The Dark Truth Behind This Viral Social Media Trend

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a day ago

It started as a casual interest. Scrolling Instagram, I'd stop to watch some celebrity or influencer put on makeup. They'd have their products lined up on the bathroom counter and perch their phone against the mirror — that way, they're facing the camera as they trace each eye with liner, slick on lipstick, and narrate application techniques. The viewer and the mirror become one, and the line between audience and self blurs.
Then it turned into a bedtime ritual. After crawling under the sheets and shutting off the light, I'd pull my phone close to my face, open YouTube, and search for a 'Get Ready With Me' video.
The Vogue ones were my favorite. They'd usually feature a young actress — Sydney Sweeney, Hailee Steinfeld, or the latest Bridgerton lead — in her bathroom, dripping alluring serums onto her forehead, applying soppy dabs of moisturizer to her neck and cheeks, and swiping on an invisible SPF. Then, she'd add a touch of foundation, apply a cream eyeshadow with her finger, brush bronzer along her jawline, and glide a highlighter stick above her cheekbones.
Vogue would link to the products the celebrities used underneath the videos, and sometimes I'd click through them: $80 for 0.5 ounces of a vitamin C serum, $115 for an eye cream, $73 for a collection of chemicals I'd never heard of. Once I opened all the links, I'd usually come to the realization I didn't need any of the products and quickly close each tab. I'll admit I wasn't always successful.
Then I'd shut off my phone and try to sleep, hoping to have beautiful dreams.
'I am dreadfully tired of my life,' I wrote in my journal in February 2022. I was 26 and working as a digital editor at a news outlet in Austin. Since the start of the pandemic, my weekdays had consisted of sitting at home in front of my computer for nine hours straight, answering Slack messages and engaging with the world's latest tragedies: COVID-19 deaths, mass shootings, the ever-increasing swirl of misinformation.
And then I would make dinner, lose myself in another screen, and try to sleep.
Perhaps I was initially drawn to 'Get Ready With Me,' or GRWM videos — a trend that has flooded practically every social media platform in recent years — because I could live vicariously through them.
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I'd imagine myself putting on makeup, even though I'd been barefaced for weeks. I'd imagine myself as someone who had places to go, who planned to be seen, even though I was going days without leaving my apartment. Usually, the videos' protagonists filmed themselves in cute bathrooms in sunlight-filled studio apartments or fancy French hotel rooms, and I'd imagine they were going to spend the day strolling down boulevards, drinking wine at lunch, and reading books in parks under the sun.
The women in these videos exuded a confidence I admired. They knew exactly what products worked for them, which ones they wanted to define themselves by.
'Regardless of how high-maintenance or low-maintenance a woman is, every single woman is her own expert,' Glossier founder Emily Weiss says about beauty routines in the 2023 book Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier.
Before founding the billion-dollar beauty company, Weiss started a blog in 2010 called Into the Gloss, where she interviewed celebrities about their favorite beauty and skincare products. It was essentially the first iteration of the GRWM phenomenon.
The blog marked a pivotal moment for beauty culture, according to Glossy author Marisa Meltzer. Weiss had recognized 'the power of personal affiliation, of embracing and monetizing the idea that this-is-what-I-use is deeply linked to this-is-who-I-am.'
I didn't know who I was. But these women appeared to. And that fed into a hope the beauty industry had been selling me for years: that maybe figuring out who I am is just a matter of finding the right products.
I started wearing makeup in high school, the same age my older sister had been allowed to wear it. When my mom took me to Ulta the summer before my freshman year, and I sat at the Clinique counter as a woman matched eyeshadow duos to my complexion, it felt like a rite of passage. Strawberry Fudge, she recommended, a light pink shade for the lid and dark brown for the crease.
I maintained the same drug-store version of that Clinique routine for years. I wore it religiously, not because I had any real passion for it, but because I thought it was a thing girls were supposed to do. An expert had even shown me. Who was I to stray?
Then in college, I studied abroad with a girl who didn't wear makeup. She was kind and adventurous and knew how to be friends with everyone she met. One weekend, a group of us was getting ready for a night out. She asked to borrow someone's mascara. I wondered aloud why she didn't have any.
'I ran out a while ago and just never got around to buying more,' she said. Fascinating. To me, running out of mascara was like running out of an essential, like toothpaste or shampoo. To this cool, nice girl, it was an afterthought. I wanted to emulate her nonchalance.
After that, I started wearing makeup less. I went to class without mascara, stopped replacing eyeshadow palettes, and went on dates with little more than moisturizer on my face. I took pleasure in being the kind of girl who didn't wear makeup. When I did put it on, to attend parties or go to internship interviews, I worried it looked like I was trying too hard.
It didn't help that I was dating a guy who egged on this insecurity. He didn't seem to care that I rarely wore makeup around him, but one night I was heading to a friend's graduation party. He was in my room, hanging out while I got ready. I started swiping mascara on my lashes and putting powder on my face.
'Why do you wear makeup for other people but not me?' he asked.
I didn't know what to say. I mumbled something about wanting to look nice for my friends. They'd all be dressed up.
'It feels like you want other guys to notice you or something.'
The thought hadn't crossed my mind. I reassured him I wasn't trying to attract other people. Looking back, I can see his comments were rooted in insecurities that my 20-year-old self was not equipped to handle. But in the moment, I let the words sink in. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a vain person.
Another night, I was getting ready to see his band perform at a house party. I put makeup on, slipped into my favorite jean jacket, and examined myself in the mirror.
Why did I want to wear makeup tonight, I wondered. Was it too much? In a huff, I ran over to the sink and splashed water on my face. Dark water droplets fell toward the drain until the mascara and eyeliner were washed away. Then I felt even sillier, having spent so much time trying to appear chill and unbothered, two things I clearly was not.
After graduation, I started working my first grown-up job, and I was eager to dress the part. Makeup again became a thoughtless habit. I'd put on eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, and powder before going to the office and dutifully removed it all each night. My college relationship petered out, and, slowly, the self-conscious voice in my head did too.
When the pandemic hit a year later, I stopped going to the office and stopped putting on makeup altogether. My office became my kitchen. Meetings became Zoom calls. Work clothes became sweatpants and T-shirts.
As the months went on, the monotony and anxiety that filled daily life morphed into a low-level depression. I craved distraction. A dopamine hit. A place to rest my mind that wasn't steeped in doom and gloom.
I don't remember what came first: the desire to perfect myself or the videos that showed me how.
'I'm pretty sure I'm the person I see most now,' I joked to my friend one day. Living alone during the pandemic, I had endless time to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, and no one around to make me self-conscious of my self-obsession.
Plus, on every Zoom call and every FaceTime happy hour with friends, there I was, my face in a box in the corner. I began to fixate on my skin. Was I getting dark circles? Had those lines on my forehead always been there?
For every problem I encountered, Instagram had a solution. I could try the moisturizer that Jeanne Damas used or watch a video of a stranger to learn how to apply concealer under my eyes. I started ordering skincare products online. Kiehl's avocado eye cream and hyaluronic acid. Then, I moved on to makeup. Glossier skin tints and cream blushes. Rarely did I have anywhere to wear them. But the buying was entertainment enough.
It's no wonder to me why the skincare industry boomed during the COVID years. It's likely the same reason lipstick sales go up during recessions: When things get tough, we allow ourselves little indulgences to get through. Beauty brands milked that tendency, employing influencers to hawk shiny bottles on every corner of social media, the place we go to remove ourselves from the difficulties of the present.
These splurges became a way to connect to beauty in an increasingly ugly world. There was a part of me that craved these influencers' lives. I wanted their world, as writer Sheila Heti says, 'to be mine by putting it in a cart on the internet, and buying it, and having it arrive at my door, and unpacking it, and knowing it's mine and no one else's.'
Recently, we've seen tween girls bombarding Sephora, eager to add a new Drunk Elephant product to their skincare ritual or a Summer Friday lip gloss to their makeup collection. We gawk and watch in awe when their own GRWM videos break into our algorithms. But it makes sense to me. Young girls love to play dress-up, to cosplay the adult women they hope to one day be.
When I was little, I decorated my room with Eiffel Towers and envisioned the 20-something version of me living in an apartment in Paris with vines growing over the balcony. I would be a writer who wore long skirts and cut her hair short and sipped coffee in outdoor cafes.
A belief grew in me that when I was older, I would no longer feel the uncertainty of being young. I awaited the day I would be like the women I saw in movies, when I would know exactly who I was and what I was doing, and my clothes and face would always feel beautiful, and I would stop thinking so damn much. I wouldn't question where my life was going. I could just live it.
Instead, there I was in my 20s, still fantasizing about the millions of directions my life could take. I'd research different ways to be online. How to go to grad school. How to live abroad. How to move to New York. How to achieve the perfect 'no-makeup makeup' look. And I'd live in those possibilities for a while.
It is normal to be young and to try on different versions of yourself. Indulging in GRWM videos felt like an instantaneous way to do that. But the proliferation of this content — and our appetite for it — highlights what I fear is a growing belief that the most important part of living is appearing. That what makes us who we are is how we look, not how we feel.
Buying milky cleansers, creamy moisturizers, and shiny lip glosses didn't bring me closer to the person I wanted to be. It wasn't until I took real steps to address my mental health that my life meaningfully began to change. For one, I found a therapist who helped me believe my desires were valid. She helped me break down my life goals into manageable steps. I began to feel I was brave enough to do things like quit my job and move to a new city if I really wanted to. And I did.
There are still times I succumb to Instagram beauty reels. I'll find myself 20 seconds into a video of a gorgeous woman applying a new blush or a coppery eyeshadow. I try to remind myself that these are just objects. Rarely are such things transformative.
What I really crave is connection. Romance. Experiences that will crack open new neural pathways in my brain, remind me I am alive. Great art brings me that: books, movies, the opera. A new city to explore. Friends who bare their souls. A gorgeous sunset. Over the last year, I've made an effort to have more of these things in my life.
There is nothing inherently wrong with finding aesthetic ways to boost your confidence. But these videos encourage us to think there is some combination of products out there that will encapsulate the elusive, ever-changing thing that is the self. It's an alluring, futile quest. One in which we will always struggle — always try, always fail, always buy.
I turned 29 last year. I still don't know exactly who I am. But I no longer obsess over it so much. For now, I'm trying to be a person who spends less time watching other people, and more time walking through the world myself.