Pernell Quilon

Pernell Quilon crafts entertainment and lifestyle stories for BuzzFeed that trace how people live, feel, and participate in contemporary culture. His archive spans interactive quizzes, humor-driven lists, reported pieces built from in-person interviews, illustrated portraits, and reflective essays. Across formats, he focuses on the emotional and social texture of internet-age life, especially around money, fandom, home, style, and mental health.

Interactive quizzes and playful tests of self

Quilon’s most visible strand of work is the run of personality tests and scenario-based quizzes that turn everyday choices into a mirror for the reader’s identity.

Alongside pieces like his dinner-party personality quiz, he writes tests that sort people into book smart, street smart, emotionally smart, or social smart based solely on the titles they choose from a curated list. He builds quiz formats around word association, asking readers for the first thing they think of when they see particular words and promising a glimpse of their next five years. Other posts drop readers into imagined situations - surviving in ancient Greece, spotting counterfeit fashion items, or trying to pass a baseline high school test that many modern adults fail - and frame the outcomes as a lighthearted check on knowledge, taste, or intuition.

Even in humor pieces like collections of “clever, biting insults,” the emphasis is on how people express themselves and navigate conflict in daily life.

Celebrity culture, fandom, and generational nostalgia

Quilon covers celebrity culture with an eye for how scandal, reputation, and audience attention actually work in practice. In his roundup of scandals that backfired and made the celebrity more popular, he assembles specific cases into a broader argument about how fame functions like a blunt instrument rather than a moral verdict. He also reports from fandom on the ground, notably interviewing Taylor Swift fans at the opening night of the Eras Tour to document what they paid for tickets, how they afforded them, and what resale did to the experience.

That piece combines candid street interviews, concrete price data, and commentary on the ticketing system to show both the emotional stakes and the financial strain of major pop events.

Generational nostalgia threads through work like his visit to Hot Topic for the first time since middle school, where he compares the early 2000s mall experience with how the store serves Gen Z today. Together, these posts position him at the intersection of celebrity narratives, fan economies, and the shifting aesthetics of millennial and Gen Z culture.

Millennial home, style, and everyday life

Another recurring focus is how people shape their homes and personal style, often filtered through a distinctly millennial lens. Quilon highlights cleaning routines and “closing shift” habits that keep homes feeling under control for longer, treating domestic maintenance as a shared craft rather than a chore.

He amplifies reader voices in pieces about home design trends that “attract the absolute worst people” or decor that “screams Republican,” using sharp pull quotes and visual examples to link taste, politics, and social signaling. In a post where millennials share photos of their actual homes, he concentrates on color, personality, and lived-in details rather than aspirational minimalism, emphasizing authenticity over staged perfection. His style coverage includes expert-led service pieces, such as advice from a professional stylist on finding a personal look in one’s 30s, 40s, and beyond, with attention to fit, quality, and the thoughtful assembly of outfits.

Even practical guides, like collecting genuinely useful grocery-shopping strategies for a teenager doing their first solo shop, fit into this broader interest in everyday life skills and the small systems that make adulthood feel manageable.

Illustrated human stories and mental health

Quilon frequently turns from quizzes and lists to intimate human stories, often pairing narrative depth with visual portraiture.

In his piece on physical warning signs of loneliness, he works with mental health framing to show how the body reflects prolonged isolation and neglect, positioning the article as both a reality check and a language for experiences readers may struggle to name. He collects millennials’ accounts of how their lives did not go as planned, creating anonymous illustrations that echo each person’s story and underscore themes like stalled dreams, financial pressure, and shifting relationships.

In New York housing coverage, he sketches renters while they confess how much they pay versus how much they earn, turning what could be a dry cost-of-living survey into a series of personal case studies about compromise and survival in the city. Essays about high school music habits and about former “loners and outcasts” bridge his own past with wider reader experience, but the focus stays on shared emotional patterns: how people rewrite their teenage narratives, reconnect with versions of themselves, and assess where they ended up.

Across these projects, his reporting style leans on careful listening, illustrated characterization, and a willingness to engage with vulnerability, whether the subject is mental health, money, or the long arc from adolescence into adult life.