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Dubai at night Shutterstock/Mo Azizi
evening sitdown
Your evening longread: How Dubai became the world's influencer capital
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Why are influencers flocking to Dubai – even during the pandemic?
(The Guardian, approx 15 mins reading time)
Once a small port on the edge of a desert, Dubai has become a global hub of influencer culture, a magnet for social media stars desperate to tweak their image in what has become the ideal Instagram city. The emirate is home to a vast industry of aspiration: agents and producers trained to boost follower counts; hotels and luxury brands eager to use social media as cheap advertising. A few influencers have turned their hard-won follower count into offline businesses, including Joelle Mardinian, whose cosmetic surgery clinic in Dubai, which sells itself as “beauty trusted by celebrities”, uses fillers, Botox and surgery to make flesh what Instagram filters and Facetune can do online.
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