On GRWM Videos: Will We Ever Just Be Ready?

A woman sits in front of a phone camera propped up against her vanity. She leans in close to the lens, contorting her face to expertly apply foundation and contour, squinting a little to pencil her waterline, and smacking her lipstick just right. She applies each step with deft ease and practiced precision, perfectly enhancing her features in that effortless covergirl style. But she’s not even paying attention to the strokes of her various brushes; she’s explaining, in heartbreaking detail, her recent traumatic miscarriage and her fear of getting pregnant again. She is participating in a common social media fad, one wherein creators share their deepest thoughts while performing their daily routine, cheerfully dubbed “Get Ready With Me,” or GRWM for short.

Perhaps the GRWM phenomenon is a consequence of Vogue’s latest Youtube series, wherein young, dewy celebrities walk through their dozen-step, hundreds-of-dollars skincare and makeup routines for an audience of 12.7 million subscribers. The series’s participants maintain a careful balance, letting their aura of fame down just enough to seem human and accessible while remaining polished enough to maintain a vast, eager, consumerist fanbase.

Whether this is the symptom or source of a broader trend, influencers, micro-influencers, and everyday people creating these GRWM videos — the vast majority of whom are women — have taken it up with zeal. Women poised in front of the camera, make-up brush in hand, have become ubiquitous across TikTok, Instagram reels, and social media more broadly.

In our current digital age, more women than ever have platforms to share their voices. Social media, for all its flaws and social expectations weighing most on young women, has provided them the biggest platform to express themselves and speak their opinions. Maybe, then, this trend is empowering. Certainly the woman speaking out about her miscarriage to a platform of thousands of viewers helps to reduce the stigmas surrounding pregnancy loss and reproductive-related depression and anxiety.

Additionally, these videos de-mystify beauty by showing just how much work goes into crafting that perfectly “effortless” look. These women use this lengthy, daily task to speak about issues important to them, demonstrating that she does not have to look perfectly polished in order to say something meaningful, and empowering her to reclaim that time in her day. Time that society and convention dictate should be spent on appearance upkeep is reclaimed for intellectual and social activity.

Though not typically interactive, these types of videos certainly have a social component. In watching someone “put their face on” for the day, there is an element of conspiracy and intimacy common in women-dominated spaces, particularly in the liminal and undervalued space of the public bathroom.

Historically, bathrooms frequented by women-identifying people serve a purpose beyond just a stop to “do your business.” They are a space outside of reality, where you can duck in with a friend or two, debrief, share some gossip, touch up makeup, make a new friend, give yourself a pep talk, and re-enter the real world. The cliché that women always go to the bathroom in groups is not totally unfounded; sometimes the bathroom is a social event, a sort of sacred space to say what you really think and let your guard down. To some extent, the GRWM trend is a window into this social structure. Through the process of applying various creams, gels, and powders, content creators induce that same sort of liminal freedom, granting themselves (and us as the consumers) permission to say what they really think, as if we were all crowded around a mirror in a sticky club bathroom.

Maybe it’s all just a good time — as gossipping in a bathroom often is — with no deeper purpose. But when watching a woman talk about one of the most private, heartbreaking, and physically painful experiences a person can go through, holding in tears as she applies mascara, it’s hard to see this as just frivolous fun.

Something about this trend feels more sinister, like society won’t deign to listen to women unless they are literally obscuring their faces with tools and cosmetics, as if we need this distortion as a sort of disclaimer to her comments. Her discussion of serious topics while simultaneously enhancing her features shows that like her face, these issues should be smoothed, softened, and made more presentable before releasing them into the mainstream. Her conspiratorial attitude works against her, cheapening her message and relating her words only to the intimate community she has induced rather than the public at large.

While her words might be powerful, speaking on topics from love to politics to trauma and depression, every one of these videos comes to the same conclusion: She lays down the brush and poses for the camera. There. Done. Ready. The ending befuddles the beginning: The end of her intellectual point and the beginning of her day. Everything she’s been talking about is therefore a conspiratorial sidebar, irrelevant to the ultimate goal: Getting ready for something that the viewer will never see. It may appear as if she is unmasking herself, revealing the minutiae of her morning routine, but by the end she is polished, or “face on,” as the saying goes.

She walks an impossible tightrope, attempting to say something meaningful while still keeping it casual, wanting to be relatable yet also speak to her own experiences, taking up space but never too much. It should be enough for her to just face the camera and speak her mind however she wants. Why must she exist in a perpetual state of transit and preparation? And when, finally, will we ever just be ready?

—Staff writer Serena Jampel can be reached at serena.jampel@thecrimson.com.