social media needs a new look
project makeover, 'clean girls', and my inexplicable jealousy of teenagers
Consider the scene. A woman walks down a sunny city street, arm in arm with her boyfriend. As they stroll, they pass another, younger, more attractive girl. The boyfriend’s head is turned! His eyes pop into hearts, and he starts drooling. The jilted woman fumes, stamps her foot, and looks down at her body. She has matted hair, unshaven legs, and lacks her rival’s trendy clothing. She is also covered in mud.
A makeover is in order! The bikini-clad woman is sluiced in water, and her legs are shaved. She runs her hands sensually over her hips, smiling. Maybe she still has a chance. But she’s smiled too soon — the makeover then attacks her hair with a straightening iron, which explodes, leaving her face covered in dirt and her hair frazzled. She bursts into tears, but to add insult to injury, the option of a ballgown is passed over for an aggressively bright orange jacket and pants.
The horror is over, the woman left sobbing on her knees. But wait, a bubble exclaims! You might just be able to help her…if you download Project Makeover.
Anyone who spends a substantial (read: too much) time on Instagram will have seen Project Makeover. A bit like Episode, which still exists but which I remember as only alternative to Buzzfeed quizzes for bored and horny teenagers stuck in long classes circa 2015, Project Makeover and its copycats are advertised as a combination of makeover missions and ‘choose your own adventures’. A combination of creepy and horny, they grab your attention the way any good advert is meant to do. But they’re also spectacularly weird, to the point where people just can’t stop watching them, simply to discover what strange twist is going to occur. Women covered in mud is a recurring theme, and feels vaguely fetishistic. So are threesomes, marital troubles, or cheating partners, all of which present the opportunity for a makeover. And so is a pervasive fear of the female body in its raw, messy, unruly form.
As recent buzz around Florence Given’s new and widely panned book, Girl Crush, indicates, the internet loves to hate things. These weird ads are already attention grabbing marketing ploys, but when each one is inundated with incredulous comments and mocking reposts, they reach a wider audience and the manufacturers decide that they work. Even if — according to this article at least — they’re entirely unrepresentative of the pretty standard match 3 puzzle games. It seems odd to include such extreme and unrepresentative content in marketing materials, but in a hyper-competitive market where attention is the prime currency, the motivation for continuing to make these posts is clear.
One Project Makeover advert I saw this morning was pretty symbolic of the general weirdness and toxicity. In it, a cartoon woman cowers behind a window, watching a buff, all-American man procure a ring and make for the door. ‘Today’s the day!’ his speech bubble proclaims from shiny white teeth. The woman isn’t so shiny. Her hair is long and matted, her face blotchy with puffy eyes, and for some reason she has a full beard. A bubble pops up, tasking the ad with giving her a makeover. At first she’s delighted (and perhaps vaguely turned on?) by a new cut and blow dry, but then the advert cruelly shaves her head and dresses her in a bloated clown suit. The woman breaks down in tears, and of course, her boyfriend leaves her. All in twenty five seconds!
The very notion of a makeover game is already pretty toxic, implying that people, women in particular, require drastic transformation in order to become or remain desirable. The beauty standards advocated are narrowly conventional, rejecting any blemish or frizz as a ‘fashion disaster’. While I’d like to think our society has begun unpicking these standards, particularly their often discriminatory connotations, I’m reminded of the ‘clean girl’ beauty trend on Instagram and TikTok. While not as explicit as the simple Project Makeover ads, the ‘clean girl’ trend implies the existence of a ‘dirty girl’, who is to be avoided at all costs. An element of ‘clean girl’ is the classic wellness influencer look — green juice and pilates, piles of perfectly ripe avocados — or the minimalist style of creators like home cook Emily Mariko (of salmon bowl fame). Yet despite connotations of wellness and fitness, being a ‘clean girl’ is less about being a certain way than looking a certain way. Clean girls must have minimal makeup but perfect eyebrows, clear and glowing acne-free skin, slicked back straight hair, and a slender, toned build which suggests they spend enough, but not too much, time in the gym.
As someone with curly hair, acne, glasses, and a less than perfect relationship with my body, these influencers all look a bit too much like the teenage girls who terrified me at school. I spent years straightening my hair and caking concealer across my forehead. I no longer see that as necessary, and my relationship with makeup is now a fun, experimental one, but it does seem like the positive, feminist movements on and offline which enabled that shift were only a drop in the ocean quickly being overwhelmed.
The ‘clean girl’ look is overwhelmingly exclusive, ostracising women of colour, those with disabilities, larger women, and trans women who do not conform to a narrow beauty standard. It feels like reincarnated girlboss corporate chic, but without the — albeit dubious — feminist politics. It’s all about personal look, personal beauty, personal lifestyle, and projecting that aestheticised personality outwards, on social media and in real life. In bell hooks’s criticism, this kind of ’lifestyle feminism’, which permits the coexistence of feminism with all sorts of lifestyles, including those with negative consequences for women beyond the individual directly concerned, drains the politics and values from feminism. It becomes an individual lifestyle, a performance, an aesthetic, rather than a political movement. The notion that having a certain makeup routine or drinking a certain juice will make you not just a better woman, but a more liberated and enlightened woman, is a kind of individualised lifestyle feminism. It ignores the potentially harmful consequences of holding up exclusive and narrow ideals in favour of a life of girlbossing. 2010s girlboss culture was at least feminist in name, Instagram and TikTok aesthetics don’t even try to think politically.
And yes, the clean girl is just one trend in a hyper-saturated online aesthetic culture, but it’s a highly prominent one. It’s also one which holds itself up as both aspirational and attainable — you too can buy Glossier cleanser and a pretty workout set! Attainability is subjective, however, and much of the clean girl aesthetic, despite its emphasis on minimalism and personal lifestyle, requires time, money, and health. Waking up at 5am for SoulCycle isn’t accessible to everyone, and nor are the expensive beauty products to attain a so-called ‘natural’ glow. Without resources or the right ‘look’ (white, skinny, and conventionally attractive), the core essence of ‘clean girl’ is inaccessible to most, and fuels harmful systems of beauty and consumer capitalism. By creating this false sense of aspiration and attainability, social media teaches us that if a woman fails in their mission to live a ‘clean girl’ life, they’re failing full stop. Just like in Project Makeover, they lose the game.
The very notion of a ‘makeover’ is one which privileges rejection of individuality and personal character for standardised, often sexualised beauty. Whilst Project Makeover may be a simple choice game, its adverts’ insistence on pushing oneself in the pursuit of beauty, even if that risks harm and bodily damage, teaches an unnerving lesson about how women should look and behave. They should always be beautiful, primed for romantic and sexual encounters, such as defending their man or preparing for a proposal. And yet these women are also punished for desiring transformation to fit the norm. Their makeovers fail. They lose the chance for gratification, for love. They started out ugly, but now they are even uglier, because they tried to make themselves pretty. They are failures.
Like the ‘clean girl’, the ideal of transformation requires an other, a body which is not desired, and not desirable, a body which is ‘unclean’. How these ‘unclean’, ‘undesirable’ bodies are depicted is important. Project Makeover’s horror at the prospect of body hair, be it on one’s legs or on their face, or ‘uncleanliness’ manifested as skin smudged darker or thicker hair, feels like a covert expression of disgust at diverse bodies, particularly trans people and people of colour. This prejudiced mentality extends its disgust to natural blemishes like spots or messy hair, sending a particularly harmful message to a teenage audience going through puberty.
It’s not hard to pick up on the prejudice and oppressive beauty norms contained in these adverts, making it easy to criticise them, and to laugh at them. They’re the extreme products of the attention economy, practically begging us to download the app, if only to see if it really is that weird. But they don’t stand in isolation, intersecting with other online trends like the ‘clean girl’ look. And they do have an impact — I remember feeling like shit when I saw Episode adverts as a young teen, for pretty embarrassing reasons, namely that my love life was nowhere near as exciting as those depicted. Okay, it was nonexistent. And in hindsight that’s quite funny, but hindsight comes with maturity. Kids and teens, the main market for mobile games like Project Makeover, are easily influenced, their brains malleable and vulnerable during puberty.
At the same time, teenagers seem to be getting, well, older. A short lived meme on Twitter a few months ago placed photos of older Gen Z and Millennials in their teen years next to photos of today’s young celebs and influencers like Milly Bobby Brown and Olivia Rodrigo. The difference is notable — in place of braces with bands, ill fitting glasses, Maybelline concealer, and baggy Topshop graphic tees, today’s teenage girls on social media wear House of Sunny dresses, heavy contour, and perfect eyeliner. They look like adults. They talk like adults. They try and act like adults. Ultimately they’re still the same messy, inexperienced children we were, but they’re exposed to so much stuff they don’t have the chance to really be those children. Much as young boys are inundated with Andrew Tate-style influencers by the algorithms, girls are exposed to social media which tells them exactly how they should look and act, how to workout, to do makeup, to dress, to consider sex. In some senses this has always been the case but with social media so omnipresent, it seems inescapable. The rush towards maturity, the desire to grow up, is enabled by an idolised adult world being pushed towards them like an Episode advert.
Chatting recently to my oldest school friend, we noted how our younger sisters look so much more adult, so much more put together than we did at their ages. Teens and preteens now are romanticising ‘2014 Tumblr girls’ through very, very heavily rose tinted glasses — pleated mini skirts that always hung weird and black skinny jeans were not that much of a look, especially when paired with terrible hair and enamel fandom badges. Mid 2010s Tumblr could never come back — everything now has to be perfect, aesthetic, and neat, even when romanticising something that very much wasn’t. One particularly embarrassing selfie shows off my intense side parting alongside my friend in a Pikachu cap, and another girl in a Slytherin hat. We’re fifteen but we look like kids — a bit messy, a bit spotty, a bit rough at the edges. We don’t look like we’ve stepped out an Episode story — we look like we’re due a Project Makeover. I pity today’s teens for having lost the childhood chance to fuck up, but I’m also deeply, inexplicably jealous of them. I want an ‘it girl’ pic from when I was sixteen, not just five hundred variants on the Snapchat flower crown filter. I want to not have to look at my ABH lined eyebrows every time I want to reminisce, or the frizzy patches where I used to straighten my hair so hard it fried. They still have the slim bodies craved by models but unlike when I was younger, can actually dress them.
Deep down I know this jealously is just ridiculous, founded more in my own insecurities about my own body and my own childhood than any sort of reality. Teens today have to look perfect, and many of them do. But there’s nothing enviable about the baggage that brings.
In 2022, life is a bit like Project Makeover. There’s always someone to admire, to be envious of. Someone cooler, or hotter, someone you fear might just steal your man, whilst you walk around like you’re covered in mud (of course, the mud is a metaphor! Now it all makes sense). Yet when you try and emulate them, you always seem to fall short. The ideal is nearly attainable, but not quite. Not for anyone. It’s just that — an ideal. And an oppressive, narrow, boring one at that. You know that, but you still want it, still want to try and get it. And for tiny number of people, they can. But as for the rest of us?
We’re just stuck in the mud.