Give Sienna Mae Gomez a beach and some sunshine and she’s good to go!
The TikTok icon kickstarted her career at the young age of 16 years old before her platform skyrocketed into the spotlight. From doing silly choreographed dances to living life to her fullest potential, the now-19-year-old exclusively tells OK! she couldn’t imagine her life any differently and is totally living the dream.
Gomez — who currently splits her time between Los Angeles, Hawaii and San Diego — learned a lot throughout her teenage years.
“When I started social media at 16, I really wanted to be liked. But now that I’ve grown a little bit, I’ve noticed it’s more about making a stable relationship and [forming a] community with people who want to grow with you rather than craving that attention,” the Sienna Swim founder explains to OK!.
While the industry of influencers and Hollywood stars inevitably comes with a lot of hate, Gomez reveals to OK! how she has adjusted her perspective and even spills what she would like to tell online trolls.
“Social media isn’t real, but the people behind the screens are. I feel like people are getting so bold nowadays. We’re all real people. We’re all doing our best to live and be happy and everyone pretty much has the same goal in life. Just be a good person. I think people genuinely think I’m like a robot sometimes, like I don’t have like real feelings,” the brunette beauty admits.
Instead of having “a million industry friends,” Gomez has learned to focus more on the “quality of my friends and keeping my circle tight.”
Of course, Gomez wouldn’t be where she is today without her amazing fans.
“I’ve never had a negative experience with a fan. I feel like every single person that I’ve met or talked to has been extremely sweet and conversational, which I really appreciate because I’ve talked to other friends in the same industry and they’ve had experiences where they’re just super brutal [and] don’t treat them as people in person,” the California native confessed to OK!.
“I feel like when I was 16 I was also just younger. More baby fat,” Gomez notes. “When you grow up you kind lean out a little bit. I think that definitely played a part in it, but I was just really glad that people saw themselves in me when I was 16. I think that being body positive is like being also really body aware. When I’m pushing that positivity about every single state of my body, I have to be positive even when I feel like c***.”
While she “loves her body in every state,” it is also important to make healthy choices.
Gomez found herself “pushing body body positivity while also eating junk food, not working out and not taking care of my mental health at all.” Instead, the social media personality started being more “body neutral” in an attempt to not be “as aware of every single roll or every single inch on your waist.”
“I think that being more body neutral [and] just fueling myself with foods that I feel good about and working out, walking or just doing the most basic form of something is more important than pushing the narrative that I’m good all the time,” she continues, noting, “in reality no one’s good all the time.”
At first, Gomez’s fame circulated around the idea of body positivity, as she would record videos of herself feeling a bit bloated, after a full meal or simply at different angles that resulted in different perspectives of her body.
“We just wanted to get every single type of person in there to see what fits. it’s just finding that like happy medium. Obviously not everyone’s ever gonna be like fully satisfied. But we do our best to include,” she confirms.
Oh, and as for Gomez’s celebrity crush? “Heath Ledger for sure.”
“Oh my God, so cute. It was Leonardo DiCaprio for the longest time, but then I saw A Knight’s Tale,” and it was game over, Gomez concludes.