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Early this summer, Kylie Jenner ignited controversy by advertising Meta’s AI-powered wearable tech.
Already embattled by a series of lawsuits, it was a blow to her public image that many fans could not ignore.
Some wonder why Kylie said yes to a slop advertisement for a product that society does not want.
Others want to know if the makeup mogul has tanked her brand irreparably.
If you don’t need the money, why would you advertise surveillance tech?
Early this summer, Kylie appeared in a bleak advertisement for “Meta Glasses.”
Widely dubbed the “pervert glasses,” these wearable devices offer users the ability to record everything that they see, linked to the increasingly reviled AI slop tech.
In the video, Kylie takes viewers through her life, as if she wears this surveillance tech regularly.
Nothing in her life or home is relatable. Additionally, anyone watching this video without knowledge of Kylie’s life would have no idea that she has two children.
If it were for a benign product, Kylie’s ad would be anodyne. But pushing the pervert glasses didn’t go over well with the fans who once followed her every word.
If we backtrack a decade, Kylie wasn’t a mom yet. She was still a teenager — and was still one of the most influential people on the planet.
(She still is … but she’s fallen several rungs as her life grows increasingly less relatable and less aspirational to her target audience.)
In 2016, Kylie was the queen of Snapchat, an app that still gets use (albeit nothing like it did a decade ago).
At that time, she would still do Instagram endorsements — including for controversial products like tummy teas (tea that helps you lose weight by sending you to the bathroom). She reportedly sold these endorsements for 7-figure paydays.
Once Kylie became pregnant with Stormi in 2017, she largely hid from the public. And, truth be told, her brand has never truly recovered from this prolonged absence and an abrupt shift in her priorities as a very young mom.
We were sick of the Kylie Jenner ads for pervert glasses on the tube by Meta + Ray-Ban so here’s a more accurate one x
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— Everyone Hates Elon (@everyonehateselon.bsky.social) August 14, 2026 at 11:16 AM
Is this a breaking point for Kylie’s personal brand?
In late 2015, Kylie Jenner launched Lip Kit by Kylie, which soon evolved into Kylie Cosmetics just a few months later.
It is that company more than anything else (aside from being born into a colossally wealthy family) that helped catapult her to billionaire status.
There is no question that, as with other celebrity makeup brands, Kylie Cosmetics owes much of its success due to her endorsement, her name, and the association with her brand.
That was at launch. Since then, the company has taken on a life of its own.
(Of course, it was also later — quietly — reported that the company was overvalued at the time.)
There’s actually a fantastic Matt Bernstein piece on Kylie advertising the pervert glasses.
(It also touches upon her boyfriend’s advertisement for Kalshi, which seems equally soulless and equally inexcusable.)
One major thing to note is that Kylie is someone who knows the value of privacy. She can afford to live in an enclave where she only appears on camera when she wishes.
Most people who have to go to work, to school, shopping, and more do not have that luxury. They can be covertly filmed on these creepy devices. And some creeps might feed these images into other AI slop programs, producing “nudified” renderings of innocent people — including children.
Can Kylie’s reputation survive this? Can her brand? That will be up to friends. And, perhaps, up to how long people associate Kylie with a technology that no one really wants.