Death to the “Clean Girl:” The Neoliberal Effect of Tiktok’s Microtrends
The newest token of the cultural zeitgeist is outfitted in Aritzia. She wears Airpod maxes and gold earrings, and she never has a chipped nail, a blemish, or a stray hair from her gelled-back bun. Dubbed the “clean girl” on TikTok, the aesthetic phenomenon has over two-billion views across an equally-ample amount of videos ranging from one creator’s “clean girl clothing essentials” to tutorials on mastering changing one’s appearance with “clean girl makeup.” Long before the clean-girl found herself on TikTok for-you pages and hashtags, however, she existed among a different demographic: Black and brown women. Like many of TikTok’s popular microtrends, the appropriation of the clean girl and its’ newly exclusionary nature exist as a manifestation of the cool-hunting paradigm. The clean girl aesthetic, therefore, is derived from its incorporation of such “dirty” or “unsavory” aesthetics — and the cultural practices of self-care by many women of color — to re-platform neoliberalist notions of capital beauty among inescapable frameworks of consumerism.
TikTok’s iteration of the clean girl is preceded by a long heritage of slicked-back buns, gifted gold hoop earrings, and inherited nameplate necklaces. Mornings of little Black and little brown girls getting their hair greased before school. Or getting their faces coated in shea-butter by tender mothers against the nagging protest that having hair too greasy, and skin too oily, would make other kids think that they were dirty. While conceptualized on the redefining of marketplace trends before they hit the mainstream, the practice of “cool hunting” has provided the framework for the rapid incorporation of cultural practices, dialects, and styles commonly seen on digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and predicated on the move of cultural influence “from the periphery to the center and from the marginalized, oppositional groups to dominant, compliant ones” (Powers, 2020). The democratization of digital content under an evolving social media landscape has, however, redefined early-aughts notions of proactive cool hunting into an intrinsic social media practice built into its very algorithms. The emergence of constantly shortening trend cycles, and an ever-growing multitude of microtrends, has positioned anyone on TikTok in the role of the “cool hunter” — looking to define the newest trend, aesthetic, or fad before billions of other users beat them to it. When everyone is cool hunting, the reclamation of culturally significant aesthetics and practices into a hegemonic mainstream are therefore, otherwise inevitable to mainstream commodification. Frameworks of cultural appropriation (no matter how arguable the cultural meaning of its appropriated objects) redesign supposedly “unsavory” aesthetics — the “ghetto” gold hoops, gelled hair, and lined lips of Black and Latin 90s aesthetic circles — into “innovative” and “polished” trends claimed by white consumerism.
The clean girl has implications outside of its’ cultural origins, too. As the clean girl aesthetic sidelines the same women it derives much of its’ practices from, the trend is also soiled by the existing models of class and racial privelege it enforces. Type “clean girl” into the Google search query, and the pursuing articles boast Sephora’s best makeup lines to achieve the unblemished, textureless, dewy skin scaled on their ads, and what brands currently sell the best luxury basics. The cost of chasing microtrends alone is accessible to few outside of those with enough disposable income to adopt and drop newly minted products in tandem with a microscopic trend cycle; but, the additional alienation of body types, individuals with disabilities, stigmas around skin and hair textures, and flux of economic statuses entails a neoliberal-based consumer framework of microtrends at large. Much like the neoliberalist craze of makeover television, consumers on TikTok are constantly fed notions that finding the right microtrend will grant them social capital in digital spaces that can ultimately lead to social mobility (Sender, 2006). The clean girl’s era of minimalism, her emphasis on looking “put together” or “wealthy but attainable” despite any extenuating circumstances, play directly on such appeals to middle-class respectability, amplifying societal sentiments that the ideal woman is a proponent of social advancement through girl boss feminism (Candelario, 2022). Incessant messages that individuals on TikTok should immediately go out and buy all the products necessary to remake themselves into the next microtrend, furthermore, merely perpetuate the consumerist nature that tells America “the perfect woman…is constantly working on herself” in a true neoliberal fashion (Candelario, 2022).
If there is a “clean girl,” could she have an antithetical sister? But the clean, polished, thin-and-white, aspirational figures of “clean girl lifestyle” on TikTok, sadly, do not have messy-kitsch aesthetic counterparts. Instead, the trend poses that those outside of its’ traditional Eurocentric box of an audience are inherently sidelined by clean girl culture as “dirty.” “Cleanliness” is, implied by the aesthetic, hallmarked on its proximity to whiteness and upper-class respectability, regurgitating neoliberal sentiments that for those outside these bounds, the proper investments in beauty products will reassert notably poor and notably marginalized individuals into the “hegemonic standard of desirability” (Randall, 2022). The supposedly “minimalist” practices that define the clean girl aesthetic are, thus despite their cultural origins, centered around traditionally white cultural signifiers that repurpose the cultural traditions — like hair-oiling and slugging — among white cultural contexts. Worst of all, it seems that once TikTok has gotten tired of the clean girl craze, the same communities the clean girl poached from, who will stay behind practicing their passed-down traditions of self-care, still wearing their gold hoops, still buttering their faces and slicking-back their hair, will be rendered “out of touch” by a volatile mainstream.
Works Cited
Candelario, C. (2022, July 21). Here's why the 'clean girl aesthetic' on TikTok is problematic.
PureWow. Retrieved October 28, 2022, from https://www.purewow.com/beauty/clean-girl-aesthetic-tiktok-trend
Powers, D. (2020). Chapter One: Trending. In On trend: The business of forecasting the future. essay, University of Illinois Press.
Sender, K. (2005). Queens for a day:queer eye for the straight guyand the neoliberal project.Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(2), 131–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180600714505
Randall, T. (2022, December 7). The problem with TikTok's 'Clean girl' aesthetic. i-D. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/epzna7/tiktok-clean-girl-aesthetic
Your description of the “clean” girl was accurate and detailed, as someone who “wears Airpod maxes and gold earrings, and she never has a chipped nail, a blemish, or a stray hair from her gelled-back bun.” While this aesthetic originally became popular on TikTok, you describe how the “clean girl” existed among Black and Brown girls before it became popularized on social media. You present an example of how Black and Brown girls often use grease to gel their hair, which made other kids think that their hair was dirty. The “clean girl” idea of a slicked back bun therefore comes from the incorporation of this previously “unsanitary or unclean” aesthetic. This is a clear representation of Devon Powers’ (2019) idea of cool hunting, as marginalized peoples’ aesthetics are being brought into the hegemonic culture (p. 4).
ReplyDeleteIn the last paragraph you display the “clean girl lifestyle” as being for a “thin-and-white” woman. Anyone who diverges from this stereotype is in contrast seen as “dirty.” This reminds me of Stuart Hall’s (1997) discussion of “difference” in his piece “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” In this article, Hall discusses how we find differences in opposition to other things. He explains that “we know what black means…because we can contrast it with its opposite – white,” (Hall, 1997, p. 234) and he adds that “this ‘difference’” contains meaning (Hall, 1997, p. 234). The clean girl aesthetic mimics this comparison, as anyone who is not a “clean girl,” is automatically different and, in this case, “dirty.” Additionally, because “clean girls” mainly refer to a stereotypical view of a white woman, anyone outside of this description, specifically Black and Brown women, are viewed in opposition, as “dirty.”
Overall, the discussion of the “clean girl” is fascinating. It is interesting how you point out that TikTok has already lost interest in the “clean girl” craze, meaning the ideas that the “clean girl” is based off of no longer will be seen as popular in the mainstream.
Lauren Pantzer
Ashtyn,
ReplyDeleteI think your analysis of the clean girl aesthetic and its implications is spot on and well-written. You present a prime example of coolhunting in the present day through a novel “aesthetic” that is having its 15 minutes of fame on social media. Also, you accurately describe the way that this style is characterized and driven by consumerism.
The phenomenon of mainstream consumerism simultaneously appropriating yet sidelining Black women that you describe directly parallels Moya Bailey’s writings on misogynoir in popular culture. Bailey posits that the oppression of misogynoir is “the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.” (Bailey 2021, p.1) She believes that misogynoir is more than the sum of its parts- misogyny and racism- but consists of the interaction between the two oppressions that define Black womens’ lived experiences. One manifestation of misogynoir is the phenomenon of hypervisibility and invisibility- more specifically, the way that Black women are caught at a “vexing crossroads” of being simultaneously hypervisible in media and popular culture, yet their needs are invisible in real life. (Bailey 2021, p. 6) Black women’s styles are both appropriated by mass culture (and flippantly repackaged by white women into “trends”) and paradoxically rejected by the mainstream. As you describe, Black girls fear that their greased hair and oiled skin “would make other kids think that they were dirty”, while the same hair grease and skin oil is praised when applied on a white woman.
This phenomenon extends far beyond just the clean girl aesthetic- practically every consumerist microtrend steals from Black women without giving credit and excludes them from partaking at the same time. As you point out, soon enough the next trend will come along and Black womens’ longstanding traditions will then be seen as off-trend.
Aly Kerrigan
Commentor: Mia Schoolman
ReplyDeleteAshtyn,
I remember vividly when the “clean girl” trend took over Tik Tok, leaving me in a constant rut of “wanting to get my life together”. There is so much more that comes with the “clean girl” than just appearance. The “clean girl” creates the idea that they eat healthy, work out, are organized and essentially have their life together. Your paragraph on the implications outside of cultural origins reminded me of Abidin’s piece “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness”. In Abidin’s piece, she highlights that influencer’s intimacy relies on how accessible, believable, and authentic their lifestyle is. Prior to influencers, people watched celebrities, and maybe some strove to be like them. They knew that their lifestyle was unattainable. The harm of the “clean girl” lies in how attainable their lifestyle appears to be. In their demonstration of intimate moments, like showing their breakfast to their followers, showing their workout plan, they are signaling to their followers that if they can do it, you can do it too. This makes spectators more intrigued which further perpetuates the harm of the “clean girl” aesthetic. There will be moments that the “clean girl” isn’t as perfect. However, because of the newfound intimacy between an influencer and their spectators, the spectators only see the highly curated version of the clean girl. Yet, the spectator believes it is their consistent lifestyle because of how intimate and connected the relationship already is. The sharing of every moment of highly private acts creates trust between the viewer and the influencer. Overall, your discussion of the “clean girl” guides me to think about what causes the obsession with “clean girls”.
Ashtyn,
ReplyDeleteI loved your piece on the “clean-girl” aesthetic currently taking over tik tok and other social media platforms. I think you did a great job at initially explaining what the aesthetic is, and further describing it as a trend through the use of Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on Cool hunting. You did a great job in making sure evidence from the Coolhunting article was present and well analyzed while also including its modernized version of influencers, which is complicated to achieve. Because influencers are evolved coolhunters it seems as if the Cool hunting article would be very tricky to use on a piece like this, because the “clean-gil” aesthetic is usually pertaining to the social media platform Tik Tok, one of the big platforms that essentially breeds new influencers, but I think you did a great job at balancing the two. I also really liked how you incorporated a socio-economic and racial narrative to further support how this once marginalized style or look was essentially appropriated and gobbled up by the culture industry.
However, one article that I think could have served to be extremely beneficial to include in your piece was Moya Bailey’s Misogynoir, a piece on how race and gender both play a bias role toward black women. Bailey references how the representation of black women in social media was usually negative, and how she is further interested in the role the culture industry plays perpetuating misogynoir. Moreover, she explains how the power of images in the media serves white supremacy and how the media control the way that marginalized groups are represented. You could argue that by white cis-gendered females adopting this trend as a trend of their own and not providing recognition to its original black/latino roots, their promotion of this look is essentially commercializing it and therefore causing it to essentially lose its authenticity, traditional meaning.
- Blake Massoni
I largely agree with your description of the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic as a trend that appropriates Black and brown cultures and commercializes them for the benefit of “thin-and-white” women on TikTok. Furthermore, your question if a potential antithesis to this aesthetic exists is especially provocative.
ReplyDeleteIn Stuart Hall’s “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” he presents a definition of difference or ‘otherness’ as being binary oppositions: white versus black, masculine versus feminine, etc. (235). Applying this to the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic implies that anything that is not ‘clean girl’ or is not represented by a ‘clean girl’ must therefore be the exact opposite: dirty. And if this trend has been popularized by and associated with “whiteness” and “upper-class respectability,” as you described, then its co-option simultaneously implies that whatever does not fit this description (people of color, people of lower or middle class, people who are not deemed pretty by conventional beauty standards, etc.) must be ‘dirty.’
I also find it interesting that these groups of people are the same marginalized communities who have been attacked or bullied for practicing ‘clean girl’ trends before mainstream media redefined it for white America. For example, I can still recall fellow Indian classmates being teased in middle school for putting oil in their hair; now, hair oils are sold at exorbitant prices by any established beauty brand on the market. Hall might describe this phenomenon as commodity racism, or the spread of racist images and themes through commodity advertising (240). As you articulated, the media has historically represented “‘ghetto’ gold hoops, gelled hair, and lined lips of Black and Latin 90s aesthetic circles” as unsavory or indecent. However, the exploitation and commodification of the ‘clean girl’ now twists the narrative, with the media selling ‘clean girl’ products as endorsements by the “thin-and-white” woman; the exclusion of non-white women thus implicitly asserts their status as ‘dirty’ in comparison.
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Newbery Park, CA: Sage, pp. 225-249.
- Anna Vazhaeparambil