"The Clean Girl": Rituals and Morals

This essay analyzes the Clean Girl aesthetic as a ritualistic, moralized consumptive practice that transforms 19th century cleanliness culture into a 21st century performative practice.

The Clean Girl and Daily Ritual

The Clean Girl aesthetic is a TikTok trend that looks like a lifestyle but functions like a religion. Daily ritual is one of the most important parts of becoming a Clean Girl (a unique subset of the ‘That Girl’, a female aesthetic centered around productivity and wellness in the late 21st century sense of the word¹). The Clean Girl aesthetic emerged on TikTok in late 2021.² The Clean Girl inherited the lifestyle principles of the That Girl, while refining its aesthetic notions. The Clean Girl puts into words the effortless appearance of the That Girl, which comes from her disciplined wellness. The Clean Girl has many constitutive elements; one of the most important is the daily ritualistic behavior. The daily rituals are tied to wellness and focus on the transitory points of the day: the first few hours of the day, from waking up to the day’s first activities, and the preparation for sleep. These rituals most often manifest in taking care of the body and the mind, both in a disciplined manner. Exercise is central but can include a variety of physical activity such as walking, yoga, pilates, or jogging and running. Physical activity exists not only in specific bursts but also as a transitory activity, often emphasizing walking to a grocery store, and stopping at a gym after work. Rituals also include behaviors intended to assist self-actualization, like journaling, meditation, making one’s bed, cooking healthy meals, and tidying and cleaning.

Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger provides the theoretical foundation for understanding the Clean Girl’s ritualistic behavior.³ Douglas argues that dirt is not a thing in and of itself but rather a cultural object, “matter out of place.”⁴ Dirt and a dirty thing is a violation of a symbolic order rather than a physical state. What a society sees as dirty reveals its cultural assumptions regarding order and boundaries. Crucially, Douglas connects ‘pollution’ to ritual; societies develop various behaviors to manage the anxieties created by disorder, transition, matter out of place. These rituals impose a structure on what would otherwise be threatening. The Clean Girl’s daily routines can be understood through this lens. To start, Douglas’ insight offers a good understanding of the timing of the Clean Girl’s activities. “Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable.”⁵ The transitionary points of the day are the ones most dangerous and most susceptible to uncleanliness. Leaving the home, entering the bed, require special attention, and that is a structure that the Clean Girl guru can provide. The mundane is the territory of the Clean Girl: shopping at the grocery store for fresh produce, going for a walk in the park, and cooking in the kitchen.

This self-actualization is often framed as moral for a variety of reasons. One YouTube video from a 21-year-old Clean Girl guru named Alina Mai explains that “having a moment dedicated to yourself” and prioritizing self-care allows one to “fill up your own cup and be able to fill up others’.”⁶ Her dedicated “maintenance routine” channels common Clean Girl habits and aesthetics. This self-care-based consumption is especially relevant in the mental-related ritualistic behavior. Spa items like robes and facemasks are common, and crystals are sometimes seen as well. Cleanliness, of course, is central to the Clean Girl, and she achieves this through a variety of products ranging from the serum to the oil to the powder. Mai’s video also includes a glass of white wine with her bath and body oil. Self-care is no escape from productivity, either: the “maintenance routine,” Mai explains, is calculated as “high maintaince to be low maintaince.”⁷ This phrase captures the Clean Girl’s central logic: the appearance of effortlessness requires significant, sustained effort. Looking naturally put-together is a completely unnatural process and demands rigorous products, routines, and discipline; all of this must remain invisible.

Opportunity for consumerism abounds for the aspiring Clean Girl, and sponsorship/marketing abounds for the guru. Beauty routine and self-care provide the highest potential for consumerism; countless makeup and hair products as well as other various implements appear in Clean Girl videos.⁸ Fitness and nutrition have lower marketing potential, likely due to being harder to earn commission sales from, though many Clean Girl gurus do recommend food and beverage and fitness clothing to their viewers.

Nutrition is part of the Clean Girl ritual. The food selection for the Clean Girl is humorously small. Trendy beverages are common, especially the matcha latte. Mai prioritizes foods that are “anti-inflammatory” and promote healthy hormone balances, making recipes such as the “skin food glow salad.”⁹ Nutrition goals are deeply tied to physical aesthetics such as the skin and the stomach. Mary Douglas in Chapter 2 of Purity and Danger explains that food can be seen as a carrier of pollution.¹⁰ The Clean Girl takes a brahmin-like approach to every facet of her life, including her surroundings. That Clean Girl minimalism and purity extends to the home. Tidiness and household cleanliness is crucial although subtle in Clean Girl YouTube content: the home serves as a background. Crucially, Douglas observes that “where there is dirt there is system.”¹¹ Dirtiness is relative; shoes are not dirty, but it’s dirty to put them on a table. Here, the home is an extension of the body. It is something to be refined and improved. The threshold of the home symbolizes the beginning of new statuses.¹² The clean, minimal home symbolizes order, taste, and discipline, the same things that the clean body does. The order in the home is often driven by consumption. Consider ‘fridgescaping’ and ‘fridge restocks.’ Promoted on the Internet, these videos show women cleaning their refrigerators and filling them with fresh produce, meat, dairy products, and snacks. The fridge restock is a close cousin of the Clean Girl aesthetic. Interested in rejuvenation, fridge restocks fetishize consumption as an outlet for a desire for order as well as productivity. A social media user interviewed in a Food & Wine article titled “Why Are People Decorating the Inside of Their Refrigerators?” explained that fridge organization served as an outlet to “romanticize my life a bit, to work on pieces of my house that are mundane and [that] I don’t like and don’t bring me joy.”¹³ Rachel Hochstein in her work on moralizing consumption links this variety of consumption to the “Romantic consumption ethic by imbuing mundane consumption with pleasure and joy.”¹⁴ The social media users interviewed in the article question their own conceptions and motivations: “I’ll take a dressing from my takeout container and then I’ll put it into a mason jar and that’s just obnoxious. That’s what I find ridiculous.”¹⁵ Inevitably, however, she moralizes the connection: “I actually love this. Instead of us talking about beauty trends, we’re talking about making our refrigerators look cool … I’m here for this. I would rather people spend their money at the farmers market than at Sephora.”

Historical Antecedents

Richard and Claudia Bushman call cleanliness today “commonplace of our lives,” an engraining of a habit so thoroughly “as to make them feel like second nature.”¹⁶ Frequent bathing has until recently been quite uncommon. Mineral spring and ocean bathing spots were common since ancient times, and continued to be so through the 1770s. In the United States, public baths began to appear in the 1790s. These new baths emphasized cleanliness. The baths and bathing habits of the earlier era were focused on rejuvenation and spirituality rather than physical cleanliness. Health was simply disconnected from cleanliness. Health was not, however, disconnected from morality. Bathing for cleanliness became a “middle-class obsession with personal and household cleanliness,”¹⁷ an “aspiration to gentility” rather than a health and sanitation issue. Neither was it a religious issue, according to the Bushmans. Being dirty was disgraceful: the well-todo taught their children that washing hands before a meal was to “avoid looking sordid and clownish.”¹⁸ This new attention to bodily cleanliness as well as the need to change clothes frequently spread to the rest of society through the 19th century. Cleanliness was a divisor: town and country was clean and dirty. Clean and poor was better than filthy and rich. Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier School-Master, retold by the Bushmans, illustrates this point.¹⁹ Ralph Hartsook refuses to marry a wealthy woman because her household is dirty. Being untidy places her in another caste, despite her being wealthier than Ralph: caste rather than class divisions.

Bathing and cleanliness became a business over time, after being clean became a social issue. Popularity in the 1790s was enough to have metalworkers advertise a variety of tub and shower offerings. Having a washtub became fashionable, even before the new conception of being clean was not registered by all levels of society. Norbert Elias argues that the civilizing process and cleanliness manners developed generationally.²⁰ Habits of cleanliness were transmitted from adults to children. Within a family, cleanliness standards absorbed the tensions between old and young into the broader transmission of values. Over generations, what began as a marker of distinction simply became what middle-class respectables did. This pattern is exactly what we see embodied in the Clean Girl today. Social markers of status and aspiration towards morality are aestheticized and then commodified. Bodily cleanliness is one of the most vibrant, deep, cutting, etc elements to the Clean Girl. Clean Girls are suggested to use body sprays, oils, multiple rounds of showering, perfume, avoid underarm odor, consider pH imbalances, ‘oil pulling,’ floss, brushing, tongue scraping, and more. The Clean Girl takes on a job weekly during her “everything shower” that produces the image of a veritable Beau Brummell.²¹ The skin for the Clean Girl is the ultimate marker of status. Scent is important, but I believe that glowing skin is the goal: smell doesn’t travel through a screen. Cleaning the skin to remove dirt came about because people changed their understanding of what the skin does.²² Science and pop culture come together to inform everything about the lifestyle of the Clean Girl adherent. Good hygiene requires discipline and effort, paralleling immaterial self-actualization goals of spirituality, understanding the self and happiness. They also speak to a broader set of aspirations: professional success, intelligence, and emotional stability. The Clean Girl is not merely physically clean—she is organized and focused. Her body’s maintenance signals readiness for the demands of the workplace and of social life.

Culturally, the Clean Girl is effortless refinement to the nth degree; “gentility,” the goal for the time the Bushmans detail, has been reached class-wise for most of the aspirants of the Clean Girl aesthetic. So becoming even cleaner becomes a way to signal all the aforementioned traits. The middle-class assumption in the 19th century was that a bar of soap could upgrade the poor; unfortunately, Claudia and Richard say, acquiring manners and cleanliness for the working class was not so simple.²³ The business of cleanliness, however, “had an interest in the culture of cleanliness, and they wholeheartedly exploited its commercial possibilities.”²⁴

Moralizing the Clean Girl

A critical element of the Clean Girl aesthetic is the motivation of its adherents and aspirants. Rachel Hochstein, Ela Veresiu, and Colleen Harmeling in “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care” work to understand when and how consumers moralize everyday consumption in the name of self-care.²⁵ Their term for motivation is the “teleoaffective goal,” a set of ends to pursue that is related to the emotions of the actor. To achieve these goals, actors can use a variety of ‘scripts.’ Adhering to a script often requires expanding morality and “reworking meanings” of consumption. Hochstein provides four scripts: hygienic; improvement; holistic; and indulgent. How scripts are formed is contested. Pierre Bourdieu thinks scripts come through early socialization and are called upon later;²⁶ others think they are learned throughout life and used as needed. Whatever the case, individual consumers adapt scripts to their needs and resources.

The Clean Girl aesthetic is interesting in that it calls on all four of Hochstein’s scripts, in varying degrees, to achieve its teleoaffective goal. The hygienic self-care script focuses on body maintenance purely from a physical health perspective. The improvement self-care script is formed by a cultural ideal. It targets productivity and success as well as care for others and for self. Each script is justified by various means. The improvement script is justified by its results. This makes it an ideal script for social media gurus who want to peddle products or gain views and a following. Their projected image simultaneously moralizes their consumption as well as confirms their status as dependable gurus. The holistic self-care script focuses on the triad of mind, body, and soul, with its goal being a state of contentedness. Hochstein links this script to the romantic consumption ethic. The Clean Girl aesthetic makes strong use of the holistic script. The Clean Girl, being a subset of the That Girl, justifies her outright interest in consumption by seeing the mind, body, and soul as deeply interlinked, and care of all realms being necessary to self-actualize. The last script is the indulgent script, which sees a “pampered body entitled to consumption.”²⁷ This mode appears infrequently in the Clean Girl aesthetic. The indulgent script manifests as a sort of treat, such as the ‘everything shower,’²⁸ a Dionysian two-hour event of scrubbing, sudsing, and oiling. Hochstein’s scripts offer a rich understanding of the complex line the Clean Girl stands between desire for self-care and vanity, positively moralizing the consumer. Moral boundaries must be balanced and often expanded: “imbuing mundane consumption with pleasure and joy, which demands reworking the consumption meanings she would otherwise apply.”²⁹ These boundaries and meanings are then projected onto others. In their survey, Hochstein and her collaborators found examples of “consumers denouncing others’ enactments of self-care,” particularly from the angle of overconsumption and indulgence (alcohol, extreme unhealthy eating).³⁰ Other instances question where self-care starts, such as a TikTok user labelling brushing teeth and using deodorant as self-care, “condemning it as an inadequate and unpraiseworthy form of consumption.”³¹ In this way, the Clean Girl aesthetic offers a set of shared values that allow consumers both an identity and a security in numbers. The aspirations can be shared and adopted. The rituals can be performed with safety from criticism. The Clean Girl’s cleaning rituals are performed for an algorithm. The YouTube video and the TikTok have further reach than the 19th century well-washed woman ever did. The change is qualitative as well. The process is now the central feature of the spectacle of the Clean Girl. The result is openly stated as a look, a facade, not the real thing. The shower, the skin routine, the morning ritual. The elegant simplicity, the effortless effort is the mark of the Clean Girl, and it is central to the performative aspect of the phenomenon. Being clean in the 21st century takes more than just a bar of Pear’s; soap and serum is just the start today.

The Clean Girl, Wellness Culture, and Society

Wellness culture has become a trillion-dollar industry.³² Originating as a modern term in the 20th century, wellness culture was born from, argues Stephanie Baker, the Western interest in the individual, embodied personality.³³ The performance of Clean Girl is relevant to the history of wellness culture and its current state in the United States. Stephanie Baker in Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform writes that the wellness guru’s knowledge derives mainly from “experience predicated on visual and written testimonies” rather than education or other qualifying authority.³⁴ This substitution is not accidental. When physical and mental health responsibility shifts from institutions to individuals, expertise shifts as well. The Clean Girl’s authority derives not from her medical training or scientific knowledge but by body and aura: clear skin, toned body, and organized refrigerator. The communication format is built for intimacy. It’s the ‘big sister’ sharing her tips for smelling good, replicating trust structures of family and friends rather than institutional authority. The individual experience of a wellness influencer being taken for gospel is merely a symptom of the shift in responsibility of wellness and health in America since the middle of the 20th century. The wellness movement of the 1950s through 70s became wellness culture, which led to the emergence of wellness in the workplace. The cultural preoccupation with fitness, Baker says, is recent, and a result of medical knowledge of health risks in a sedentary society. Healthcare responsibility, then, shifted from the government to the workplace and consumers as a part of neoliberal economic and social policy. Baker: “Fitness culture also shifted the obligation for public health from the government onto the individual … cultural ideas about fitness as an individual source of mental, emotional, and even spiritual health.”³⁵ The Clean Girl has internalized her obligations that society has provided. They call them their “non-negotiables”³⁶ — guru Mai explains that she has a list of non-negotiable priorities, and it’s a term that is often heard applied to particular skincare routines and healthy eating. Understanding the non-negotiables exercises the individuality of the Clean Girl as a consumer, as a guru, and as a disciplined person. What feels like personal discipline is the direct cultural product of a society that transferred health responsibility from institutions onto individuals. The Clean Girl aestheticizes, commercializes, and posts that responsibility.

Conspicuous consumption is a critical element of the Clean Girl on the Internet. Vanessa Bumanlag in her Master’s thesis “The Performance of Whiteness: Analyzing the ‘That Girl’ Trend on TikTok” sees status symbols in luxury fashion items, jewelry, and self-care products.³⁷ Her analysis of dozens of That Girl videos finds that routines are used to showcase brands and products, especially luxury brands. The illusion of luxury, she claims, is what is important: “Even if content creators cannot afford the look, they opt in for cheaper dupes of the real luxury item.”³⁸ Aesthetic and consumptive associations with success are very common, offering a lifestyle to aspire to for viewers. Bumanlag sees this as “advocacy”—if one follows these steps, becomes a Clean Girl, one can obtain this lifestyle. Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption is instructive here.³⁹ In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that consumption functions as a social signal and that lower classes emulate the consumption patterns of those above them. The Clean Girl’s logic operates on this same principle: performing a lifestyle out of reach, and the aspirants purchase toward it. The performance of status, in other words, matters more than its actual substance. This is precisely why the guru is so central to the Clean Girl: she is the aspirational original, the one to pattern oneself after. Her luxury is the target, and a dupe is the vehicle to get there, for those who otherwise can’t. That ‘dupe’ culture Bumanlag identifies is Veblen’s emulation for the Clean Girls. Success and luxury can be achieved through “products, services, and lifestyle changes.” She connects these standards to white beauty ideals: the Clean Girl aesthetic is discriminatory racially, socially, economically, and physically. The That Girl and Clean Girl lay out a very specific ideal aesthetic of “white, heteronormative womanhood and beauty expectations.”⁴⁰ The primary criticism on blogs and Internet seems to be related to the origins of the aesthetic; some argue that the slick-back look, nails, and jewelry look was appropriated from Black and brown styles of the 1990s.⁴¹ That the look became ‘clean’ when it was adopted by white women hearkens to the 19th century view of cleanliness as a racial category. 19th century reformers believed soap and hygiene could elevate the poor, but it never did — there was more to it than just being clean. Those guidelines are reproduced with the Clean Girl aesthetic: it presents as a universal guide to success while in reality exists with a particular set of assumptions. This manifestation has been observed by many, including Bumanlag.

Criticism of the Clean Girl

Ongoing criticism of the aesthetic may be a driver for its trajectory since its origins in the early 2020s. Baker argues the wellness industry—of which the Clean Girl is undoubtedly a part—“remains a hierarchical and exclusive phenomenon” and that it divides on lines of race, class, and gender.⁴² The aesthetic has continued to hold a share in online circles, daily fashion, consumer trends, and celebrity news, but with a subdued tone, according to Ava Gilchrist, Senior Fashion Features Writer at GRAZIA, who wrote for Whowhatwear.com in 2025 an article titled “Is the ‘Clean Girl’ Still Relevant? How TikTok’s Longest-Running Aesthetic Has Evolved.”⁴³ She observes that recent fashion trends, while distinct, have taken inspiration from the Clean Girl (e.g. quiet luxury). These changes may be a reaction to the criticism, being “slightly more mature” while maintaining the simple roots. Likewise, the maturity of the quintessential Clean Girl appears in her personality. Gilchrist writes that the Clean Girl has relaxed her aura of collectedness and exists with increased honesty. “Instead of flaunting blemish-free, ‘woke-up-like-this’, flawless skin, clean girls are acknowledging the expansive and sometimes exhausting routines they’ve implemented to emulate a shower-fresh appearance.” That admission reveals the premises the Clean Girl aesthetic is founded on: natural looks, guided living, an effortless effort. That the aesthetic has become increasingly transparent increases the Clean Girl’s inherent contradictions. The effortless appearance requires the performance of effort to remain at all credible. To be credible and gain followers, the Clean Girl guru must show her work while still projecting the lifestyle as attainable. The tension of the ritual is its simultaneous requirement to be visible, but that visibility undermines the core tenets of the Clean Girl aesthetic. Mary Douglas observed that ritual exists to manage anxiety by imposing order.⁴⁴ The Clean Girl’s routines are about creating order to manage that anxiety: a fear of being out of place. The evolution of the Clean Girl is an acknowledgement that the order was never really effortless or real. It was bought and faked and attempted and sold.

Conclusion

The Clean Girl aesthetic is not a passing trend. The Clean Girl brings the 19th century cleanliness obsession into the 21st century’s zeitgeist. Like the soap and tallow industrialists of the 1800s, companies today have capitalized on the cleanliness obsession. The links to morality through productivity, diligence, and self-actualization make the Clean Girl aesthetic a particularly powerful consumptive vehicle. These products can then be incorporated into a ritualistic lifestyle, justified with a variety of scripts to shield from judgement and criticism. Sharing these scripts and behaviors online reinforces the aesthetic and its habits. This cleanliness, as Mary Douglas explains, is not just about hygiene and health — it’s about social order, status, and boundaries.⁴⁵ The Bushmans show that Americans have been performing cleanliness as class and moral aspiration since the 18th century.⁴⁶ The Clean Girl is not new, she is simply the latest iteration of an old impulse. Her descriptions are prescriptive, and her opportunities for self-improvement abound. Today, her rituals are privately performed in the bedroom or bathroom. Being clean is being a success. Individual cleanliness and consumption makes way for individual morality.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Mai, Alina. “HOW TO ACHIEVE THE CLEAN GIRL AESTHETIC.” YouTube, October 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqi9D9bBFUs.
• “Why Are People Decorating the Inside of Their Refrigerators?” Food & Wine. https://www.foodandwine.com/fridgescaping-trend-8685640.
• “Not Even the Inside of Your Fridge Is Safe From Decorating.” The New York Times, August 3, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/style/fridgescaping-fridge-decorating-tiktok.html.
• Gilchrist, Ava. “Is the ‘Clean Girl’ Still Relevant? How TikTok’s Longest-Running Aesthetic Has Evolved.” Who What Wear, 2025. https://www.whowhatwear.com/fashion/trends/clean-girl-aesthetic-trend.

Secondary Sources

Footnotes

¹ “That Girl” (Aesthetics Wiki, n.d.), https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/That_Girl.

² “Clean Girl” (Aesthetics Wiki, n.d.), https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Clean_Girl.

³ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

⁴ Douglas, 44.

⁵ Douglas, 96.

⁶ Alina Mai, “HOW TO ACHIEVE THE CLEAN GIRL AESTHETIC” (YouTube, October 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqi9D9bBFUs.

⁷ Mai. The phrase “high maintenance to be low maintenance” encapsulates the central paradox of the Clean Girl: that the appearance of effortlessness is itself a product of rigorous, invisible labor.

⁸ Clean Girl gurus typically earn revenue through affiliate marketing and brand sponsorships, receiving a commission on products viewers purchase through linked URLs. This model financially incentivizes the expansion of product recommendations.

⁹ Mai.

¹⁰ Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 41. Douglas analyzes Havik Brahmin pollution rules at length in Chapter 2, noting that cooked food is liable to pass on pollution while uncooked food is not — a distinction that resonates with the Clean Girl’s preference for whole, unprocessed foods.

¹¹ Douglas, 44.

¹² Douglas, 115. Douglas draws on Van Gennep’s observation that thresholds — doorposts, lintels — symbolize the beginning of new statuses, an insight applicable to the Clean Girl’s careful curation of domestic entry and exit.

¹³ “Why Are People Decorating the inside of Their Refrigerators?,” Food & Wine, n.d., https://www.foodandwine.com/fridgescaping-trend-8685640.

¹⁴ Rachel E. Hochstein, Ela Veresiu, and Colleen M. Harmeling, “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” Journal of Consumer Research 52, no. 1 (2025): 222, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae056.

¹⁵ “Why Are People Decorating the inside of Their Refrigerators?”

¹⁶ Richard L. Bushman and Claudia L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (1988): 1213, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1894408.

¹⁷ Bushman and Bushman, 1217.

¹⁸ Bushman and Bushman, 1220.

¹⁹ Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Master (New York: Orange Judd, 1871). The Bushmans use Eggleston’s novel as evidence of the social weight carried by cleanliness standards in 19th-century American rural culture; see Bushman and Bushman, 1221..

²⁰ Norbert Elias, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Elias’s work was originally published in German in 1939 and translated into English in 1978, sparking renewed scholarly interest in the historical formation of everyday manners and bodily comportment. The Bushmans cite Elias’s framework as the starting point for their own historical inquiry; see Bushman and Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” 1213..

²¹ George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840) was an English arbiter of men’s fashion who made daily bathing and immaculate dress the mark of a gentleman. The Bushmans note that Brummell’s influence helped fix cleanliness as a marker of status and refinement in Anglo-American culture; see Bushman and Bushman, 1221..

²² Bushman and Bushman, 1222. The Bushmans explain that changing scientific understanding of the skin’s pores — which were believed to emit perspiration constantly and thus required regular clearing — drove the 19th-century shift toward daily bathing as a hygienic necessity.

²³ Bushman and Bushman, 1231.

²⁴ Bushman and Bushman, 1238.

²⁵ Hochstein, Veresiu, and Harmeling, “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” 219.

²⁶ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus holds that dispositions — including tastes and consumption practices — are formed through early socialization and thereafter operate largely below the level of conscious awareness.

²⁷ Hochstein, Veresiu, and Harmeling, “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” 228.

²⁸ “The ``Everything Shower’’ Is Trending on TikTok. Here’s What It Is,” Vogue, n.d., https://www.vogue.com/article/everything-shower. The “everything shower” typically involves extended time in the shower combining hair masking, body scrubbing, shaving, and elaborate skincare — a ritualistic practice that circulated widely on TikTok beginning around 2022.

²⁹ Hochstein, Veresiu, and Harmeling, “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” 222.

³⁰ Hochstein, Veresiu, and Harmeling, 230.

³¹ Hochstein, Veresiu, and Harmeling, 232.

³² Stephanie Baker, Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform (Emerald Publishing, 2022), 11.

³³ Baker, 7.

³⁴ Baker, 79.

³⁵ Baker, 71.

³⁶ “Non-negotiables” is a term widely used in Clean Girl content to describe the core daily practices — skincare routines, morning exercise, specific dietary choices — that the practitioner commits to regardless of circumstance. The term frames personal wellness choices as moral obligations rather than preferences.

³⁷ Vanessa Amelia Bumanlag, “The Performance of Whiteness: Analyzing the ``That Girl’’ Trend on TikTok” (Master’s thesis, University of Windsor, 2025), 43, https://www.proquest.com/docview/3213821239.

³⁸ Bumanlag, 44.

³⁹ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the practice of spending on goods and services publicly to display economic power. His framework remains foundational to understanding how consumer culture functions as a system of status signaling.

⁴⁰ Bumanlag, “The Performance of Whiteness: Analyzing the ``That Girl’’ Trend on TikTok,” 58.

⁴¹ Critics have pointed out that the slicked-back bun, hoop earrings, and minimal makeup central to the Clean Girl look were common in Black and Latina communities long before the trend was named and aestheticized on TikTok. The naming of the look as “clean” upon its adoption by white creators carries its own racial valence; see Bumanlag, 58..

⁴² Baker, Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform, 113.

⁴³ Ava Gilchrist, “Is the ``Clean Girl’’ Still Relevant? How TikTok’s Longest-Running Aesthetic Has Evolved,” Who What Wear, 2025, https://www.whowhatwear.com/fashion/trends/clean-girl-aesthetic-trend.

⁴⁴ Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 44.

⁴⁵ Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

⁴⁶ Bushman and Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America.”