Mary-Belle Kirschner (born 23 October 1999), better known as Belle Delphine, is a South African-born British media personality, pornographic actress, model, and YouTuber. Her social media accounts feature and cosplay modelling, sometimes blending the two together. Her online persona began in 2018 through her cosplay modeling on Instagram. Her posts on the platform were often influenced by popular memes and trends.
In mid-2019, Delphine gained notoriety through creating a satirical account and selling her “GamerGirl Bath Water” product through her online store. Shortly after, her Instagram account was deleted due to community guideline violations and she would go on hiatus. Upon returning to online content creation, she launched an account on which she posts adult content and began uploading YouTube music videos that were markedly explicit.
Media outlets have described Delphine as an “e-girl” and a cross between an Internet troll and a performance artist. Delphine has also been cited as an influence on the e-girl style commonly adopted by TikTok users.
Early life
Delphine was born Mary-Belle Kirschner in Cape Town on 23 October 1999.[7][8][9] She grew up in a devout Christian household.[10] After her parents divorced, she moved to England with her mother and settled in Lymington.[9] As of December 2020, she was living in Hove.[9] In her adolescence, she was “an avid watcher of the anti-political correctness genre of YouTubers like iDubbbz” and also enjoyed watching the parody character Filthy Frank online.[11] She attended Priestlands School in Pennington, but dropped out at the age of 14 due to being bullied online.[7][9] Delphine expressed that she was isolated by her classmates after they disseminated screenshots of her dark humor jokes.[11] Around this time, she was treated for depression.[9] She found work as a babysitter, barista, and waitress.[7] She began posting “low-res and dimly lit” pictures of her cosplay on her Facebook account, which was later deleted.[7]
Online career
Early years and Instagram modelling
Delphine has had an Instagram account since 2015.[12] In July 2016, she registered a YouTube account.[13] The following month, she uploaded her first video, a makeup tutorial.[14] In 2018, Delphine began to regularly upload pictures of her modelling on Instagram, using accessories such as pink wigs, thigh-high stockings, and cat ears to help create what she described as a “weird elf kitty girl” aesthetic.[8] She also regularly produced cosplay-related content,[8] which included characters such as Harley Quinn and D.Va.[14] In March 2018, Delphine launched a Patreon account, where supporters could receive access to her “lewd” photosets.[12][14] In September, she uploaded a second YouTube video featuring a tour of her room.[14] Rolling Stone noted that her style in this second video is more in-line with that of the one she later adopted during her rise to prominence, which they described as “alien Disney princess porn star”.[14]
Delphine’s popularity notably increased in the autumn of 2018. She “quickly rose to the top of the ‘For You’ page on TikTok“, after participating in the platform’s trends and challenges.[7] Delphine’s image was subsequently spread around 4chan and Reddit, where users praised her “ironic approach to online thotting” as “genius” and “brilliant performance art”.[7] Delphine’s Instagram follower count surged from 850,000 in November 2018 to 4.2 million in July 2019.[14] Her content began to notably and frequently include ahegao facial expressions, which are exaggerated expressions often featured in adult anime to signify an orgasm.[8][15][16] Complex stated that she “posted clips of herself coyly eating a raw egg, shell and all. A scroll through her feed is just as likely to find colorful thirst traps as it is to see photos of her playing with a dead octopus”.[15]
As her popularity grew, Delphine began to draw controversy for her content. In January 2019, adult content creator Indigo White alleged that, while underage, Delphine passed off the photos of other sex workers as her own.[14][17] A February video, in which Delphine danced to a song about suicide while holding a gun, also drew controversy. Shortly after it was posted, false rumors of her death circulated online.[18][19]
Pornhub account and GamerGirl Bath Water stunts
In June 2019, Delphine made a post on Instagram in which she promised to create a account if the post reached 1 million likes.[20] Pornhub responded to the post, calling it “the best news”.[21] The post quickly earned over 1.8 million likes; as promised, Delphine created a Pornhub account, to which she uploaded 12 videos.[20] The videos were all troll videos that featured misleading titles and thumbnails and were not sexually explicit.[14][21] Each of the videos received poor like-to-dislike ratios, ranging between 66% and 77% dislikes.[22] Pornhub Insights published a statistics report detailing that Delphine’s videos became the most-disliked in the website’s history.[23] One of the videos, titled “PEWDIEPIE goes all the way INSIDE Belle Delphine”, was a minute-long clip which featured “a cat ear-clad Delphine eating a picture of YouTuber PewDiePie, winking throughout”.[20] The video drew a similarly joking response from PewDiePie.[18][24] Later in 2019, Delphine won the Top Celebrity In December, Pornhub’s annual statistics report listed Delphine as the most-searched celebrity in 2019;[26] “Belle Delphine” was also the site’s fourth-most-searched term in general during the year.[27]
On 1 July 2019, Delphine launched her online storefront, including a product dubbed “GamerGirl Bath Water”.[28][29] She announced the product on her Instagram account, where she posted an image of herself in a bathtub, with the caption “bath water for all you thirsty gamer boys”.[30] The product was marketed as the remains of her bath water in a jar and was priced at $30 (£24).[28] Delphine stated that the idea for the product to sell her bath water came from continued fan comments on her photos saying they would drink her bath water.[8] Upon initially selling the product, Delphine added the note: “This water is not for drinking and should only be used for sentimental purposes”.[28] The first run of the bath water sold out in three days.[29] The product was met with controversy, media coverage, and Internet memes.[24][29][31] Two days after the bath water product sold out, a website was created attempting to capitalize on its success, selling “GamerGirl Pee” for just under $10,000; this was confirmed not to be associated with Delphine.[32] @BakeRises, a since-banned Twitter user, fabricated a headline alleging that Delphine’s product caused a herpes outbreak,[24] which was debunked.[33] YouTube video responses also sprung up featuring individuals supposedly drinking, cooking, and vaping the bath water.[14]
EJ Dickson of Rolling Stone noted that the response to Delphine’s gamer girl bath water stunt from media outlets alternated between “deriding Delphine’s fans for their naïveté and applauding her for her marketing savvy”.[14] Katie Bishop, writing for The Guardian, reported that the sale was “widely mocked”.[34] Patricia Hernandez of Polygon opined “What’s curious about Delphine’s side hustle here is that it seems to be a mixture of business and next-level performance art. In the video advertising the bath water, she outright calls this a stunt. And if you look at her wider Instagram oeuvre, Delphine’s work is defined by her willingness to go there“.[28]
In response to her increased public exposure, Delphine was interviewed by The Guardian; she stated “I’m lucky. I can do crazy things and get to see the world react to it, and there’s definitely enjoyment in that, even if it’s sometimes a little scary. I get a bigger reaction to my weirder content but I think that’s only possible because I also make risqué content”.[34] She added “I think it’s been amazing and fun, but it’s time to move on to new things. I have a diary next to my bed full of crazy ideas. I’m not sure what will top this, but I’m looking forward to seeing what will come next”.[34]
On 19 July 2019, Delphine’s Instagram account was banned.[35] A spokesperson for Instagram stated that her account had violated the community guidelines,[36] though the specific post or reason was not provided.[37] At the time of the ban, her account had accumulated over 4.5 million followers, according to Business Insider and Social Blade.[36][38] Business Insider reported that there “appeared to be a coordinated effort to report Delphine’s account”.[35]
Delphine continued using her Patreon and Twitter accounts. At one point, her Patreon account had over 4,400 supporters.[12] Polygon noted that “at least one man” spent $2,500 in exchange for a personal Skype conversation with Delphine.[28] In late August, Delphine became inactive on her social media platforms,[39] making many Patreon supporters believe they were being scammed out of previously promised upcoming content.[39][40]
On 7 October 2019, Delphine tweeted an image of her mugshot, with a caption detailing that she was arrested.[39] The image contained a “Metropolitan Police Service” watermark, although there was not any external proof of an arrest from the Metropolitan Police or otherwise.[39] Delphine later stated that someone had stolen her pet hamster at a party and that she vandalised that person’s car in retaliation, resulting in her arrest.[40][41] Online publications and users questioned the authenticity of her claims,[40] while the Metropolitan Police stated they were “unable to disclose any information” regarding the arrest due to the Data Protection Act.[40] After she uploaded her fourth YouTube video in November 2019, Delphine took an online hiatus.[7]
Transition to OnlyFans and pornographic content
In June 2020, Delphine returned to social media with a YouTube music video parodying the song “Gooba” by American rapper 6ix9ine.[2][42] The video also promoted her newly launched Instagram, TikTok, and OnlyFans accounts.[2][42] She was later banned from TikTok.[43] The Spectator and Business Insider reported that her OnlyFans account draws in over $1.2 million (£1 million) per month.[9][44] In September, Delphine uploaded a music video for Doll.ia’s “Plushie Gun” song, which featured her twerking, licking a razor blade, and playing with toy guns.[45]
On 20 November, Delphine’s YouTube channel was terminated without warning “due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy on nudity or sexual content”.[45][46] This termination occurred almost immediately after Delphine’s “Plushie Gun” video was removed for violating the platform’s sexual content guidelines.[45] Prior to this, many of her videos had been age-restricted for their adult content.[45] Her channel had around 1.8 million subscribers and 78 million video views prior to its termination.[45][47] The termination drew criticism from both Delphine and her fans, who questioned if there was a double standard between mainstream celebrities and independent content creators like Delphine.[45][46][48] Her channel was shortly reinstated with YouTube attributing the termination to “a mistake by the review team”.[48] Around this time, Delphine started posting adult and explicit content on her Twitter account. Her erotic posing was often accompanied by gaming paraphernalia.[30] On 25 December, she uploaded her first homemade hardcore porn to her OnlyFans account.[49]
In January 2021, Delphine posted images of a staged-kidnapping fantasy shoot, which led to several Twitter users accusing her of promoting rape.[50][51] Delphine defended her post, stating “there is nothing wrong with enjoying power-play and BDSM where both people are consensual”.[50][51] She took another hiatus from the Internet in 2021, sharing on Twitter that she “vowed never to do porn again,” wanting instead to live in a cottage and travel.[‡ 1] However, in April 2022, she resumed making online content.[3]
