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Sunday World

Online star Dympna Little on grief, lip filler and how Instagram has changed her life

SHOOTING THE SKIT | Mullingar woman Dympna Little has grown an army of online fans for her darkly funny skits, but tells Deirdre Reynolds it's not all about clicks 'People are so invested in the lips,' she laughs. 'I don't know why they're so interested. 'I paid for it, but I said to the doctor that was doing it, 'I might just record a bit, people are obsessed with these f**king [lips]. I bet they'll be sharing, 'Oh, she got the lips dissolved'.' 'I looked yesterday … I think it was over a million views!' In fact, since sitting down with Magazine+ this week, the characteristically honest video has been watched 1.2m times, and counting. Then again, it is her lippy brand of comedy that has turned the dental nurse from Westmeath into an online sensation in the space of a few short years. Better known as @dimplestilskin on Instagram, she's gone from sharing funny skits with just a few family members on WhatsApp to growing an online fanbase of 224k people all over the world with her distinctly Irish gallows humour. 'It blows my mind,' begins Dympna, who still works in a dental practice. 'It's crazy. 'To be honest with you, I always thought if I just got 10,000 followers that was really good, and I was on 10,000 for about three years [on TikTok], the darker humour was better accepted over there. I slowly started posting onto Instagram, then it just kind of blew up. Dympna with her mum Lily 'People are very nice to me out and about. They'll come [up] and tell me, line for line, a video that I made years ago; I'm going, 'I'm just so happy that you got the joke!' 'So, like, I appreciate people following me, but the number doesn't really affect me any more — if 50 people think the video is funny, I'm happy.' Despite her massive following, unlike many online personalities, Dympna has chosen not to plug products on her page, giving her the freedom to skewer influencer culture, as with her breakthrough video in 2023, which she recalls going viral 'for all the wrong reasons'. 'It was me making fun of people who record themselves [giving money to] homeless people, it's not a good deed if you're recording yourself — kind of along those lines. 'I had just come back from having eye surgery in Turkey, so my face was quite swollen, so I looked like a f**king monster,' she jokes. 'Everyone was sharing it like, 'Oh my God, what is that?' All the comments were like, 'What's wrong with your face?' 'In the beginning, I was like, 'I don't know if I'm able for this'. 'Then I was like, d'ya know the way every town has a looper, and they shout mad things at you for no reason walking by? You wouldn't start crying because they said it to you. 'No matter what you put up, someone's going to say something bad about you,' she adds. 'It doesn't affect me anymore, not at all. You do develop a very thick skin.' Far outweighing that nastier side of finding Insta fame, in any case, is the virtual 'hug' of support she felt from her followers after the death of her mother, Lily, aged 69, to cancer in December, shares Dympna, who is now also using her platform to petition the Irish Government to pay a €500 wig grant directly to oncology patients, rather than hairdressers. 'By the thousands and thousands,' she says of the kind responses that flooded in to her emotional videos about missing her mam, not to mention the funny ones about dealing with doctors or country funerals. 'Very similar stories just going, 'I know how you feel', and they'll kind of tell me stuff about their mam as well. 'Sometimes I do burst out crying, and I have to stop and try [to] record again. Then when I post it, I go, 'Oh God, I was crying on the internet, that's embarrassing'. Dympna, aka dimplestilskin, received an outpouring of love after her mum Lily died in December News in 90 Seconds - May 25th 2025 'You do feel very vulnerable … but it's just grief in real time, I suppose. 'There was a lot of people who felt like they kind of got to know mammy during [her illness], and mammy knew them. They were all lighting candles for mammy — she was so grateful. 'When she died, it felt like I had this hug from everyone, and it was nice. 'I know people give out about social media and everything, but it can be a good way of just venting the everyday stuff,' she continues. 'Sometimes you feel like, 'I'm definitely the only person that feels this, there's something wrong with me'. Then someone goes, 'That's how I feel', and they often describe it better than I can, and you don't feel as alone with things.' Now, as well as cutting back on filler, Dympna is cutting back on the filters too, feeling more comfortable in her own skin on social media and beyond. 'Extremely painful,' she describes reversing the cosmetic injectable she got eight years ago. 'My lips just shrunk down to nothing, they were like a cat's arse, where it [temporarily] dissolves all your own [hyaluronic acid] as well, so it takes a while for them to come back. 'I was blessed with big lips anyway, so I don't know why I got lip filler, if I'm honest with you — I should have just left them alone. I knew they were ducky looking, and then when I got online, people were like, 'Oh my God, your lips — you look like a duck!' 'But then people moved on … no one really mentions it anymore, so I was like, 'OK, now it's time', because I was too defiant to do it when they were at me about it. 'For a long time, when I started making the videos, I was too conscious of myself so I was using filters,' she says. 'In my head, I felt like there had to be some sort of separation between me and the video. I'm probably a bit more myself [now] than the early days.' One thing that won't change, the Mullingar native promised, should she realise her dream of making a career out of comedy, is her truth (and, indeed, F) bomb-dropping style. 'My brain is always in video mode,' Dympna says of getting inspiration from 'the most irrelevant thing'. 'I'm lucky that way, I never have to sit down and think of a video. 'I mightn't think of one for days, and I'm like, 'Oh that's it, all the videos are gone, I've no more ideas, ever' … and then the next day I could have 12 ideas.' Often to the peril of family and friends, she laughs: 'It happens all the time [where] people are like, 'Don't make a video out of that'... as if I would!'