TikTok to the Crib: Why Influencer Baby Names Are Taking Over in 2025

Reels to real: The digital way to name a baby

Once tied to family heritage and religious tradition, baby names used to be a way to honor ancestors, saints, or the family trade. But in the age of reels, baby naming has become a way to follow the latest trend.

Now, influencer culture doesn’t just shape what we buy; it also shapes who we name our children after. As content creators grow in popularity and take over our social media feeds, their names (and their kids’ names) trickle into our cribs, moving us away from lineage and toward algorithmic relevance.

Forget Grandma Susan. Today’s newborns are more likely to be named after a wellness vlogger, a Gen Z fashion influencer, or the baby of a reality TV star with 3 million followers and a skincare line.

How names are going from reels to real

Look through the top baby names of the past few years and one thing becomes clear: not heritage, but the internet is naming our children.

Here are the most popular picks from 2024:

Rank (Here)	Name	SSA 2024 Rank	Gender	Births	Influencer/Social Media Connection
1	Nova	#39	Girl	5,044	Instagram/TikTok favorite, modern/astro vibe
2	Kai	#76	Boy	4,276	Surfer/vlogger/athlete/influencer
3	Rowan	#71 (B), #266 (G)	Both	4,647 (B), 1,193 (G)	Modern gender-neutral trend
4	Addison	#68	Girl	3,327	Addison Rae (TikTok star turned Pop star)
5	Sage	#413 (B), #146 (G)	Both	779 (B), 1,987 (G)	Wellness/influencer trending
6	Arya	#162	Girl	1,863	Social media, TV
7	Zara	#234	Girl	1,327	Zara McDermott (influencer/model)
8	Saint	#282	Boy	1,195	Saint West (Kardashian baby, viral sharenting)
9	Charli	#524	Girl	587	Charli D’Amelio (TikTok), Charli XCX
10	Stormi	#790	Girl	356	Stormi Webster (Kylie Jenner, Instagram famous baby)

Some of these like Nova and Kai have become more popular than classic names that endured for decades.

Many of these, like Rowan and Sage, are gender-neutral as they’re based on wellness trends, popular aesthetics, and even color palettes.

However, influencer-based names have the fastest decline risk: if the trend fades, the name’s appeal can wear off quickly. Some names escape this by attaching to multiple cultural touchpoints, like Zara, which is also a famous fashion brand and Kai, which is seen everywhere from K-pop to sports.

Kardashian Kids and the Rise of Celebrity Baby Names

No conversation about influencer-driven baby name trends would be complete without mentioning the Kardashians—a modern dynasty whose fame is matched only by their power to set pop culture’s agenda. Over the past decade, the Kardashians and Jenners haven’t just launched beauty empires and viral challenges; they’ve also put a new crop of baby names on the map.

Names once considered unconventional—like Saint, Chicago, Dream, True, and Stormi—have become templates for a new era of naming. Their choices make headlines, and almost instantly, those names see a spike in popularity as fans and followers rush to emulate their favorite reality stars.

In the SSA’s 2024 data, the Kardashian effect is undeniable. “Saint” (as in Saint West, son of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) ranked #282 for boys, with 1,195 newborns sharing his high-profile name last year alone. “Stormi”—famous as the daughter of Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott—appeared at #790 for girls, a name that barely registered before her 2018 birth and now belongs to over 350 new babies in a single year.

From FYP to birth certificate: Why parents are picking influencer names

At first glance, the influencer baby name boom might seem like a harmless trend-chasing — a quirky side effect of the digital age. But zoom out, and it begins to reveal something deeper about how identity, aspiration, and even childhood itself are shifting in a media-saturated, hyper-individualized culture.

Branding

Names, once private and local, have become public and performative. They are no longer just spoken in kitchens and classrooms; they’re printed on sweatshirts, hashtagged in birth announcements, and embedded in online search engines from day one.

Parents are choosing a searchable keyword, a vibe, a narrative that resonates with the kind of content they’re consuming online.

Kids = content

The rise of “sharenting” (parents creating content centered on their kids) means that babies are born into a world where their lives are being documented, edited, and consumed by audiences from the moment they are born. So, a distinctive name isn’t just for novelty, it’s part of the content strategy.

In a world where everything is content, even the most personal choices are shaped by the possibility of how they’ll be received — not just by family and friends, but also by followers, viewers, and global audiences.

Ultimately, beyond just names, this trend is about the deep cultural transformation happening underneath: where parenthood becomes performance, where identity is crafted in public, and where even the beginning of life is shaped by the invisible hand of the algorithm.

As the line blurs between digital culture and daily life, expect tomorrow’s baby names to read like a trending topics list: always refreshing, just a scroll away from the next viral sensation.

So, who’s trending in your crib this year?

Methodology

To analyze baby naming trends influenced by social media and internet personalities, we used data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for the year 2024. The SSA publishes annual statistics on the most popular baby names in the United States, including the number of births for each name by gender. We identified names within the Top 1000 that are clearly linked to influencers, viral internet personalities, or children of celebrities, verifying these connections through online trend data and media coverage. Birth counts were used to determine the popularity and ranking of each influencer-related name.