“You know those girls that always look clean? Their skin is always glossed, and they never look like they’re wearing too much makeup? You may not look like them, but here’s how to get their look.”
In early 2022, the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic began trending on TikTok and has had a chokehold on influencers worldwide. The trend involves people championing a clean and simple beauty routine involving minimal makeup, dewy skin, fuller eyebrows and sleek hairstyles. Although this trend started off as being harmless, it very quickly got termed as another cast, fat-phobic, texurist and classist trend.
The idea of the clean girl aesthetic has been around for eons, and was usually adopted by Black, Brown and Latina women who sported slick-back buns, dainty gold jewelry, and glossy skin. The trend, which was earlier popular among women of colour, is now commonly seen among white women. If you thought that the trend was just about the ‘clean girl look’, you are mistaken. The clean girl trend also revolves around eating habits, acne-free skin and amplifies being skinny alongside reinforcing Euro-centric beauty standards. These ideas are essentially racist, fat-phobic and often unachievable. The trend displays the class perception evident in society and social media capitalisation on beauty standards. One tweet reads: “The issue with the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic is that it only represents skinny, thin, loose curl textured desirable Black women with no blemishes on their face, implying that anyone outside of that aesthetic is dirty. You can just call it minimalist makeup.”
The tweet sparked the initial criticism around the aesthetic and led to people debating the origins of this trend. A few years back it was trendy to hoard makeup and wear a full-face each time you stepped out, whereas now it is popular to shell out money on skincare and ‘Clean Girl’ makeup items. The whole idea of calling the ‘no-makeup’ makeup look as a Clean Girl look, puts up a facade of effortless lifestyles and unreal standards of beauty. This trend burdens women with the task of maintaining socially accepted and hairless bodies, and caters to a very specific type of person.
The ‘Clean Girl’ aesthetic also implies a ‘dirty girl’ aesthetic, which makes textured skin and wearing a full-face of makeup undesirable. It raises the question – does society still consider having natural body hair and acne abnormal? The trend attempts to reincarnate the ‘Clean Girl’ as a symbol of consumerism and white privilege.
TikTok has introduced us to many micro-trends and aesthetics that leave us spiralling for days, then forgetting them the next — however, the “Clean Girl” aesthetic has pierced itself skin-deep into the subconscious of online users worldwide. This trend has given rise to many other trends such as #LatinGirlLook and #BlackGirlAesthetic and questions the relevance of having a new aesthetic every day. We should no longer let the Clean Girl aesthetic dictate the way we should look. The beauty world should have a space for everyone – even those who do not wish to take part in such trends.