Past BUST cover girl and star of this year’s TV hit New Girl, Zooey Deschanel, recently added another shiny badge to her accomplishment vest: member of Forbes magazine’s Celebrity 100 list. The list highlights the “world’s most powerful celebrities” by assessing their monetary value and influence on the business world.
Ms. Deschanel is nothing short of a huge influence in the latter category. She’s a musician, actress, and producer, making her a triple-threat in the entertainment sphere. Her “adorkability,” a term coined by the press to describe her inimitable combination of good looks and quirks, pays off– Forbes estimates that she raked in around $9 million in the last year alone. She’s brought comedy newcomer New Girl over eight million weekly viewers, and inked advertising deals with Pantene and Apple iPhone’s Siri as of late.
But the most lucrative magic of Deschanel may lie on the outskirts of the entertainment field, where press and fans meet. Zooey is also one of three co-founders of the website HelloGiggles.com. Launched last summer, the website was originally slated to fill the void of a more female-centric Funny or Die, specializing in video content. Instead, it’s become more of an online collaborative blogging community, ranging in topic from political rants to advice on how to create the most bomb manicure. HelloGiggles, after only a year of existence, managed to net over 1.5 million viewers per month.
Although many critics have been quick to point out the potentially annoying and detrimental aspects of Deschanel’s brand of girly femininity, we can definitely learn a lesson from Zooey D. about individuality. She doesn’t let the criticism bring her down, insisting that “the fact that people are associating being girlie with weakness, that needs to be examined. I don’t think that it undermines my power at all.”
(Photos courtesy of Forbes and HelloGiggles)
