Brazil’s Revista AzMina takes on the popular lifestyle aesthetic.
From pristine centre-partings to no-makeup looks, the clean girl aesthetic epitomises a sense of impeccable, natural elegance. Think of 1990’s American icon Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy who, with her dewy skin and slick-back hair, was the style’s original poster girl. But this lifestyle encompasses more than just a ‘woke up like this’ aesthetic. Green juices and matcha lattés that promise good health and longevity feature as much as neutral colour schemes and effortless self-organisation.
As Revista AzMina reports, the clean girl aesthetic went viral in 2022, with 750 million viewers on TikTok. People of Colour, however, are found few and far between in a trend whose golden hoops were – ironically – first sported by Black women decades ago.
Authors Flávia Santos and Gabi Coelho expose what they see as the flaws of clean girl aesthetics, looking at the socio-economic barriers and politics of representation involved. They raise concern about how the clean girl aesthetic can compel non-whites to resort to expensive and laborious beauty treatments to effectively hide their natural features in a space, online and otherwise, that doesn’t value them on their own terms.
To counter this, Santos and Coelho explore diverse local and global trends, such as Patricinhas Negras, Afropaty, and Sade Girl. Unlike clean girl, some of these trends embrace a certain aesthetic maximalism, with flashy colours and unrestrained hairstyles. Afropuffs, for example, unleash the natural volume of frizzy curls, creating a free and relatively unstructured “pom pom” in opposition to the gelled or oiled-back slick bun of clean girl.
Brazilian stylist Paloma Gervasio Botelho notes the role film and TV soap operas can play in allowing non-white people to reclaim space, citing the sought-after Patricinhas Negras trend that emerged when people began to imitate the ebullient 1990s African American character Hilary Banks and her sophisticated looks from the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Um Maluco no Pedaço in Portuguese).
But there is often a deeper structural problem inherent in social media. Digital influencer Ella Tascine talks about the “algorithmic racism” which implicitly valorises certain types of content over others, with a bias towards aesthetics more suited to whites. “When I research hairstyles for curly hair [on TikTok]” she says, “wavy hair appears”.
Xamânica, a creative director and researcher of indigenous cultures, reminds us that trends are a current reflection of a society’s cultural, social, political, and economic norms. But they are always open to change, and change can come from all directions. “It’s important to pierce these bubbles a bit”, Xamânica recommends.
Move over clean girl, it sounds like your time is up!
Full original article in Portuguese by Flávia Santos and Gabi Coelho, 12 December 2024, available here.
Revista AzMina is an independent Brazilian publication covering a range of subjects from a progressive feminist perspective.
