Morning Shed: Just the Latest Toxic Trend in Pursuit of Everlasting Beauty
The trend, criticised for promoting over-consumption and unsustainable practices, reflects how beauty ideals continue to demand time, money, and bodily discomfort—primarily from women.
TikTok’s latest viral beauty trend, the “morning shed,” may look harmless—just influencers removing overnight beauty aids like skin masks, chin straps, and mouth tape—but it marks yet another chapter in a long, often dangerous history of extreme beauty pursuits.
The trend, criticised for promoting over-consumption and unsustainable practices, reflects how beauty ideals continue to demand time, money, and bodily discomfort—primarily from women. Once rooted in skincare and sun protection, modern beauty routines now echo the elaborate, even harmful rituals of the past.
Throughout history, women have endured toxic and painful treatments to meet societal expectations. Ancient Egyptian women applied cosmetics made from lead and copper, risking poisoning. During the Chinese practice of foot binding, young girls’ feet were broken and reshaped to fit a cultural ideal of smallness—often at the cost of lifelong pain and disability.
In Renaissance Europe, women bleached their skin with arsenic and enlarged their pupils using belladonna, a literal poison that could cause blindness. Elizabethan women used lead-based Venetian ceruse for a pale look—ironically believed to be a cause of Queen Elizabeth I’s death. In the Victorian era, dangerous methods like consuming tapeworm pills or arsenic wafers were marketed as beauty aids.
Today, while practices may seem less extreme, the pressures persist. My research shows white Western women experience some of the highest appearance pressures, followed closely by East Asian women. These pressures decline with age in the West, but remain constant in Asia. In contrast, Nigerian women report the highest body appreciation and lowest sociocultural pressures.
As economic inequality deepens globally, beauty spending rises—especially in unequal U.S. cities. With social media accelerating the pace of trend cycles, from lip suction to laser hair removal, the “morning shed” is just the latest reminder: the beauty ideal remains as relentless—and as profitable—as ever.
