The viral ‘morning shed’ skincare regime has a dangerous reality ...Middle East

I’m haunted online by women in frightening masks. They’re all over my TikTok feed, binding their faces with tape and plastering their skin with unctuous creams. This is all in service of something called the “morning shed” – the a-ha moment, filmed for the camera, where beauty influencers unwrap themselves and reveal a plumper, younger and more beautiful self. It’s like a sequel to The Substance, with more depuffing undereye pads.

The format of these videos is simple: Young women – and it is almost always young women – wake up mummified in beauty products and then peel them off, layer by layer. The more extreme creators bind their jaws with “de-puffing” chin strap masks and tape their lips shut (breathing through the mouth is very uglifying, apparently). According to Allure magazine, these videos have been watched over 96 million times. The mantra “The uglier you go to bed, the hotter you wake up” is often cited in the caption.

I’m both fascinated and repelled by these videos. In a strange way, I’m reminded of my Chinese great-grandmother, who was from the last generation to grow up with bound feet.

What people often get wrong about “lotus feet”, as it was called, is that all of the girls were forced into it. This wasn’t true in all cases. Some victims willingly did it to themselves, seeing it as a way to become more desirable – a path to marriage and a better life. Crucially, it also trapped them in work – it’s much harder to shirk your family duties making textiles or handicrafts if you can’t just get up and walk off.

Obviously, putting on a sheet mask and tying your hair up in a silk bonnet overnight isn’t quite the same as breaking your toes, but it does show that generation after generation women do mystifying things to conform to a beauty standard that can often seem bizarre years on.

Many “shedders” position their routine as a form of “me time”. Devon Kelly, one of the first influencers to popularise the morning shed, explained: “I recognise this is all a bit much, but my favourite hobby is leisurely self-care and sleeping.”

#sleeproutine #mouthtape #glassskin #koreanskincare #silkbonnet #silkeyemask

Kelly isn’t the first to hit upon the idea of beautifying yourself in your sleep: In the 19th century, Empress Elisabeth of Austria went to bed in a leather mask lined with raw veal. In Victorian times, women slept in Hannibal Lector-esque rubber “toilet masks” because they thought it would beautify the skin. (The history books are silent on whether these beauty interventions worked, but you can probably guess they made waking up next to these women a bit of a shock.)

So why do I find the 21st century take on this so disturbing? Partly it’s the age of the morning shedders involved, most of whom look like they are, at a push, in their late 20s, when your metabolism should allow you to roll out of bed half-pissed and still be able to operate heavy machinery while looking like you’re fresh off a spa day. But it’s also what it says about society’s current approach to the self, in which we invest money and time into ourselves and expect it to pay off, like our bodies are Fortune 500 companies or Wall Street stock options.

The morning shed feels like a particularly feminine take on the cult of self-optimisation, in which every waking (and sleeping) hour has to be dedicated to bettering yourself. For men, this might look like protein powders, creatine supplements, Headspace and gym memberships – a regimen that might sound sensible in theory, but can quickly spiral into the bizarre, as evidenced when one American fitness influencer’s morning routine went viral this week, showing him waking up at 3.52am to, among other things, repeatedly dunk his face in ice water.

For women, self-optimisation might look like journaling, daily facial massage, drinking chia seeds in water and working on vision boards to manifest a better life. Some of this may even be beneficial in practice – chia seeds actually are good for digestion, though you could just as easily eat other, less glamorous fiber-rich foods. On social media, however, moderation gets you nowhere. What gets traction are knife-edge extremes – an elaborate 12-step nighttime skincare routine, getting up at 3am and not the more sensible 7.30am and that ends up becoming the starting point for the trend.

What do we expect from all this hard graft and investment (chia seeds and chin-strap masks don’t come for free)? A hotter, better self – for who and for what ends? What could we spend our energies on if we didn’t direct it so obsessively towards ourselves?

My great-grandmother probably didn’t think that her great-granddaughter would spend her evenings at home watching women bind their faces on TikTok, but I think she would recognise something of the unnameable impulse to do so. We tell ourselves it’s good for us – but really, we’re just trying to fit in.

Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster

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