Put at the top of the ever-growing list of ways to climb to the top of the tik tok ladder is almost a cliché. A consensus has reached the ways in which you can be ‘tik tok pretty’. As opposed to the Eurocentric beauty standards already perpetuated by the media, ‘tik tok’ pretty seems to be a level above the rest.
Characteristically, it’s described as someone hyper conventional to what we already consider ‘pretty’. The people labelled by this arbitrary tag are often young girls, adorned for nothing more than the way they look. Although this is not a new phenomenon, I wouldn’t be delusional in reminiscing in a brief period, where feminism became trendy, and body positivity was an everyday Instagram slogan (the trendiness of this being an issue in itself ).
Much like the ‘fox eyes’, ‘heather’, standard pretty’, ‘popular pretty’, Tik Tok users continually categorise, label and analyse the faces they are presented with, adoring those who they believe to be worthy. In the name of #girl power, it’s our duty to lift each other up, but we slowly drift further and further towards awarding the best in show likes, comments, sponsors, while almost unknowingly projecting the same beauty standards we’ve tried to dispel for decades. According to more recent research the viewing of these idealised body images, a representation of a minority of body types, increased dissatisfaction and low mood and increased women’s self-objectification.
Self-objectification is where a woman views herself in the third person, placing ‘a greater value on their physical appearance over other aspects of themselves’. Tik Tok’s content however is entirely created by individuals, so how much can we really prevent poor representation. The lack of representation online spans across multiple areas.
Race, age, sexuality, and gender are all effected by this very issue, but uniquely the content created isn’t viewed with any conscious effort, made by individuals who do not hold the same responsibility as media companies. It is TikTok itself that designs your feed based on what it thinks you will like. Images of what we may consider ‘the perfect body’ are sandwiched between incessant ads for ‘greens’, ‘apple cider vinegar gummies’, leggings which make our bums look bigger and spandex to make sure we know what’s the problem.
This accompanies the ‘beauty filter’ which clears our skin to an impeccable standard, and almost undetectable. A current trend on TikTok is the ‘that girl’ audio, associated now with @bigpapikayy (aka Kaylee), who rose to fame with comments on her looks, beauty and the same cadence as Meredith Grey. She recently has spoken herself about her own use of the beauty filter, which many were surprised to find out she used as she showed her real skin.
There is no denying that regardless, Kaylee is gorgeous and the audio is ultimately a bit of fun, however posted for potentially the world to see and so she used the beauty filter as a ‘security blanket’, the same reason many of us do. It is a toxic circle we wind ourselves in, a spell that needs to be broken. How can we make this better?
I don’t think we can. As we are all sucked in by the same addictive scrolling tik tok gives us, unlike other social media platforms, even avidly following a wider representation of people won’t change much about the coveted ‘for you’ page. Tik Tok seems to have created a platform which taps into our subconscious, almost ‘knowing’ us better than ourselves, making assumptions based on our peers and viewership.
With tik tok fame to some extent comes with responsibility, but to what extent can we expect often teenagers and young people to put their own feelings aside and risk the rejection of the for you page for not being ‘aesthetic’ enough. Are any of us really tik tok pretty? Is the normal-ness of the tik tok famous too easy to practice a parasocial relationship, when they often are just as fictional as the celebrities we have criticised for this objectification?