@heretoreaditall2019 it wasn’t just work ethic that ruined her. The way she has embraced alternative therapies has put a lot of people off, I suspect, and I notice since she’s been with Gleam she isn’t talking so much about healing baths made of sticks, crystals and energies etc.
The biggest problem with Grace, however, has always been her lies and mistruths. You found her after she had seemingly embraced being plus sized - those of us who have followed her since the beginning saw her battle her weight, and she was much thinner at one point, but she has lied about her size a lot since those days. What is the point of embracing body positivity if you’re going to keep insisting you’re a smaller dress size than you appear? What is positive about that? She’s still doing it, although less than she used to, purely because she talks about clothes a lot less.
Some people also believe she re-wrote her own history as she was diagnosed by a very weird therapist (who had sleepovers with Grace) as having an “anorexic mindset” with binge eating disorder. She claimed at her thinnest she would freak out if her friend used oil to cook with, would starve herself and throw up, but people remember her going on Slimming World and saving up her points to have a huge Nando’s, do big grocery hauls of crap etc. I don’t want to judge because we don’t know everything that went on, but again, it just created a feeling of her being untruthful or unaware of her own actions. She doesn’t come across as genuine.
There is also the jealousy she has displayed, and the constant turnover of friends who stick around for a few months and then disappear. Then she would shade them on Twitter. She did have a best friend (Asia) for years, and constantly threw shade at her as she successfully lost weight, then there was a big bust up after Grace accused Asia of stealing her clothes on Twitter, with Asia then making a video about the truth about Grace and putting it on YouTube. This was 2015-ish, I think? Anyway, it kind of proved everything people had speculated about - that she was selfish, rude, only out for herself, put her friends down a lot, told lies, her boyfriend at the time was cheating... both of them came across petty, but Grace came off worse.
I genuinely think all of that is the reason she has never grown a larger audience - because her “empowered women empower women” message has always felt fraudulent. There are so many more genuine influencers out there, whatever their size.