Forget Instagram Face –We’re In the Era of TikTok Life
Make it stand out
Cat-like eyes, bulbous lips, plump cheekbones and an “ambiguously ethnic” skin tone are core ingredients of so-called ‘Instagram Face’, an aesthetic taxonomy coined by author Jia Tolentino in a viral 2019 article for the New Yorker. The concept may sound platform-specific, but Instagram was just a petri dish for an examination of how the cocktail of social media, editing apps, and real life cosmetic surgery enabled the rise of a “single cyborgian look”.
And, thanks to the conveyor belt quest of aesthetic ‘perfection’ that continues to churn under the auspices of surveillance capitalism and the endless imperative to self-optimise, we have a new kind of homogeneity that extends well beyond facial features. Instagram Face might still dominate traditional western beauty standards but TikTok has cultivated a much broader aesthetic language. Enter: the TikTok Life - a lifestyle of sameness.
The phenomenon builds on a pre-existing shift in the influencer economy towards what Olivia Yallop, author of Break the Internet, described as a “generic global taste: consciously ‘curated’ yet somehow still homogenous” and crucially, “ready to be copied by consumers or re-grammed by brand pages”. In her book, released two years after Tolentino’s essay, she cited YouTube vlog backdrops as just one example of this trend, referring to stage-managed candles and fairy lights which “flatter faces and imply authentic intimacy” as well as bright, minimal and content-conscious ‘Instagram interiors’.
Since then, TikTok has popularised algorithms centred on perceived interests (rather than follower counts) making it easier than ever to go viral - making ‘successful’ aesthetics all the more covetable.
Though TikTok has niches spanning almost every interest imaginable, mundane vlogs represent a large swathe of the platform’s content (the ‘dailyvlog’ hashtag alone has 3 million posts with 35 billion views), especially among young women. Although the concept of vlogging is evocative of individuality and idiosyncrasies, many videos in this camp reproduce the same look through their use of a variety of interchangeable objects and activities.
So, are we all just trying to be It Girls? Considering the cost-of-living crisis, climate crisis, and the general UK permacrisis, does it matter if we are?
Among the pick ‘n’ mix of lifestyle features, you will frequently find bedsheets from Scandi millennial influencer Matilda Djerf, Drunk Elephant skincare products, crisply lit bathrooms with minimalist clutter, smiley-face lamps, and berry-jewelled porridge oats. There’s no precise list of belongings and interiors, but all are united by a sense of being Scandi-esque, pretty, and pastel or beige. In other words, they fit within the dominant visual lore.
As with Instagram Face, sameness bubbles through the core of the aesthetic, but the deliberate construction of the look is concealed by a veneer of candid just-put-this-here placement, evoking our wider cultural embarrassment when it comes to aspiration. We all know that to be an ‘it girl’, according to sacrosanct societal rules, you cannot appear to try too hard or care too much (while simultaneously appearing gorgeous).
So, are we all just trying to be It Girls? Considering the cost-of-living crisis, climate crisis, and the general UK permacrisis, does it matter if we are?
In some ways, the extension of Tolentino’s concept to encompass interiors, diet (the ‘what I eat in a day’ hashtag has close to 20 billion views), routines, and wellness products, was the logical conclusion of the influencer economy, as it hurtles towards commodIfying the vast terrain of the self. It comes amid recent news that TikTok has overtaken both Instagram and Facebook as the most shopped channel, following the platform’s offering of retail content through ‘TikTok shop’. Interestingly, Instagram faced extreme backlash when the app tried to follow suit and introduce a store page to their feed.
The video platform’s rise is inextricable from the phenomenon of homogeneity. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains the role of data mining in social media companies’ revenue streams (spoiler - it’s a large one). Within the surveillance economy, corporations harvest data and use it to model and predict user behaviour, selling their findings on so-called “behavioural futures markets”. With this in mind, it makes sense that influencing would expand to condense and capture increasing swathes of human experience into palatable TikTok video sized chunks.
The ostensible cultural convergence of taste is a phenomenon exemplified by last year’s ‘That Girl’ trend. For the uninitiated, in an explainer on the topic by a user known as Katherine Alexandra, That Girl is defined as someone who is trying to be the “best version” of themselves. In the abstract, this sounds incredibly vague, and confined to benign self-improvement, but such language conceals the blatant specificity of the aesthetic.
Content explicitly marked as ‘That Girl’-related frequently opens with a clip of a pastel pink or beige bed surrounded by a set menu of accessories, and from which a young woman effortlessly slips out, before starting her skin and hair routines. It’s self-improvement through an incredibly specific lens of ‘clean eating’, minimalist luxe interiors and ‘wellness’. That Girl isn’t the first of her kind either - and previous iterations of a dominant TikTok lifestyle aesthetic have included the ‘Vanilla Girl’ and ‘Clean Girl’, which involve Scandi-style minimalism and ‘girl next door’ style beauty respectively. They all gleam with neutral colours, accents of matcha tea, and a certain level of wealth, too.
Jessica DeFino, who frequently writes about the beauty industry recently described the ‘clean girl’ and quiet luxury aesthetic, as one of “stealth wealth”. Her argument is that the ‘clean look’ privileges the beauty bourgeoise, a class of wealthy individuals who she says “reap the rewards of cosmetic labour without the gauche appearance of having performed said labour”. In other words, the absence of excessive makeup ‘works’ because said individuals have “outsourced standardised beauty to dermatologists, injectors and surgeons.” In a similar way, the TikTok life often relies on a certain level of privilege. Djerf’s bedsheets alone come in at £129 for a double duvet.
But getting bogged down in the minutae risks obscuring the systems at play. Mid-scroll, it’s easy to forget that algorithms are designed to serve their parent companies, not us. Yes, we get content tailored to our inferred desires, but algorithms simultaneously have a more sinister role in actually dictating our tastes. Rob Horning, a former author for Real Life magazine writes that “algorithms don’t reflect existing needs or wants; they are a system for instilling new ones” in service of the capitalist imperative to produce consumers and desire “for the kinds of standardised culture it can reproduce profitably”.
To join those reaping the rewards of eyeballs on screens, individuals adopt what Horning calls a viral self, a persona based on appropriation of successful content, rather than “fidelity to some inner truth or some personal taste”, but the more we “express ourselves for self-definition” by performing a particular aesthetic, the more we limit ourselves, and the more online aesthetics converge.
Just last month Teen Vogue wrote about the ‘Tomato Girl’, whose apparent hobbies include “frolicking through Europe”, and “reading romance novels at cafes”; an aesthetic arguably drenched in even more privilege than That Girl.
But whether Tomato Girl or Any-Other-To-Be-Named-Girl becomes mainstream, through every aesthetic, we continue to be someone specific.
A consumer in a new guise. In the sea of iterations of ‘girl’, the algorithm doesn’t care which one is currently dominating. “It doesn’t matter what specific sort of thing [TikTok] recommends to us, only that it continues to do so,” explains Horning. And so our desires are formed, and our selfhoods shaped.
Admittedly, there has been some backlash including a wave of so-called ‘realistic vlogs’, but using the above logic, the Realistic Girl could just become the next That Girl.
Words: Megan PG-Warren-Lister