My descent into glow-up madness

Sometime last spring, I decided to glow up. This is an extremely embarrassing thing to admit, or at least it should be. But this is America. If you’re not “glowing up,” which is to say, committing all of your time and money to the endless quest of self-improvement, you’re “letting yourself go.” And in America, there’s nothing more pitiable than settling for what you already have. 

Plus, everyone else was doing it. Every day on my TikTok feed, women were telling me about their various “glow-up journeys” — their “skin care journeys” and “hair growth journeys” and “gut health journeys” and “protein journeys” and “personal style journeys” and “mindfulness journeys.” They were doing intensive challenges that promised to transform one’s mind, body, and spirit in segments of two weeks or one month or a year. They were taping their mouth shut and strapping their chins in hammocks while they slept to achieve maximum face snatch. Everyone’s journey, no matter what part of themselves was being perfected, seemed to end in the same place: with a video about how to replicate the results. 

So I listened. The reasons for this are boring: a wedding on the horizon, a delusional desire to fit into my pre-Covid wardrobe, and one instance in April where I came home after a long day of social events and was so disturbed at how my foundation had coalesced into weird splotches that I abandoned everything I knew about makeup application. 

I started seeing a nutritionist who told me I was eating too much cheese (I was). I updated my skin care routine to include all the products recommended to me by TikTok’s favorite dermatologists, people like Dr. Shereene Idriss, who cleverly begins many of her videos with the fact that she’s 40 years old despite having the skin of a recent college graduate. I became obsessed with the content of a “certified trichologist” with the longest, shiniest hair I’ve ever seen who explained the science of hair care in ways I didn’t understand but that convinced me to buy everything she used. I consumed endless videos about how to determine my Kibbe body type (true romantic), color season (light summer), and facial contrast level (low).

It was only the beginning of my own “journey,” which would lead me down ever more dire algorithmic straits and a forest of complicated feelings about one’s purpose as a woman at this precise moment. The demands, it seems, are increasingly untethered from reality: The “after” of a 2020s glow-up requires you to have skin that appears to be made of wet glass, while any makeup on top of it should be barely noticeable because that is the look of tasteful rich women. Your body should be so small it looks starving, but also strong and capable and “healed” from whatever traumas lie in your past.

Whether from your hypermoisturized face or the waxy sheen of cosmetic fillers or the knifelike sharpness of your protruding clavicle, you should, in other words, be glowing. And who among us doesn’t want to shine?

Day 1

In October, I began the “75 Hotter” TikTok challenge, which promised a 360-degree glow-up in 75 days. It borrows the gimmick from an earlier viral challenge called “75 Hard: A Tactical Guide to Winning the War With Yourself,” which demands you work out twice a day, stick to a diet of your choice, and give up alcohol for 75 days straight; if you miss a day, you have to start over. Available free online, it’s described as a “transformative mental toughness program” and “Ironman for your brain.” You can imagine that this kind of marketing works on a very specific type of person, and that person was not me. 

But 75 Hotter was a little more forgiving. It encourages getting 10,000 steps per day, having a workout plan, and “prioritizing protein and greens” at every meal; it also includes rules like “talk to yourself the way you’d speak to a friend” and, in dating scenarios, “cutting out toxic people.”

75 Hotter is the brainchild of Jade Brandt, a 36-year-old content creator in Austin who tried 75 Hard and found its strictness unsustainable. 75 Hotter, then, would be “75 Hard but for the girls.” “Every year during the fall, I go pedal to the metal, I indulge so much that when the holidays roll around I feel so gross and big and I just don’t like the way I look,” she said in her 2023 video launching the program with a handy infographic, which gained nearly 6 million views. 

The virality of 75 Hotter and programs like it prove that the season for glow-ups is no longer limited to the two weeks in January when people discuss their New Year’s resolutions: Glowing up is now a full-time endeavor. (Brandt, for instance, re-released it for the summer months and coined the term “Hottober” for autumnal glow-ups). “People care about their health more now, and they want to get ahead of it and not wait until January 1,” she tells me. 

Despite the ever-proliferating number of regimens being marketed and products to buy, she views the current state of glow-up culture on social media as a less toxic version of what millennials were raised with. “It’s different from when I was a teenager — we were so hyperfocused on how skinny, how blonde, and how tan we could be. It was not, like, empowering,” she explains. “But now it’s more attainable. We’re in this wellness culture where we just want the best for our bodies.”

Day 3

I soon realized, however, that “wanting the best for my body” meant being consumed by anxiety about the most inconsequential problems imaginable: I worried that I wouldn’t make 10,000 steps; I worried about the fact that the Just Salad Crispy Chicken Poblano bowl has nearly 700 calories and that, at a friend’s birthday party, I ate a couple bites of nachos in a way that was not very “prioritizing protein and greens at every meal” of me. 

The next day at the Charli xcx show in upstate New York, I made a new friend who told me that her mental breakdown this summer also led to achieving the perfect body. “The only real way to glow up is to have a low-key toxic relationship with food,” she said after we’d consumed several Brat-green cocktails. She is, unfortunately, right. Though I managed to make it to my 30s without ever being diagnosed with an eating disorder, I found myself spending what I would consider a problematic amount of time thinking about calories and macronutrients and whether I can trust the reflection in the mirror when I look so different in that one cursed photo (there is always a cursed photo). Then I thought about how, if there was to be a term for this, every woman in the world would probably get diagnosed with it and therefore no one would consider it a problem.

This, I discovered, was not unique. Asher Seruya, a psychotherapist and writer, says they’ve seen their clients struggle with a shift many of us seem to be feeling right now, a shift toward a more punishing set of beauty standards. “Skinny” is once again a desire people feel comfortable admitting in public, whether for their health or otherwise, in part because now it’s a desire that can be reliably achieved via prescription. “My clients are certainly feeling it. There are people in their lives who previously they might have thought were allies in body positivity or fat acceptance, and now they’re on a GLP-1 trying to lose weight,” says Seruya. “It’s not fun out there.”

It has been demoralizing to witness the return of 1990s and 2000s thinness and fat-shaming discourse, not because it actually went away — because of course it never really did — but because this time we don’t have Hollywood and the tabloid machine to blame. Millennial women often commiserate about the diet culture of our formative years, a time when a 130-pound Bridget Jones fretted over being fat and Titanic-era Kate Winslet was dubbed “Kate Weighs-a-lot.” 

By the late 2000s, as social media gave voice and therefore power to regular women who pushed back against these standards, the fashion and entertainment industries reacted by embracing, at least in theory, an ethos of “body positivity” that permeated culture throughout the 2010s. Diet culture was replaced by an obsession with “wellness,” which of course functioned basically the same way, except now you were supposed to meditate and wear athleisure to show off precisely how “well” you were.

The pendulum has now swung back the other way. Blame Covid, blame the “vibe shift,” blame Ozempic, but these sentiments are no longer coming from cultural gatekeepers. They’re coming from run-of-the-mill influencers, leveraging the algorithmic power of social platforms to spew regressive advice that grabs attention and lures us in by purporting to tell us something “the mainstream media won’t.” Creators like 22-year-old Liv Schmidt have built followings by telling millions of people exactly how to eat (spoiler: dangerously little), and, in the case of Schmidt, simultaneously shaming viewers who question her methods with emojis of pigs, cows, and whales.

At the same time that we’re being inundated with photos of drastically shrinking famous people, we’re also told it’s never, under any circumstances, okay to talk about someone else’s body. To act as if this has zero impact on the way we feel about our own bodies, though, is to lie to ourselves and each other. That leaves many people in a state of feeling it’s taboo to love yourself the way you are, and equally taboo to talk about what all of us can clearly see with our own eyes.

Day 19

Less than three weeks in, I found myself consumed by another fallacy entrenched within the glow-up economy: that middle-class people can simply Amazon their way to gorgeousness. I had become a monster with a shopping addiction; every time I’d feel inclined to purchase something, I’d just do it: a cool-toned highlighter (since I’m a summer!), brown mascara (because it’s more flattering on my low-contrast features!), and an under-eye cream due to the fact that over the past few days I’d decided the puffiness under my eyes was a very serious issue, something I’d never even considered before. 

I obsessed over finding celebrities who shared my features and coloring, since I’d been told by several personal style influencers that this is the key to achieving your ideal aesthetic. I landed on a cross between Shiv from Succession and Stassi from Vanderpump Rules, which tells me my ideal aesthetic is “bitch.” 

The writer Jessica DeFino has extensively covered the fallacies of the makeup and skin care industries in her Substack, The Review of Beauty. She argues that the shift in the 2010s toward body positivity transferred rigid beauty standards above the neck; thus the interest in anti-aging products, injectibles, and face lifts skyrocketed. 

“As soon as the standard for how a body could exist in space relaxed, you couldn’t allow your body to exist in time anymore,” she says. Skin care culture, she purports, is “just dewy diet culture”: “There is no ideological difference between obsessively counting calories and obsessively applying active ingredients, or between devising a diet to eliminate fat and devising a skin care routine to eliminate dead skin cells and oil and pimples and wrinkles, all of which are basic human features.”

She guesses that our cultural obsession with glowing-up and watching other people do so too is a reflection of the American dream. No matter where we start from, it’s part of our national spirit to believe, however foolishly, that it’s always within our capacity to improve. 

“It’s the new Hero’s Journey. You have a starting place and an ending place, and the ending place is visually clearly better, and it signifies so much,” she says. “It feels like part of a greater trend toward infantilization. … It’s concerning in terms of our critical thinking, our literacy, our political awareness. Beauty is being swept up into this larger political trend of wanting easy answers instead of thinking a little bit more critically about it.”

Day 31

My new narcissism was thrown into perspective when Americans woke up to a new president-elect. I recalled dimly how 2017 saw the birth of the skin care boom in the US; many women at the time saw their face as a site of control when everything felt chaotic. “There’s just a lot of fear right now, and when we feel fear, humans naturally want to try to control something,” Seruya explains. This time, they expect that our bodies, in addition to our faces, will be feeling the effects, given the last few years of thinness discourse. 

I asked DeFino what she thought would be 2025’s version of the skin care boom. “I think there’s going to be a stronger focus on femininity and gender,” she says. “Anything that’s reinforcing the [idea that] women are expected to be as beautiful as possible as part of their own morality and duty to society is pretty dangerous in combination with some of the other things that we’re seeing right now.” 

Those other things she’s referring to are the terrifying and deadly rollbacks in women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s access to gender-affirming care. The idea that women should “look like women” has implications far beyond the aesthetic; it reinforces the idea that we should be fearful of trans and nonbinary people and that attacks against them are justified.

The pushback against body positivity and “wokeness” writ large is built largely upon a wave of anti-feminism and anti-trans scapegoating. It’s no surprise that, post-election, people are reevaluating their relationship to recent fashion and lifestyle trends they saw on TikTok like cottagecore, “clean girls,” coquette, and tradwives, wondering if they were bellwethers for a rightward swing that nobody noticed until it was too late. 

Day 50

By the time December rolled around, I found myself thinking a lot about how the best possible outcome for right-wing grifters is a popular understanding of beauty and health that runs on crowdsourcing, where the loudest voice in the room is the only one worth listening to. If an army of influencer-entrepreneurs and multi-level marketing bosses — many of the same people who will soon ascend to the highest levels of influence in the government — can shape our understanding of what we should put on or in our bodies, the institutions that regulate these industries are much more easily subverted. There’s more money to be extracted in the shifting of the winds. 

On Day 50, my algorithm served me a video of a girl claiming that “candida overgrowth” is what’s causing your fatigue and bloat and that it could be cured by the supplement linked in her TikTok Shop. My feed, by that point, had been flooded by these sorts of junk science videos I’d since learned to tune out, videos of people claiming that the reason you were bloated was because of stress or cortisol or your high-Fodmap diet and that the cure was available to purchase via affiliate link. It was always referred to as “bloat” or “inflammation” rather than fat because if you admit that it’s just fat, it’s harder to sell products to get rid of it. 

Through my steadily more depressing TikTok algorithm, I learned that the worst thing you can do in life is let yourself get fat, and the second worst thing you can do is not spend every second of your day and every dollar of your money trying not to be fat. I learned that if you lose even a small amount of weight you will be consumed by a desire to shop for new clothes so powerful you forget everything you told yourself about trying to “be better about not buying fast fashion.” 

I learned that if you pay a random lady on TikTok 50 Euro to give you a “virtual makeover” she will pretty much just Photoshop makeup on your face. I learned that a 1.35-ounce bottle of Glow Recipe Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops costs $35 and in less than one month it will be gone and you will have to buy it again. I learned that after you spend $300 on hair care and skin care products, only you will really notice the difference. 

I learned that even if you are on your journey of becoming the “best version of yourself,” you will still feel stressed about work and wish you had more money and feel like everyone is mad at you without being able to point to who or why. I learned that no matter how much better you look at the end of your “glow-up journey” you will never be completely satisfied, that self-improvement only breeds the desire for more of it. 

All of this learning has led me nowhere good. A culture where our bodies only exist to be optimized is one that is fundamentally antisocial and isolated; it turns us into prodigious consumers and uninteresting human beings. It makes smart people who care about the world a little bit less so. 

And still, there is something seductive about leaning into it, if only for the duration of the average TikTok glow-up challenge. Perhaps that’s because progress only feels like progress when it manifests itself physically, perhaps because it’s harder to see the ugliness of everything when you’re too busy becoming beautiful. 

Day 64

I do not feel particularly hot today, even though by all the measures that matter I am hotter than I was on Day 1. Still I take 10,000 steps, I put on my under-eye cream and brown mascara, I prioritize greens. In 11 days, maybe I will have become the hottest version of myself. The journey’s not over yet. Though of course, it never is.