Blind items… what even are they? Incredulous gossip? Fan fiction? Or are they cold hard facts about the ins and outs of Hollywood and all the people in it?
The truth is, they’re a little bit of all those things — and it’s up to you to decide what your take is on them.
Blind items are short excerpts of celebrity gossip that use clues rather than names when talking about the item’s subjects. For example, you may read, “This foreign-born, A-list singer…” and be talking about Justin Bieber. Or another may read, “This A-list reality star who’s married to a billionaire rapper…” and be talking about Kim Kardashian. You get the gist.
Blind items have been around for almost two decades now thanks to websites like “Crazy Days and Nights” and BlindGossip.com. But for the most part of their existence, the blind-item community was mostly made up of pop-culture, fanatic web sleuths who knew where to find blind items and how to recode them. But thanks to the massively popular Instagram account @DeuxMoi and a few TikTok creators, they’ve experienced a major facelift and democratization in the past year.
Deux Moi began back in 2013, but rose to prominence as Instagram’s sole blind item account at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. The creator of it remains anonymous; however, everyone assumes it is either someone with major connections to the entertainment industry or a colloquial pop-culture fan who just got really lucky. Lucky because they receive hundreds — if not thousands — of tips a week from Hollywood insiders, studio executives, assistants, and regular old fans about a myriad of celebrities and celebrity scandals.
The account, which now boasts over 1.3 million followers, prefaces everything it posts with a disclaimer that not everything sent it is true, nor can it be verified. However, a large number blind items that have been posted have turned out to be true in some way, shape or form. When this happens, Deux Moi posts a story of the original blind item along with the headline of the story the item was talking about with the iconic three words, “BLIND ITEM REVEALED.”
Not only is Deux Moi a hub for those obsessed with celebrity gossip, but also for celebrities themselves. The Instagram is followed by a few big names in the industry, such as pop star Dua Lipa and supermodel Gigi Hadid. TMZ’s official Instagram account is even a follower as well. This demonstrates that Deux Moi has cemented themselves as a trusted source of celebrity information in modern day, even though it’s based completely in blind items.
Blind items have also gotten a face lift thanks to a few TikTok creators like Shannon McNamara of the Fluently Forward podcast. McNamara– who is in her late twenties– has been into blind items for years but decided to talk about them on TikTok because she felt like there weren’t any blind items being discussed on the platform. Soon enough, a video she made about a blind item blew up and she realized that a huge portion of Generation Z – the age of the majority of TikTok users– had no idea what blind items even were. She took it into her own hands to become the voice of blind items on the platform as well as start her own podcast about celebrity blind items, which has become one of the most popular entertainment podcasts on both Apple and Spotify since its launch a few months back.
Thanks to Deux Moi and McNamara, blind items are back with a vengeance. If you’re a pop-culture fan, it’s in your best interest to follow both of them to perhaps be the first to know about the hot gossip that’s happening in your favorite celebrity’s life.