These videos are tailored to look ridiculous. The average viewer looks at these women–bedecked in skincare gadgets, rising before the sun so they can peel them off in time for their pilates class–and feels a combination of shock and pity. The viewer wonders how it is possible to sleep in all of that gear and how anybody has the time to do all of that every morning and night. If you’re a certain type of viewer, you might start to panic, thinking, “Should I be doing that too?” These videos are engineered to make you spin out like this. They’re engagement bait, there to generate attention rather than give actual beauty advice. However, that might be even more harmful in the long run, as young viewers can conflate them with reality.
via @kayla.ryann
These types of videos have been a staple of the internet for as long as there have been lifestyle influencers. They’re always less about reality and more about an idealized version of what reality could be. Like so much lifestyle content, it’s there to inspire, to provide an escape, and mainly, to sell us the products that it took to appear in that “perfect” way. They don’t need to have any bearing on what the influencer’s life is actually like (and we will never truly know what it’s really like), since their jobs revolve around broadcasting an enviable life.
One of these videos became Twitter’s meme of the week, a particularly outrageous morning routine shared by fitness influencer Ashton Hall. In the video, he wakes up at the very specific time of 3:52 AM with the infamous mouth tape (but this time it’s marketed to men—whatever that means). The next couple of hours of his morning consists of (at random intervals) standing outside on a balcony, doing a couple of pushups, drinking from an endless stream of Saratoga Springs water bottles, dunking his face in ice baths, doodling on a journal that seems like he’s always on the first page of, and jumping into a pool, all to prepare to sit in a suit in front of a laptop at 9 AM, where he dunks his face in one last bowl of ice water. It’s hilariously unrealistic and accidentally tips its hat to how phony these videos are. In the video, at 7:36 AM, he jumps in a pool. At 7:40 AM, he finally makes contact with the water, meaning he presumably levitated in the air above the pool for four minutes. In front of his work laptop, he says the totally real piece of business dialogue, “We gotta go ahead and get at least 10,000.” He also conspicuously leaves out the timestamps of the minutes it took to set up his camera at an optimal angle and press record. Also, a faceless woman makes and serves him his breakfast... You’re telling me you’re waking up at 3:52 AM and you’re not even making your own breakfast?
via @tipsformenx
This video became a meme because everyone can tell that it’s fake, or at the very least, exaggerated. It acts like a parody of itself. But what about the videos where it’s a little harder to tell? Like, from influencers who traffic in authenticity, the women who gain the trust of their followers through their vulnerability and then use that trust to sell skincare? It’s notable that commenters were quick to clown Hall’s video (one made by a man), but the ones made by women are treated with a different level of seriousness. We expect women to have bizarrely over-the-top beauty routines since we’ve been doing it for centuries. But when a man does the same thing, he’s an instant laughing stock. The double standard doesn’t need to be harped on, but since this type of content is everywhere and so are the viewers who laugh at it, it strikes as significant.
It’s also worth noting that these types of 4+ hour morning routines are truly only accessible to a minuscule section of the population, one that consists of single, childless people who either work part-time or don’t work—or, most often, those whose work consists of filming and sharing their morning routine. They’re not meant to be for the Average Joe. They’re meant to capture the attention of the Average Joe, so their views can be turned into sponsorship deals with the brand of mouth tape they’re wearing.
via @jasmine.alishaa
The discerning, adult viewer knows the layers of falsehood that these videos are made up of. But young viewers might have a more difficult time differentiating them from reality. A young girl might think she must bandage up her face like a burn victim every night, and wake up at 5 AM to peel it all off in order to have value. This is already happening, given the new cliche of hordes of little girls at Sephora, spending their allowances on Drunk Elephant skincare despite already having the skin that adult women spend thousands to get. A little engagement bait might seem harmless in the murky depths of the internet, and the influencer hustle isn’t going anywhere. But at a certain point, it stops being engagement and starts becoming subliminal messaging, targeting the viewers who are growing up alongside it. As they age they will quickly learn, like the rest of us, that if you get out of bed in time to have coffee before work, it’s a good day.