TIKTOK QUEEN

Crystal is the lady with the bendy face and she's so successful on social media she's now doing it full time

- JOHANÉ SCOTT

IT'S the face that launched 6,4 million TikTok followers – weird eyeballs, dancing eyebrows, funny wiggly nose, a movable mouth and all.

Whether she's ripping off characters from Friends, lip-syncing bizarre scenes, or inserting her freakishly expressive eyes into classical paintings, Crystal Noleen Greeff-Katsini is truly a meme queen, a mime goddess, and a makeup whiz.

The 24-year-old from Durban is so successful on the social media platform she's decided to devote herself to her wacky antics full time.

Calling herself #ladywiththebendyface, Crystal has taken TikTok by storm, earning herself a global audience despite never having ventured further from home than Clarens in the Free State, where she went on honeymoon.

Ever the goofball, she answers YOU's video call in her home in Kloof with two doll's hands poking from her sleeves and before she says a word, she's laughing at herself.

A huge neon sign in her office spells out the words “Hey Sunbeams”. “My followers are just so positive and lovely, they're like sunbeams, Crystal explains.

She says she downloaded Generation Z's favorite social-media platform during the lockdown in 2020 because she was curious and bored. A mere six months later, she'd surpassed the million-follower mark.

“I wish I could say I downloaded the app with a plan of what I was going to do but I honestly don't know how it happened. It was a total accident," she says.

If someone had told her she'd be creating TikTok content full-time and making a living from it, she'd have laughed at them. But in August last year she decided to turn her platform into a business.

"I still can't comprehend how I got 6,4 million followers. When people tell me I'm famous, my brain tells me, 'No, you're not” she says.