Mom Wins Six-Figure Prize After Turning 1,500 Doritos into a 7-Foot Statue of Liberty (Exclusive)

Jordan GreeneMon, August 10, 2026 at 9:54 PM UTC

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Credit: Gabby Whiting -

Gabby Whiting sculpted a 7-foot Statue of Liberty covered in Doritos for a $250,000 competition

The mom of four documented her first-ever sculpting journey, gaining a supportive online community along the way

Whiting spent two weeks and $528 creating “Lady Chiperty,” using nearly 1,500 chips and custom Dorito-colored paint

Long after her four boys had gone to bed, Gabby Whiting would head into the garage and start carving.

In the middle of an Arizona summer, with temperatures topping 100 degrees, the 35-year-old mom was racing to transform massive slabs of foam into a 7-foot Statue of Liberty. Once she finished sculpting, she planned to cover the entire thing in Doritos, and she had only two weeks to pull it off.

“I had to take lots of breaks to cool down or breastfeed or just be a mom in general,” Whiting tells PEOPLE exclusively. “There’s no way I could have done this without my husband. He believed in me and wanted to support this endeavor.”

Whiting, a Mesa, Ariz., content creator and owner of the at-home teeth-whitening business Sunkist Smiles, is a mom to four boys, ages 7, 5, 3 and 4 months. She was four months postpartum and breastfeeding when she decided to enter the Doritos Build It Bold Challenge, a competition celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with a $250,000 prize.

Contestants were tasked with recreating an American monument using Doritos. Whiting had never sculpted anything before, but when she saw another creator promoting the competition, her first thought was simple: “Why not me?”

“I have always loved DIYs, and this one seemed right up my alley,” she says. “I especially love competitions, so this felt like the perfect combination. And obviously, $250,000 would be life-changing for my family.”

Gabby Whiting shopping for Doritos.Credit: Gabby Whiting

Whiting initially considered recreating Abraham Lincoln seated in his chair at the Lincoln Memorial, completely covered in Doritos. But after combing through the official rules, she discovered it wasn’t one of the eligible monuments.

Her next choice was Lady Liberty, and the challenge suddenly felt even more fitting.

“To me, I was like, I gotta do something epic,” Whiting says. “It can’t be easy. It has to stand out. It has to make people say, ‘Wow!’ ”

Whiting had first learned about the competition earlier in the summer, but with existing brand commitments to finish, she initially put the idea aside. By the time she was ready to go all in, the July 31 deadline was only about two weeks away.

On July 9, she announced on social media that she was entering, a moment she remembers being nerve-racking because saying it publicly meant she actually had to follow through.

Two days later, while her husband, Gary, stayed home with their boys, Whiting headed to Home Depot to buy the foam she would use to construct Lady Liberty. She left with four enormous pieces measuring roughly 8 feet by 5 feet each, and immediately encountered her first problem: How was she going to fit them into her van?

Gabby Whiting with the foam pieces.Credit: Gabby Whiting

Rather than hide those mishaps, Whiting filmed them. She had bought a microphone specifically for the series and decided to document the entire experience, including the parts where she had no clue what she was doing.

“I wanted to show the good, the bad, the awkward and the moments where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing,” she says. “I think people connected with that because I wasn’t pretending I had everything figured out.”

Whiting wanted Lady Liberty to be big enough to make an impression, but with each foam board costing around $50, she also had to be realistic about the family’s budget. She and Gary worked through the dimensions and eventually settled on 7 feet.

Gary helped calculate the proportions by drawing measurements onto a printed image of the Statue of Liberty, which Whiting then used as a guide to sketch the figure’s front and side views directly onto the foam.

“No tracing, just eyeballed everything!” she says.

Gabby Whiting carves out Statue of Liberty.Credit: Gabby Whiting

The actual cutting didn’t begin until July 17. Whiting glued sections of foam together layer by layer and began carving away the excess in her garage, initially using a hand saw before realizing it was going to take far too long.

Her followers had a suggestion: Get a hot knife. Although she listened, no tool could eliminate the most intimidating part of the process. Whiting wasn’t simply cutting out a silhouette; she needed to turn a stack of foam into a recognizable three-dimensional figure. To help her achieve this, she printed photographs of the Statue of Liberty from as many angles as she could find, while Gary became her second set of eyes.

“I had never sculpted anything before, and suddenly I was trying to find Lady Liberty inside a giant block of foam,” she says. “Because she needed to be 3D, every cut mattered. Once you cut foam away, you can’t exactly put it back.”

“There were definitely moments where my husband and I felt stuck,” she adds. “We would stare at her and wonder what we needed to change.”

“There was a moment when we were carving and suddenly we could actually SEE her,” she continues. “That was when everything changed. I remember thinking, ‘Wait … this is actually coming together. Am I really going to pull this off?’ ”

As Lady Liberty began to emerge from the foam, Whiting’s social media audience was becoming increasingly invested in the experiment. Her kids cheered her on, neighborhood children came over to inspect the latest progress, and followers began offering their own suggestions.

One of those tips led to Whiting’s favorite moment of the entire project. A follower suggested painting the white foam before attaching the chips so it wouldn’t show through any gaps. Whiting initially planned to grab some orange paint, but then she remembered seeing another TikTok creator have her hair color-matched.

That gave her an idea: What if Home Depot could color-match a Dorito?

“I truly almost didn’t” ask, Whiting says. “I literally had to tell myself, ‘Gabby, who cares!’ ”

Gabby Whiting matching a Dorito to paint.Credit: Gabby Whiting

So she walked into the store carrying a single Dorito, approached the paint counter and asked an employee whether they could color-match it. When he said yes, she held up the chip. “Can you color match a Dorito?”

The employee, Raphael, immediately played along. He laughed, held up the chip for his coworkers to see and helped create custom paint to complement the Cool Ranch Doritos Whiting planned to use on the statue.

“It was one of my favorite ‘brave’ moments of the entire project,” she says. “I’m so glad I went through with it because it involved other people, and I think those unexpected interactions are what make content so much more fun.”

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Raphael, she adds, “was truly the hero of that story. He was just in the right place at the right time.”

With the statue finally carved and painted, Whiting was ready to add the project’s defining ingredient.

She bought 17 party-size bags of Doritos — six Nacho Cheese, 10 Cool Ranch and one Sriracha Tangy & Sweet for the torch flame — spending about $85 on chips. She was convinced she would need even more and asked her followers to guess how many bags it would take.

Some guessed 30. Others predicted 40 or even 60. In the end, Whiting needed just nine. She used five bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos on the base, four bags of Cool Ranch on Lady Liberty’s body and a handful of Sriracha chips for the flame. Based on her estimate of at least 165 chips per bag, Whiting believes she glued approximately 1,485 Doritos onto the sculpture.

Altogether, she estimates the project cost about $528, including foam, a foam shaver, a hot knife, paint, glue sticks and the 17 bags of chips she purchased. That figure, she jokes, doesn’t include “all the Circle K Diet Coke runs that kept me alive through the process.”

If sculpting was the most intimidating part, attaching the Doritos was the biggest surprise. Whiting had assumed gluing the chips would be relatively straightforward, only to discover that their irregular shapes turned the process into a giant puzzle.

“Not every chip is the same, so I had to utilize its shape and find the best spot for it,” she says. “It became a puzzle project at this point. Truly therapeutic!”

Gabby Whiting with the finished project.Credit: Gabby Whiting

Once the carving was complete, the family moved the statue from the sweltering garage into the living room, where Whiting could work in the air conditioning and watch a movie or show while she glued after the kids went to bed.

But with the deadline approaching, the seemingly therapeutic task soon became a race against the clock. Whiting had three days left when she began attaching the Doritos, and it took all three to finish. She estimates she stayed awake for approximately 48 hours during the final stretch, powered by adrenaline and determination.

Gary took over bedtime and other responsibilities with the boys, and at one point even stayed up until 5 a.m. helping attach Doritos so Whiting could get some sleep.

Meanwhile, Whiting’s online audience was following every increasingly frantic update. She went live on TikTok during the final nights, where viewers would enter confused by the sight of a woman gluing tortilla chips to a giant statue before quickly getting pulled into the drama.

Followers began commenting “my show is on” when she posted another update. Some called her the “Dorito Queen,” while others gave her creation the nickname that stuck: Lady Chiperty.

“What started as a crazy idea turned into this entire community experience,” Whiting says.

After roughly two weeks and an estimated 75 hours of work, Lady Chiperty was finally finished. Still, Whiting wasn’t done. She needed to complete her official submission video and upload it before the July 31 deadline. After racing to get everything ready, she finished with just 45 minutes to spare.

Then the website rejected her video because the file was too large. “I started freaking out,” Whiting says.

She immediately told Gary to call her brother-in-law Jake, the family’s resident tech expert. Whiting sent Jake the video, he converted the file and emailed it back, and she tried uploading it again. This time, it worked.

After two weeks spent carving foam in triple-digit heat, gluing nearly 1,500 chips and fitting the entire endeavor around life with four young children, Whiting and her boys celebrated the only way that seemed appropriate: by dancing around Lady Chiperty in their living room.

Now, Whiting is waiting to learn whether her creation will earn the $250,000 prize. But even if it doesn’t, she says the experience has already taken her somewhere she couldn’t have predicted when she first decided to enter.

“If I don’t win, life goes on,” she says. “This challenge has already given me so much. It introduced me to an amazing community, grew my platform and gave me an incredible creative experience.”

Close up of the statue.Credit: Gabby Whiting

More than anything, Whiting hopes the project encourages other moms to make room for the things they want to pursue themselves.

“You can be a mom AND chase your dreams,” she says. “You can get creative, find something you’re passionate about and believe in yourself.”

“I like being silly. I like doing weird things. I like finding the fun in life,” Whiting adds. “There will always be someone who thinks you’re weird, who doesn’t understand your goals or who thinks you shouldn’t be doing something. But why not give yourself a chance anyway?”

For the moment, Lady Chiperty is still standing in the Whiting family’s living room, where keeping her intact around four boys has become its own challenge.

“My toddler has already run his bike into the base a few times, so I’ve had to re-glue a few Doritos!” Whiting says.

She plans to seal the statue with a protective spray and hopes to eventually organize some kind of meet-and-greet after hearing from followers — including parents whose children watched the entire series — who want to see Lady Chiperty in person.

Whiting would especially love to bring the statue back to the Home Depot where the adventure began and reunite with Raphael, whose Dorito color-matching cameo made him a fan favorite.

“People have actually told me they want to meet him!” she says. “I never expected people to become this invested in the project.”

As for Lady Chiperty’s longer-term future, Whiting hasn’t quite figured that out yet. “Maybe I’ll keep her and turn her into a Christmas tree this year!” she jokes.

on People

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”