition bricc infused with her actual bathwater.” It retailed at $8 a pop with only 5,000 soap bars going into production (a maximum return of $40,000 for the company, which might give you a hint as to whether this was a) a real product, or b) a marketing exercise). At time of writing, bars of the soap are going for £200+ on eBay, though the market is being flooded with cheap Chinese knock-offs.
These fakers are onto something because, after all, there’s no way of separating the real, Sweeney infused, soap from the fake, non-Sweeney infused, soap. After all, it’s just a bar of soap with a teeny weeny bit of possible bathwater splashed in it. (The average capacity of a bathtub is about 150 litres. Divided by 5,000, that’s a maximum of 30ml of bathwater per bar, assuming Sweeney didn’t dunk in multiple tubs. For reference, it’s estimated that it requires 1,500–2,000 litres of water to make a single 100g bar of soap, if all the water in the process is accounted for.) But the soap served as a provocation. “Sydney Sweeney sparks fierce backlash over 'creepy' and 'gross' brand collaboration,” reported the Daily Mail. “Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater soap is no better than Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candle,” wrote a Metro columnist. In her social media comments, weirdos called it “weird” and “cringe” and “something an OnlyFans girl would do.”
Who knows whether she cares or not. After all, the bar is not quite what it seems. This isn’t, really, a product for perverts, but a commoditisation of an old internet joke. “I’d drink her bathwater,” people would tweet, as a sign of self-deprecating unworthiness, akin to sayings like “step on my neck” or “hit me with your car”. According to this blog I dug up on the origins of the phrase, it’s an offering of endearment that goes back to ZZ Top and No Doubt. It was also – famously, from a meme culture perspective – brought to life in Saltburn, as Barry Keoghan slurped the dregs from Jacob Elordi’s plughole. (I’ve somehow managed to make that sound even more visceral than it was).
And so the bathwater soap should be read as what it is. An internet joke. Some creep somewhere is going to apply it whilst indulging in self-pleasure, sure, but, I hate to say it, that’s always the case when any celebrity does anything. I don’t doubt that some men have lit Gwyneth Paltrow’s rose-scented ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle and engaged in onanism, but, equally, I don’t doubt that some strange folk have utilised Victoria Beckham’s ‘blood face cream’ as an aide-memoire to their own sexuality. After all, there are almost no lows to which the human mind is not capable of travelling. I’d only be half-surprised to discover that someone had clamped their todger in a George Foreman grill, and climaxed to the Rumble in the Jungle.
The key to the soap is that it is, by her own claim, a product that Sweeney herself endorses. Critics seeking to fill quick and easy column inches rushed to labelled it an illustration of the way that young women are objectified for a male audience, reduced to nothing more than dissolved skin flakes. There’s truth in that, of course, and the more you think about the product itself, the more dystopian it begins to sound. But the truth, too, is that Sweeney is the victim of a relentless barrage of commoditisation. Since entering the mainstream in 2019, she has only had a handful of roles on TV and in films, yet she is ubiquitous. She is constantly packaged up by men online, and sold to other men, online. As an experiment, right now, I’m going to go on Elon Musk’s X and see how long I have to scroll before I see a photo or video of Sweeney. Answer: 8 posts. And then a simple message: “sydney sweeney, what a woman.”
To some extent, this is the fate of all beautiful women in the internet age. To only partially control their own image. It brings to mind Emily Ratajkowski being sued by a paparazzo after she published, on Instagram, the photos he had covertly taken of her. But if that felt like a subtle sign that the rapacious desire for new angles of new flesh was taking us to dystopian and illiberal places, the blooming of the AI age lights it up in fluorescent neon. After all, Sweeney’s image being used – without her permission – to teach children how to solve maths problems might be an indictment of the education system, of the priorities of minors, and a violation of Sweeney’s right to object (she might, after all, be ideologically against mathematics, like myself). But, all in, it’s a fairly benign application. Don’t be fooled: the same technology is being put to some seriously malevolent purposes, while you read this blog.
Whether it’s shilling crypto-scams or forcing women into pornography, the normalisation of technology that makes a joke of personal liberties is the true objectification here. Some celebrities might be happy to license their AI avatars to teach maths lessons (possibly with fractionally less cleavage on display), but we seem to already be passing, quite breezily, through the point where one could enforce any meaningful protocols here. Plenty of celebrities will sue if they feel their right of publicity is being stolen (such as Scarlet Johansson taking legal action against OpenAI over the use of her vocal likeness on a digital assistant). But that action might happen against big publishers; it’s not going to happen against every Tom, Dick and hA1rry-g00nTro11 on the internet. The cat is out the bag – but because it’s an AI cat, it can’t be easily reclaimed (unlike a real cat, which is actually not so hard to get back into a bag).
And so, the bathwater soap stunt feels like an act of defiance against this. Sweeney’s image is being constantly stolen from her. But there’s no AI – yet – that can replicate her bathwater. The soap project is a recognition that there are still some very human tangibles in this world. Technology has long been able to imitate, and now it can create. Images of Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace dress from the 2000 Grammy’s spread through the internet like perv pox; now any celebrity in the world, from Sweeney to Guy Fieri, could be squeezed into that dress at the entrance of a simple prompt. Total objectification.
And yet… when nothing is quite real, the value of 30ml of actual bathwater goes up. It is a hedge bet against the irrevocable assimilation of AI. A dumb internet joke, sure, but also a political statement. This is something that is mine, something that I own, something that can’t be endless reproduced. It is what Walter Benjamin, as photographic art forms evolved, described as “cult” value versus “exhibition” value (surely, you’re not going to introduce Benjamin in your conclusion?!). In a world of relentless exhibitionism, the “instrument of magic” that is something discrete, ephemeral, and private remains. Bathwater, it seems, is the cave painting of our dwindling society.