ABSTRACT
Influencers and influencing are a form of social media marketing, including people who hold a sort of “celebrity” status online. In this short essay, I am going to critically discuss influencers and the “clean girl” trend which appears on a number of social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, and discussed on Reddit. In addition to the cultural discussions happening around class, race, gender and categorisation that make it easy for white influencers to garner a following and acceptance, I will explore this phenomenon in relation to intersections of race and class and systems of inscription and the clean aesthetic, which shares the boundary making elements of the clean eating trend, in order to create a better understanding of how Black content creators are being excluded from commercial rewards through brand collaborations. This can be understood as being based on the unspoken conditions of gatekeeping, that is a feature of this social media trend and will be discussed in the account that follows.
