Laundry is one of the most important – and hated – home maintenance tasks. And while there are many opinions on how to do it right, we wanted to know how one woman in particular approaches her whiteness and cuteness: Ann Russell, aka a TikTok Auntie, has amassed 2.3 million followers on the social media platform for her practical cleaning tricks. delivered in refreshingly no-frills videos. Among her most popular laundry posts are: Tips for Saving a Shrunken Sweater (4.6M Views), and Why You Don’t Like Fabric Softener (2.3M Views).
The 59-year-old, who lives in a small village in southern England, says her TikTok stardom was “a complete accident”. She only joined to follow her niece, but decided on a whim to post a video of her dog, Holly, reacting to fireworks. Next, I took off a little explanation on how to use bay leaf. “It went from having eight people watching a video to having 60,000 people watching it… and it just rolled slowly and inexorably from there,” she says.
She posted the bay leaf video in the fall of 2020, when she was freelancing as a professional cleaner. This past September, she published her first book, How to Clean Everything. Russell says she never imagined it would end up here. She insists she’s “completely rubbish” on social media — she’s still not sure how to add captions to her videos — and attributes her success to being “very, very lucky.”
However, her two decades of cleaning experience certainly has something to do with it. As does the low-pressure technique: “It’s a wash. It’s not the end of the world. If it goes wrong, it doesn’t really matter.” (However, we still want her tips!)
