‘Glow Up’ Culture Is Hurting Tween Girls’ Mental Health

Skincare, fashion, and beauty videos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram are everywhere, and many of them target young girls. Just search the hashtag #glowuproutine on TikTok and you’ll be flooded with videos touting various products and routines that are aimed specifically at the tween and teen girls.

A quick search for #glowuproutine on TikTok brought me to a this video—which has a whopping 17K likes—and shows a girl putting together her back-to-school “glow-up” routine. First, she shops at Ulta and fills a basket with numerous “essential” products. Then, she begins her “routine”: applying press-on nails, taking an “everything” shower, laminating her eye brows, doing her “holy grail” lymphatic drainage gua sha routine, treating her under eyes with two moon-shaped skincare patches, and whitening her teeth. But the most extensive part is her skin care routine, which she describes this way: “Literally, every product I could put on my face, I slathered on my face.”

Videos like this are super popular, and many teens and tween girls take them seriously. They believe that these routines are “musts,” that they have to stock up—and use—whatever products are being suggested, and that they’ll fall behind other girls if they don’t partake. Ultimately, many girls today buy into the idea that having a curated and expensive routine solely to improve their physical appearance is something to aspire to.

Explaining Glow-Up Culture

Teens and tween are easy targets for beauty enhancing content because they tend to feel insecure about their appearance and hyper-focus on comparing themselves to others, says Whitney Casares, MD, MPH, pediatrician and author of My-One-of-a-Kind Body.

Back-to-school glow-up routines specifically prey on kids’ fears around being attractive or popular enough, and do this by encouraging teens to spend exorbitant amounts of money on the products they say will offer a quick fix. “I absolutely notice this as a central focus among my patients in this age cohort,” says Dr. Casares. “And it’s only getting worse as time goes on.”

Grace Lautman, LMHC, CN, nutritionist and teen eating disorder therapist, says that these glow-up routines can also spotlight unrealistic bodies which can encourage unhealthy habits, and even eating disorders. “It’s another area of the internet where perfectionist and unrealistic beauty standards are upheld,” she says.

Physical Risks

Here’s the thing, though: It’s not just about the fact that the videos take advantage of young girls’ self-image issues and encourage them to spend money they don’t have. The products recommended in the videos may not be healthy for young girls’ skin, and may even be dangerous in some cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Many of the products recommended by influencers in “glow-up” videos aren’t regulated for safety and aren’t even made for kids, Dr. Casares points out. “Short-term reactions like rashes and irritation are common for my patients who use these ‘glow up’ routines, but I worry even more about the long-term effects of using advanced skin care products on young skin,” she says.

For example, sun damage, skin thinning, and premature aging are all potential risks of using the products recommended in these videos, according to Dr. Casares. Moreover, “over-exposure to beauty content is also linked to body image struggles which are, in turn, related to other negative physical outcomes for people of all ages, including dieting and overexercising,” she describes.

Lautman agrees, and sees the impact of these videos among the teens she works with. “In my work I’m mostly looking at the impacts in terms of increasing the desire to diet and control food and exercise,” she says. “Any increase in attention and control to the body, skin or muscle, increases already existing experiences like body dysmorphia and distorted body image.”

Psychological Risks

An abundance of research points to the fact that tweens and teens who become immersed in videos that emphasize beauty and appearance are more likely to develop body image issues. “Specifically, they’re more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies, to compare themselves to others, and to develop serious mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and disordered eating,” says Dr. Casares.

The more tweens and teens become consumed with looking a certain way online, the worse they feel IRL, too. “It starts a loop of self-doubt and dissatisfaction that’s difficult to break,” explains Dr. Casares.

Lautman also sees the psychological effects of this among the young women she treats. “The psychological impacts of videos like these, (especially when watched in bulk, and without other videos that show more authentic and diverse videos and bodies) are increased mental preoccupation, and internalization of unrealistic beauty standards,” she describes.

Social Media’s Role

Social media is rampant with videos aimed at teens—and it’s not just glow-up routine videos that can be harmful.

“In addition to ‘glow-up’ routines, TikTok and Instagram trends around fitspo and beauty product unboxing make these kids feel like they aren’t enough as they are and give them the false idea that if they buy a particular product or try a certain workout, they’ll finally be acceptable,” says Dr. Casares.

Some recent trends on social media have been particularly unsettling, especially when you imagine young girls viewing them. There’s skinnytok, which promotes extremely thin body types, unhealthy weight loss tips, and diet culture. Then there’s Bop House content and similar influencers, where young, conventionally attractive creators film themselves with expensive clothes, products, and hairstyles—without revealing how they were able to afford it all. After teens swipe through their page, they’ll quickly learn (through comments and otherwise) that these 19- to 24-year-old creators are selling pornographic content online and using social media to promote that content—and to show off their earnings in an effort to pressure other young girls to do the same.

Most glow up routines target women and girls, but even boys have their own version: “looksmaxxing.” In short, “looksmaxxing” is a trend that encourages young boys to follow a set of habits to optimize their appearance. Suggestions under the #looksmaxxing hashtag range from the innocuous—like getting enough protein—to dangerous like using illegal hormones and medications.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg …

The point is that tweens and teens are exposed to a whole slew of content that promotes unrealistic beauty standards, body dysmorphia, and inappropriate sexualized content—all at very young ages.

What Parents Should Do

As a parent, it’s easy to feel powerless when it comes to social media, because it’s so rampant, and it’s hard to keep kids away from it. But there are things parents can do to decrease their child’s consumption of social media, and also help them process the social media trends that they may inevitably get exposed to.

Here are some tips from experts.

Use parenting controls

“Since eliminating social media use is often unrealistic (and at the very least exhausting) for parents, they should make sure the content their kids do see is as age-appropriate as possible,” Dr. Casares. One way to do this is to have your child use a teen account on Instagram, which has preset limits on content for kids under 18. For apps without teen account options, try using parental controls on your child’s phone or tablet to limit body image content.

Have open discussions about social media

It’s vital to encourage your child to think critically about social media, says Lautman. This might include discussions about how social media promotes unrealistic body and beauty standards or how social media filters can fool us into thinking someone looks “perfect.”

“If a parent is just starting to create conversations about these topics, then just open-ended questions about what it’s like to navigate clothes and make up at their age can go a long way,” says Lautman.

Work with your teen

Finally, it’s essential to work collaboratively with your teen and build strategies for how to tackle social media issues when they come up, says Dr. Casares. This may include:

• Creating an individualized social media plan. Customize their experience on social media by adding parental controls, blocking certain hashtags (like #glowuproutines), and restricting their screen time.
• Teaching media literacy. Media literacy isn’t just about fact-checking, it’s about being able to deconstruct messages in the media to understand their meaning and how it’s constructed. This can help your child learn how to recognize unhealthy and unhelpful content when it does pop up on their feeds.
• Controlling the algorithm. Most kids get exposed to unhealthy trends through their algorithm, which can spontaneously show a child a #glowuproutine video even if they’ve never searched the hashtag. Proactively teach your child how to curate their feeds so they’re exposed to this type of content less often. This might include blocking certain creators and searching up things they’re actually interested in more frequently so the algorithm doesn’t default to promoting viral trends that might be toxic for kids.