In the wake of the COVID pandemic, a new aesthetic rose through the cracks with tailored Pinterest boards and TikTok videos espousing the perfection of the “Clean Girl Aesthetic.” This lifestyle focuses on health, beauty, and wellbeing. The aesthetic promotes ethical and clean products, skincare, minimal hair and makeup, and plain basics. At the root of the Clean Girl Aesthetic is the message that a lack of color and excess accentuates the truly beautiful to emphasize the natural perfection of the body.
Unfortunately, the natural perfection of the body touted and professed by the Clean Girl Aesthetic is the traditional standard of beauty touted by white supremacist ideals – thin, white, and as close to Anglican features as possible. The Clean Girl Aesthetic rejects fashion as a means of expression and finds tattoos, piercings, and colored hair gaudy and obnoxious.
Of course, this trend is rooted in conservative values and derives from other growing trends across the internet, such as trad wives and mommy vloggers. The emphasis the Clean Girl Aesthetic places on minimalism and order reflects the control fascism tends to exude over people, especially feminine-presenting people. The aesthetic directs feminine people to take up as little space as possible through minimal colors, less expression, or even physical, emphasizing small bodies and youthful makeup looks.
Much like the recent rise in fascists pushing against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Clean Girl Aesthetic is a push against the body-positivity movement of the 2010s and early 2020s. Suddenly, celebrities known for their beautiful, thick features are working to embrace supplements and medications such as Ozempic to regain their thin physiques. Artists like Pete Davidson, known for tattoos, are now scrubbing their bodies clean. The Clean Girl Aesthetic pushes back against individuality to emphasize tradition and simplicity in the same way fascism works to silence women and go back on the idea that beauty standards can exist beyond the rigidity of traditionalism.
The Clean Girl Aesthetic sends a subtle message to all who aim to adopt it—women who embrace order, neatness, and “natural” beauty are more desirable than those who embrace their messiness and individuality and use their voices to express their desires. This trend is slowly conditioning women to embrace the fascist move toward gender roles of a bygone era by romanticizing subservience as the latest trend.
