Siiri Parks: How a stylist’s ‘Karen’ videos led to fame

ST. LOUIS — Siiri Parks, an internet personality known for her hair stylist videos and ‘Karen’ video reenactments, says that her mother is the reason why she is a stylist today. She says she owes her hairstylist career to her mom, who gave her the push to attend cosmetology school.

“I don’t give her enough credit,” Park said. “Props go to my mom for everything because, like, she saw something in me that I didn’t and like, she made all of this happen.”

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‘All of this’ that Parks is referring to is her internet fame. She has 4.9 million followers on TikTok. She has about 695 thousand followers on Instagram between her two profiles.

One of her top videos got 11.1 million views.

Parks lives in the St. Louis metropolitan area, has a home with four dogs and works in the Grove in St. Louis. She is originally from Florida but spent her 12th grade year in Jefferson City. She went to Merrell University of Beauty Arts and Science in Jefferson City, Mo., where her mom had enrolled her.

Parks said that in her teenage years, she took on the role of hairstylist for herself and her friends, which she called the style ‘scene’ that was popular in the early 2000s. She would use a simple BIC razor to create edgy bangs. She would also help friends with coloring and styling their hair for events like prom.

She even cut her mom’s bangs with kitchen scissors.

Parks said that initially, it wasn’t her ambition to do hair for her career. She described herself as someone without clear aspirations who took a gap year after high school.

“When I got done with my gap year and my life had just kind of turned upside down like crazy, I finally had to swallow my pride and come home. And I was just being lazy on my mom’s couch, crying every day. I had no plans; life was hard, and my mom came home from work one day and she was like, “I enrolled you at the local hair school. You are too beautiful, and you are too smart to let what has happened to you this past year ruin the rest of your life.”,” said Parks.

“And I went, and I wanted to hate it so bad, but I made immediate connections with the staff and with the students. The next thing I knew, I fell in love with it.

I became the salon manager, and I was the longest-running salon manager that that school had ever had. I won first place in the Fantasy Division of the state beauty competition, where we went against other schools and each other,” said Parks.

“And the best salon in the town that I was living at hired me like right out of school. And it’s all because. I had no plan and my mom saw that, like, even if I wasn’t passionate about it at the time, I had a knack for it, and she made me do it.”

Her first taste of internet fame:

When Parks was 17, she had her first taste of internet fame. She said when she was a teenager, she did not have her Facebook page set on private, so she had a meme go viral. The post got around 700,000 shares.

“I called my mom, and I told her, ‘I’m going to be famous’ and, in my mom’s fashion, she took it with a grain of salt, and she was like, ‘alright, Siiri, go to sleep,’” said Parks.

But teen Siiri wasn’t expecting to reach this level of internet fandom. It wouldn’t be until years later, in 2019, that one of her videos went viral again. She posted a video that had a Post Malone remix on it.

“I did a little relatable hair thing with one of my coworkers at the time,” said Parks. She checked her phone three hours later and she had 700,000 views. “I just kept checking my phone and I hit a million and it was so exciting. And then I didn’t have another video go viral for eight months.”

What really got the attention of her audience was when Siiri started the “Karen” videos. “Karen” is a slang word for someone who is an entitled woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors, according to the slang dictionary.

I got like wigs during quarantine, and I was just having fun doing like some cosplay videos,” Parks said. She then started posting “kinds of hairdressers that you would see” or “kinds of clients.”

“It was just funny and friendly. And then I think in like 2021, when I started posting my Karen videos, is when things really took off,” said Parks. “Now, up to that point, I had like 70,000, but it wasn’t really like building other than that but once the Karen videos started getting posted, It was like ‘Bam’ ‘Bam’ ‘Bam’ and I went to [around] 100,000 and my analyst told me by October 2021 I would probably hit a million.”

By October 2021, she will have 2 million followers.

“It was just beyond my wildest dreams.”

Parks came from humble beginnings:

When I’m not on the internet, when I’m not attending events with my friends, working at hair shows, or teaching classes, I’m just this girl who doesn’t wear makeup all the time and has frizzy hair, even though I’m a hairstylist, said Parks.

She said she prefers shopping at Walmart because it’s what she’s used to; she says she’s frugal and will still try to stay close to home and remember where she came from, so she doesn’t lose that.

“I’m very grateful for all of the opportunities that being on the Internet and talking to myself in wigs has brought me because I just remember back to when I was in the third grade, and I owned one pair of pants, and my mom was on hospice. She had MRSA and staph in her heart and lungs,” Parks said. She also reiterated that her mother is currently alive.

“My sixth-grade guidance counselor had, a clothing drive for me because they were just so hard. I always try to remember where I came from so that I cannot go backward. But give me that little kick in the pants to continue moving forward. I always to try to give back because I know what it’s like to be where I was, whether it was in the third grade, when I was 18 or even five years ago, before all of this started happening.”

Parks and her philanthropic efforts:

“I’m very grateful for my PR, but at the end of the day, no one needs this many things,” said Parks. “I’m extremely fortunate with the things that I’m gifted, so sometimes I re-gift them; sometimes I do them as giveaways for people who are watching [my videos].”

Parks has contracts with hair companies that pay her to do ads using their products. Some of these products will be filmed being used on her regular clients; she usually won’t charge her clients for their participation in the ad.

“I’m hoping to get to one day where I don’t have to charge people at all [for hairstyling] and I can just make my income from the internet and then just do what I love, like purely out of hobby,” said Parks.

She also donates overseas.

“My part of my family is also from Cuba. My tía’s parents and her sister and her nephew still live there, so sometimes in the town that they live in, they can go without electricity for like 17 to 20 hours a day. A lot of times, when I get paid, I will send money to disaster relief in Cuba,” said Parks.

But that’s not all the good she is doing with the money she gains from views on these streaming platforms.

“There is an orphanage in Africa that my family has traveled to. My aunt is a nurse; she’s given a lot of the kids and volunteers vaccinations and medicine. When I get paid, there are kids that I sponsor over there too,” said Parks. She also mentioned that her grandmother, who loves to sponsor one girl, recently bought her a goat for milk production.

Parks just helped her mother through nursing school.

“I can credit myself a lot for the success that I’ve had in the industry and on the Internet, but props go to my mom for everything.”

Her revenue in order to do all these things comes from TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and companies that she signed with to make ads.

“I feel kind of like Spiderman. I’m like Peter Parker, an average girl and then you get me in front of a phone or camera and it’s like Siri Parks, a hair stylist who talks to herself in her wings and has five million followers. But she doesn’t really know how it happened.”

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