In these TikToks, women (the majority of the time) declutter their homes, deep clean their showers, and sanitize all the nooks and crannies in their houses, all in a matter of minutes. They clean and restock their fridges with their latest Costco haul, which has been delivered to them via Instacart. All the specialized cleaning products appear in their hands with the snap of a finger (and are conveniently linked for purchase in their bio). With the help of time-lapse, tasks that take hours in the real world only take seconds in the #CleanTok world. All the satisfaction you might get from manically cleaning your house one Sunday afternoon is accomplished in the blink of an eye. When it’s done, your shoulders can drop, you can breathe a little easier, and you can relax. The work is done, and you haven’t lifted a finger.
via @tanya_cleanhome
The effect of watching these videos is a palliative to the nervous system. You’re watching something go from dirty to clean in the span of a TikTok video. The problem is solved as quickly as it’s presented to you and you leave with a renewed sense of control. Maybe areas of your own life are messy, in a literal sense or a psychological sense. Maybe you’re an overwhelmed mom of three who has very little time to keep her own house clean, and as soon as you do, a kid comes along and messes it up again. Watching a filthy rug turn sparking clean after some time-lapse scrubbing might give you a sense of possibility. Maybe you’ve been bed-rotting for hours watching TikToks, avoiding the simple to-dos of your own life. Watching someone deep clean a Wendy’s bathroom might help keep your cortisol levels on an even keel. Maybe you’re a young person disillusioned with the state of politics, unsure of what you can do to slow the rapid destruction of your world. Watching an expert clean out a hoarder’s room can make you feel hopeful that there are some problems that indeed can be solved, and these brave influencers are solving them. It’s a remedy against the feeling of hopelessness.
This theory is also backed by science! According to a study by the National Library of Medicine, 1,037 participants showed an increase in relaxation levels as well as an improved mood after watching an ASMR video. (They didn’t specify what type of ASMR, but cleaning videos could logically be counted in those numbers.) Many viewers watch these types of videos before they go to bed, as a sort of wind-down routine. It’s a basic principle, but a powerful one. We turn to social media for a rainbow of reasons, and we leave feeling a rainbow of sensations and emotions, even if they’re often negative. Cleaning videos are another way to feel nothing, as they’re still just another thing that keeps you scrolling, but it's a better kind of nothing, one that doesn’t agitate the nervous system.
But where some of these types of videos instill peace in the viewer, some incite paranoia. Many #CleanTok videos go beyond the usual expectation of cleanliness, like this video, which earned over two million likes, of a woman deep-cleaning a hotel suite on a Disney cruise. She scrubs the shower and the toilet, sanitizes each surface, sprays down the phones and the light switches, and even installs a new set of “disposable” bed sheets. No, she’s not a part of the housekeeping staff, she’s a guest about to settle into her $1,000+ vacation.
via @operation_niki
It’s no secret that hotel rooms are often less clean than we might hope, but to go so far as to deep-clean your already-clean room definitely stems more from a place of paranoia than it does comfort. At the very least, it displays an aggressive need to assert control over your own life, even when you’re far from home. But more to the point, @operation_niki shares this type of content not necessarily because she has a bad case of germaphobia (maybe she does, we’re not privy to her personal life), but because it’s her content strategy. She makes a living off of sharing cleaning videos, and the more outrageous they are, the more views they receive, and the more Disney cruises she can afford to go on. Disney probably invited her on that cruise just to make that video (she’s made videos sponsored by Disney in the past).
It’s a theatrical level of cleanliness, more like a fantasy vision of life than any reflection of a real one. Just like so much influencer content, it’s an exaggerated pantomime of the real world. Its heaven is a spotless kitchen with a perpetually restocked fridge, where all threat of dirt, grime, and disarray is a distant memory thanks to some competent hands. In a world in which so much feels out of our control, it’s only natural that we look for order in the rectangles of our screens.