“Clean Girl”: How Tik Tok Trends are Sabotaging Millennial Individuality
Sierra Cameron
How to be a clean girl:
Wake up at 5:30
Make yourself an oat milk matcha latte.
Journal for 20 minutes. What are you grateful for? Set your intentions for the day.
Go on a “hot girl walk”.
Shower and complete your 6 step skincare routine. Remember, clean girls don’t have acne.
Oh, and don’t forget to gua sha.
Now, do your “no-makeup makeup” look. You want to GLOW. Use only creamy products: blush, highlighter, and bronzer. You need to look “snatched” but make it natural. Brush out your brows. Keep them full and fluffy. Finish with some lip gloss. Perfect.
Put on gold jewelry; maybe chunky hoop earrings and a dainty necklace today.
Now, let’s think about hair. You have two options.
Use your Dyson Air-wrap to style it and wear it down.
Use Olaplex Bonding Oil to slick it back into a bun, ponytail or braid.
Put on a neutral colored one size fits all Brandy Melville tank, Aritzia pants, and your mini Uggs.
Good, you’re ready.
The “clean girl aesthetic” rose to overnight prominence in early 2022 and has since pressured millions of millennials to exude an illusion of effortless and natural beauty through perfect hair, dewy makeup, modern yet classic style, and a wellness-obsessed life. The trend asks that its participants be the chicest and coolest girl in the room, referred to in a parallel trend as “that girl,” who radiates confidence, perfection, and unattainability. However, as every girl tries to become “that girl” they begin to look more and more like every other girl, turning the trend into an ironic joke. Nowadays, most everyone knows at least one person who has adopted the clean girl aesthetic and lets it dictate their lifestyle. If you don’t, stroll down a city sidewalk or scroll through your Tik Tok For You Page for a little while. You’ll see them… they’re everywhere. The look is hyper-specific, even down to the hair serums, makeup products, and clothing brands leaving little room for originality. As the trend grows past social media and into popular culture, celebrities such as Hailey Beiber and Gigi Hadid have become the token clean girls, determining what the newest iterations of the look entail.
Disguised as a harmless trend, the clean girl aesthetic is a lifestyle—and a problematic one at that—because at its core, it’s inherently exclusive and performative. It’s difficult to trace the origins of the lifestyle back to one specific person, but the elements of the trend have been popular for much longer than TikTok. For example, the slicked back bun has been a go-to hairstyle for brown and black women since the 1960s but when they did it, it was considered greasy and dirty–a far stretch from the “cleanliness” we associate the look with now. These communities have never been credited for their inspiration and contribution to the trend, and beyond that, aren’t widely welcomed into the aesthetic as we know it today. Enter “clean girl” into any social media search bar and you will find an overwhelming amount of white, thin, and affluent young women. But why?
Hailey Bieber
The lifestyle is exclusive because it’s not realistic for the vast majority of people. To be a clean girl, you need to have the luxury of excess amounts of time and money. If you are able to perfect your hair and makeup, spend 30 minutes journaling, drink a homemade matcha latte, and attend a pilates class day after day, you likely don’t have kids to get ready for school or multiple jobs you must work to support your family. These assumptions seem to be true for almost every clean girl who shares their life on social media. Her life is effortless, or at least it appears to be, but by living in this illusion she completely dehumanizes herself and seems to be oblivious to the realities of the world in which we all live. For example, the clean girl places a big emphasis on the importance of physical and emotional wellness but rarely discusses the potential detriments that accompany a health obsessed life including disordered eating and mental health struggles. Overall, she often lacks vulnerability and chooses to disregard the universal reality of bad days, emotionality and chaos in life.
Perhaps when no one is watching, the clean girl doesn’t adhere to the rules of the lifestyle, but since our glimpses into her life only come from the social media content she feeds us, we have no way of knowing. Social media is inherently performative and I’m confident that many of us, at one point or another, have used it to craft the illusion of a perfect life. Personally, I use Instagram as a highlight reel. On average, I post once a month about some spontaneous adventure, happy moment spent with friends, or a combination of the two. Sure, these things really happened and the smiles are genuine, but the vast majority of my life is left unaccounted for. Spoiler alert: it’s not all adventures and smiles. Yet, despite my first hand understanding of how fabricated social media is, I often forget that the same is true for everyone else. I don’t necessarily think we need to start posting photos that showcase our insecurities or most mundane days but I do hope that we can collectively work on acknowledging the moments in which our reality doesn’t align with the one depicted on our feeds. The key to consuming social media is self awareness and the understanding that just as we create an illusion of our lives, so does everyone else.
By my prediction, the clean girl aesthetic is here to stay; so we must learn to observe it with a grain of salt and challenge the rigid parameters that it presents. Even just changing the name would drastically help with the issue of exclusivity. The “clean girl” emulates doll-like perfection so where does that leave girls with acne, body hair and cellulite? Do those natural qualities make them dirty? Of course not, but that’s what the name implies. Although I’ve found more cons than pros, the clean girl aesthetic isn’t all bad and I like to believe it was created with good intent. Like I mentioned previously, the aesthetic associates itself with other parallel trends such as “that girl” which preaches female empowerment and independence. Additionally, the clean girl promotes self care and self respect, a vital concept that often falls to the wayside in our busy world. I hope that as the trend continues to influence more people, it also increases its transparency and accessibility. As it exists right now, there’s no world in which this lifestyle is an option for everyone. It’s expensive, it’s ageist, it’s sexist, it’s racist, and it’s fatphobic, but if there’s one thing social media can do, it’s spread a message and change a narrative. If enough people use their platform to challenge the constraints, I believe there’s a beautiful opportunity for a new trend–one that values vulnerability, empowerment, wellness, and self respect in a sustainable way.