The term “glow-up” has been around for a long time now. Coined by rapper Chief Keef in his 2013 song, “Gotta Glo Up One Day,” the concept of “glowing up” revolves around “a positive personal transformation, with a significant change in appearance.”
Though positive is in the literal definition of a glow-up, there are so many negative aspects to glow-up culture. Some of the worst aspects include how many social media influencers encourage extreme and problematic diets in the name of glow-up culture and how so many younger audiences are influenced to develop unhealthy relationships with food and exercise in the name of achieving that “glow-up” one day.
However, another problematic aspect about glow-ups that I feel is rarely talked about is how glow up culture encourages young people to become extremely conscious about their childhood selves.
If you look through the #glowupchallenge tag, you will see many videos with the following format: a before picture of them as a child and an after picture of them as an adult. These posts may or may not be paired with a caption that usually makes fun of how their childhood self had “ugly” traits, like hairy arms and legs, unibrows, crooked teeth. Basically, traits that they had when they were younger and were easily able to change as adults through hair removal and tools like braces.
This is so problematic for a couple of reasons.
One way this is problematic is because “glow-up” culture creates this notion that in order to be beautiful, we needed to get rid of things that make humans, humans. Like it or not, we all have hair on our bodies. And sometimes, we are born with crooked teeth. Implying that these traits should not be a part of a glow-up indicates that we are not comfortable with just being ourselves. At the end of the day, glow-up culture is not encouraging us to celebrate positive changes. Rather, glow-up culture is encouraging us to chase after unattainable beauty standards and it encourages us to shame our children for not fitting these standards. In turn, this may force young people to grow up way too early.
Another reason glow-up culture is problematic is because it can perpetuate a harmful relationship between race and beauty, especially for women of color. Sometimes, I will see TikToks made by South Asian creators stating the following: “isn’t it true that ‘Brown Girls’ have the best glow-ups?” Now, I am fully aware that these creators mean no harm and are simply just trying to uplift and make themselves feel more confident about their looks now. However, the reason we are more likely to praise our current selves over our childhood selves is because we can easily “change” them to look more Eurocentric through tools like makeup and skincare. So, through the praising of our glow ups from childhood to adulthood, we continue to idolize these Eurocentric beauty standards rather than learning to accept our own, beautiful bodies.
Ultimately, these two reasons are why I no longer believe that I had a “glow-up.” Because, at the end of the day, I really did not. All I did was get older.