She has great jeans, and she has great genes. She seems to have everything but a great acting career. She’s the one and only Sydney Sweeney. The renowned Euphoria actress was one of Hollywood’s most promising young candidates, but recent scandals have dogged her career.
By now, you’ve probably seen videos and articles about Sweeney circulating on the Internet, whether it’s about her American Eagle jeans ad or her bathwater soap. Each media outlet voices a different opinion, but one thing is quite clear: none of these commentaries is even remotely related to her acting career. Anyone would agree that this definitely isn’t the type of publicity you would want as an aspiring actress. When you’re on a promising path to success in the filmmaking industry, you want people gushing over your upcoming movies or how you performed in the last big hit, not about your unpopular political stances and eugenics controversies. But when attention shifts away from the work and toward the person, momentum can stall quickly. Unfortunately for Sydney Sweeney, her own public-facing decisions have landed her in a difficult position.
Before Everything Went Haywire
Before her numerous scandals, Sweeney’s career was flourishing. In her early years of acting, Sweeney was actually an underdog of sorts, an average, middle-class teenage girl who had no industry legacy and was struggling to support herself between films. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Sweeney was completely transparent about her financial condition and how she had no one “to pay [her] bills or call for help.” Money had always been tight for Sweeney, which is why she was constantly taking small roles in the background of large projects like Sharp Objects, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
Her story reflected the difficulty of pursuing an acting career as a young woman in the world of Instagram fame and streamers, and it explained her constant need to be signing brand deals. “If I just acted,” she said, “I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in LA. I take deals because I have to.”
It started with high-end fashion labels like Miu Miu, Armani, Kérastase, and Laneige, which is typical for young actors attempting to make their names known in the movie industry. While these deals may have provided Sweeney with a temporary relief from her financial instability, they’re also the reason why her acting career has been on a steady decline. Sweeney’s frequent appearances in flashy advertisements of big brands have largely eclipsed and drawn attention away from her acting.
Dr. Squatch and Bathwater Soap
Especially in recent years, Sweeney has accepted some controversial brand deals. 2025, in particular, has been a brutal year for her. In May 2025, Sweeney played off of an advertisement she did with Dr. Squatch, which showed her, nearly nude, sitting in a bathtub. This ad, which got over 1.7 million likes on Instagram, inspired Sweeney to partner with Dr. Squatch to create a bathwater-infused soap. While it certainly amused the majority of her male fanbase, it was not so well-received by many others. “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss,” as the soap was called, was criticized for crassly commercializing her body to serve a male audience.
Many people don’t find an issue with the advertisement itself, but rather with the way it appeared to cater to her predominantly male fanbase. This is a common argument against Sweeney, as people find fault in the fact that her image teeters on the thin line between mocking male egos and inflating them. Perhaps this is speaking to a greater issue of women who have been objectified and shamed for profiting off their own sexuality, but Sweeney just happens to be the current focal point of a complex cultural conversation regarding agency and the entertainment industry.
Sweeney argues that many of her critics are the same women who also embraced Lush’s “Saltbomb” bathbombs, which were inspired by Jacob Elordi’s infamous bathwater-slurping scene in Saltburn. She brings up a fair point, but there are stark contextual differences that make her comparison inappropriate. For one, Dr. Squatch is a personal care brand marketed towards men, which aligns with Sweeney’s own public image and advertisement goals. Meanwhile, Lush explicitly markets to everyone and rejects traditional gender norms in their branding. While the customer base leans towards women, Saltbomb was inspired by a movie filled with complex queer theories and didn’t specifically target women. It simply didn’t make sense for her to protect herself and her primarily cisgender, heterosexual male fanbase from criticism by blaming an ad campaign that was representative of a queer narrative.
Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans
This tone-deafness is something that often gets Sweeney into difficult relationships with the public. The controversy around the bathwater soap shenanigan returned to haunt Sweeney just two months later in July 2025, when she promoted jeans in American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign.
“What could people ever fuss about with jeans?” you might ask.
It turns out that there are quite a few things that can go astray when a company tries to get a little too creative with a denim advertisement. Viewers complained about the hypersexualized nature of the ad: the camera lingering on her chest for too long, the scene of Sweeney zipping up her jeans while lying down. This playful concept could have worked with any other advertisement, but in this particular instance, it rubbed many people the wrong way, especially because the company claimed that the ad campaign was meant to raise awareness about domestic violence.
The backlash didn’t stop there. Viewers seemed to take more issue with Sweeney’s monologue. The entire ad focuses on Sweeney as she stares into the camera and whispers:
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
The wordplay around “jeans” and “genes” prompted some to interpret the ad as echoing ideas tied to eugenics, a discredited scientific theory popular among white supremacists that the human race could be improved by breeding out less desirable traits. Unfortunately for Sweeney, the public reaction was only more intense because of her conventional, beauty-standard-abiding white appearance, with her blonde hair and blue eyes.
Political Controversy
Since then, the debate has shifted to focus on the divisive split between liberals and conservatives. Each side has been pointing fingers at the other: liberals blame Sweeney and conservative supporters for promoting Nazism and eugenics, while conservatives accuse liberals of overreacting and envying her conventional attractiveness.
Things didn’t get better for Sweeney after both President Trump and Vice President Vance defended her ad campaign. After President Trump wrote on a Truth Social post saying that it was “the HOTTEST ad out there,” public speculation suddenly veered toward Sweeney’s political stance. Extreme critics began scouring the Internet for evidence of her party affinity, and it didn’t take them long to discover that Sweeney was, in fact, a registered Republican after her political details were leaked in August 2025. Their suspicions were confirmed.
While many other celebrities side with conservative ideologies without receiving much scrutiny and hate, Sweeney was in a particularly vulnerable position with all the attention on her. Things got especially heated after photos were leaked of her attending her mother’s birthday party, where guests were pictured in Make America Great Again-style caps. While the Right was thrilled about the support from this rising actress with her “All-American” looks and bombshell physique, the Left saw this as a betrayal of the ideals that Sweeney’s characters embodied in progressive, satirical films like Euphoria and The White Lotus.
With all of this discussion circulating in the media, Sweeney has chosen to remain quiet about her own politics.
Final Notes
Ultimately, Sweeney has certainly been responsible for some of the backlash, but much of it has been exaggerated by petty arguments between disagreeing parties, which has caused the focus to stray from the actress herself to sensitive personal opinions and political topics. It makes you wonder whether people are actually upset over a 28-year-old actress’s career choices or whether they’re projecting their own moral frustrations onto her.
To an outsider, it might seem like Sweeney’s entire life has come crumbling down in a messy heap of denim and soap ads, but personally, I think that it might not be all that detrimental for her. After all, the publicity has gotten her a lot of attention. It may not be the best kind of attention, but it’s attention nonetheless. After all, the same thing happened to Taylor Swift around the 2016 election, when fans were incessantly begging her to denounce Donald Trump and disclose her political stance. At the time, many critics predicted that Swift was capitalizing on the drama, and now, Sweeney could simply be following in her footsteps.
If the critics guessed correctly, then her publicity strategy doesn’t seem to be working so well right now. Most of Sweeney’s movies in the latter half of 2025 have flopped terribly (most notably the boxing biopic Christy, which earned a historically low $1.3 million opening), and she seems to have fallen off from public discussion. Hopefully, this break gives her some space to recalibrate her brand, because I think her upward career trajectory is far from over. Her recent holiday hit, The Housemaid, has already begun to shift the narrative, and the new year will hopefully provide space for her talent to finally outshine the noise of last year’s controversies.
Sources:
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