ABSTRACT
The “beauty community” comprised of industry professionals and regular girls posting about makeup, clothing, and body products as forms of self-care is one of the most popular and lucrative areas of content creation on social media in the twenty-first century. By producing their own makeup tutorials, product hauls and reviews, “get ready with me” (“GRWM”) videos, and vlogs, women and girls developed a vibrant site of self-mediation on YouTube in the late 2000s that expanded with the onset of Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2018. This chapter considers how beauty and wellness “gurus” in the wellness subculture on TikTok converge tutorial, haul, GRWM, and vlog elements in their #ThatGirl videos, through which they instruct the viewer on how to replicate their diets, exercises, and morning routines. This chapter argues that the aspirational lifestyle of habit-tracking, healthy eating, and self-care that is mediated through #ThatGirl videos on TikTok ascribes to white supremacist views of beauty and productivity by idealizing the “look” of wellness as that of a woman who is laboring at all times—for her job and for her body—and who is young, white or white-passing, thin, able-bodied, cisgender, and whose gender performance abides by heteronormative expectations of femininity.
