Why olive oil girl is TikTok’s main character

If you’ve spent any time on TikTok in the past few days, you’ve probably come across the viral olive oil story. If you haven’t, strap in.

The latest trend on the platform sees people sharing their wildest stories over a slideshow of images of Pepe the King Prawn soundtracked to Like A Prayer. One particular TikTok from the trend was posted by Megan Chacalos (@meganchacalos), who has since become TikTok’s latest main character, known as “olive oil girl.” In the viral video Chacalos recalled a high school mishap involving an olive oil hair mask. What happened from there, you couldn’t make it up.

The story begins when someone at school told Chacalos her hair looked like “hay.” To attempt to remedy this she masked her hair in olive oil and covered it in saran wrap. Thirsty, she then went down to the garage to grab a drink out of the fridge, but the excess oil that “dripped everywhere” from her hair mask caused the path to become an “oil slick.”

“Suddenly one of our cats jumped out, frightened me and I went flying on the oil,” she wrote on the slideshow. “I slammed the door and passed out.”

Chacalos woke up in complete darkness (the lights were on a timer) covered in oil. She said: “I panicked. I didn’t know where I was, my phone was dead. I tried to stand but my legs were completely asleep AND I was covered in oil.”

“I tried to run to the door, I slammed into many things, knocking them over, making tons of noise,” she continued. Then she set off the house alarm. After attempting (and failing) to put the alarm code in, “the FULL burglar alarm started blasting.” Her dad then confronted her in his underwear with a titanium bat. After realising it was his daughter, the dad then deactivated the alarm.

Just when she got into bed and thought the ordeal was over, the police turned up at the door thanks to the burglar alarm. If that wasn’t bad enough, the next day the neighbourhood waterline was broken which meant Chacalos couldn’t wash out the olive oil hair mask, so had to go to school with her hair covered in olive oil and saran wrap.

As you can imagine, the story quickly went viral and at the time of writing has received over 52 million views. “I fear this is an original experience,” one person commented under the video. “I wish I could read this for the first time again,” another added. “Ai couldn’t even dream of this story,” wrote a third.

If you’re trying to imagine what this sequence of unfortunate events looked like, there’s no need as Chacalos acted out a whole reenactment in a follow-up TikTok which now has over 18 million views. As one person commented: “I had seen the script, now I’m seeing the movie.”