graphic by claire evans
The New Year’s haze has passed, and yet my Instagram Discover feed is still inundated with the same video content typical for this time of year: the 75 Hard Challenge, elaborate mock-tail recipes for better sleep, 30-minute Stairmaster workouts, and how to achieve the perfect heatless curls overnight. The endless sludge of self-improvement content on Instagram and TikTok offers quick fixes to make me hotter, trendier and healthier in glossy 60-second packages.
I am not immune to the promise of this type of content: to deliver a chiseled, Instagram-worthy version of myself by this time next year. To be a 20-something-year-old woman navigating social media is to dodge and duck near-constant advertisements for products that offer an easy solution for manufactured insecurities. The phenomenon is nothing new. As feminist writer Naomi Woolf argues in her 1990 book “The Beauty Myth,” the beauty industry has churned out billions in revenue every year on its winning strategy of instilling insecurities to profit off of, and the “new year, new me” mindset presents a perfect marketing opportunity.
Before there was an endless supply of digital media geared toward self-optimization, traditional media filled the role of funneling these advertisements through familiar story arcs. Take, for example, early 2000s reality TV, which almost always featured some version of self-optimization: “What Not to Wear,” “The Biggest Loser,” the incredibly dystopian and near-sadistic “The Swan.” Even “America’s Next Top Model” almost always held some sort of makeover during the season, reaffirming that even the most conventionally beautiful girls were not exempt from Tyra Banks-endorsed improvements, even against their wishes (shout out to Cassandra from Cycle 5—you deserved better, queen).
There is something distinctly satisfying about the control we can enact against ourselves in pursuit of self-actualization. In makeover media, the transformation is never just about appearance. The physical transformation is almost always underscored by perceived character growth. Both early 2000s reality TV shows and today’s never-ending stream of social media content advance the same neoliberal feminist myth: A woman’s success can be achieved through consuming goods and services promoted by the beauty industry, despite upholding patriarchal, eurocentric and fatphobic beauty standards. With the right skincare products, pilates membership and green smoothie recipe, you, too, can level up to your higher self, girlboss!
In the essay “The Cinderella Makeover: ‘Glamour Girl,’ Television Misery Shows, and 1950s Femininity,” author Marsha F. Cassidy details how the emergence of makeover media from the late twentieth century, backed with corporate sponsorships from the beauty industry, fueled our cultural fixation on reinventing our appearances. She writes, “By promoting ‘glitz and glitter’ to the masses … television opened up a fresh category of consumer products to advertise—everything from hair coloring and chic hats to Fifi hosiery and Trapeze sports shoes. During the 1950s, television and the beauty industries were allied in the mutual promotion of a woman’s never-ending pursuit of curative glamour.”
The specific, almost nostalgic formula of makeover reality television follows a familiar three-act structure: first, an introduction to the drab makeover subject with a story that will likely tug on your heartstrings; then, an intervention from beauty and lifestyle “experts”; and, finally, a conclusion featuring the grand reveal of the “new and improved” hero by the end of the 30-minute episode. There is most certainly a before-and-after shot, and the recipient of the makeover gushes over the final product of themselves, usually teary-eyed and professing their indebtedness to the experts who deemed them unworthy in the first place.
In the digital media age, however, the familiar three-act structure becomes fuzzy. Makeover media no longer has to adhere to the fixed time slots of cable TV, and the ability to scroll endlessly incentivizes influencers to continuously pump out content. The boundlessness of social media means there will always be a new way to reinvent the self, as long as that transformation is monetizable. You can buy your way to self-actualization with a new workout set (Amazon storefront link in bio!), pastel-packaged supplements to “fix your gut microbiome,” or a red-light therapy mask retailing for half a month’s rent.
The evolution of the makeover from cable TV to social media, has, almost ironically, been subject to its own transformation, repackaged and repurposed for the medium, as well as for what is socially acceptable to promote in 2024. WeightWatchers now calls itself WW; the word “wellness” is oftentimes substituted for “diet”; and multi-step, luxury skincare routines are ubiquitously labeled as self-care. The vocabulary has shifted, but the impulse remains constant from its early 2000s predecessor. We have yet to escape the fixation of buying our way to our idealized selves.
Yet, despite knowing all of this, I fall prey to these advertising schemes as I scroll through my Instagram feed. If it’s impossible to escape the game, why can’t I play, too? In her essay “Always Be Optimizing,” feminist writer Jia Tolentino critiques the desire to derive individual success from the capitalist and patriarchal roots of self-optimization and the beauty industry. She writes, “There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If we can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms?”
The accessibility of adopting the latest “That Girl” trends to our offline life means that it has never been easier to participate in the capitalism that drives women’s self-optimization. Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest—the apps housing the majority of today’s makeover digital media—all have ways to shop the trends within the app, offering sizable discounts on the beauty and lifestyle products featured in some of the most viral content on the internet today. Any “That Girl” trend can be discovered and purchased in an instant, allowing the consumer to keep scrolling without missing a beat. The distinction between makeover media and the beauty advertising it funnels has fully collapsed. It’s never been easier to play.
Makeover media will always appeal to the part of my brain fixated on the idea of becoming a more beautiful, more loveable version of myself. But instead of trying to close the gap between the idealized version of myself and who I actually am through consumerism, maybe it’s more radical to opt out. As long as self-transformation content on social media exists, it will serve to proliferate the corporate interests behind it, just as its reality TV predecessors did, too.