“About receiving disrespectful pickup lines. Guys, I’m annoyed… ” Lu wrote in Portuguese on her Instagram account on Thursday morning, paired with a face-palm emoji. “And hey I’m virtual! I keep imagining the real women who go through it every day!” These are the first several things you need to know about Lu: She is beautiful, she doesn’t take any shit, and also she is not a person. She’s the brand mascot for Brazil’s Magazine Luiza, which is effectively Ikea meets The Sims — an enormous home furnishing, home goods, and consumer tech retailer that reported $37.6 million in profit last quarter. It has about 900 IRL storefronts that house samples of hundreds of thousands of items that can be ordered online. In 100 of them, there are no products at all, just the ability to peruse virtual items on a tablet and then order what you need to make your dream home real. Magazine Luiza also has a rapidly growing e-commerce business and a large network of consumers who set up their own digital “stores” to make commissions off their friends and family. All this is less interesting to me (for the moment) than Lu, a hyperrealistic animated woman who will sell you anything from a baby monitor to a giant chocolate egg to a banana-yellow minifridge that can brew its own beer, but will also give herself the space to be wildly unprofessional. Lu, watching the World Cup this summer in a head-to-toe display of patriotism, flashed a blue-and-yellow manicure and told her 630,000 followers that she was “mega nervous and anxious” about the game. To resist biting her nails, she was wearing linen gloves she received from Época Cosmetics. Then when Brazil lost, she cried and didn’t advertise anything. In 2018, the fashion world loves an Instagram influencer avatar. Lil Miquela, the 19-year-old Brazilian-American model designed by the LA robotics and AI startup Brud, has 1.4 million followers and got a print feature in New York magazine this spring. In July, Elle asked whether avatars like Miquela and Shudu — an artificial model designed by British photographer Cameron-James Wilson and popularized when she sampled Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line — were “the perfect influencers.” The answer? No. Only Lu is perfect. | 
