#deinfluencing

It’s cute but the functionality is pretty bad.

The rings are SO stiff that it’s an inconvenience to open them to add more papers & when I open it the papers fling out.

The rings aren’t removable or replaceable.

The leather quality is not even that good!

I fell in the love with the look of the zipper on the left side but when you go to write on the left side you just have a hard lump that you have to write on top of.

It was $210!! The moterm is more than half the price and just as cute.

Self care, healing.

Slow consumption, only the needed.

Mending, not replacement

In early 2023, a new wave of content swept through TikTok's For You Page. Creators began filming themselves walking through Sephora aisles, tossing beloved products aside, telling their audiences: don't buy this. Stop spending. The hashtag #deinfluencing exploded, racking up over 150 million views in just a few months. For many users, it felt like a long-overdue reckoning with the platform's relentless consumerism: a collective exhale from the pressure to buy, buy, buy. After years of being sold everything from $599 Dyson Airwraps to celebrity-branded blushes, it seemed like TikTok was finally pushing back against itself.

But was it? When we examine the de-influencing trend through the lens of gender representation and media criticism, a more complicated picture emerges. The trend did not dismantle the beauty standards and feminine ideals that made influencer culture so powerful in the first place. It just repackaged them.

On its surface, de-influencing seemed genuinely countercultural. As Fortune reported in January 2023, creators were telling audiences to resist the pressure of viral products, to question whether they actually needed the Stanley Cup or the Charlotte Tilbury highlighter. The trend arrived amid economic anxiety; inflation was high, and younger audiences were increasingly skeptical of sponsored content after scandals like "MascaraGate," in which a popular beauty influencer was accused of wearing fake lashes while promoting a mascara on a paid partnership deal.

As HuffPost noted, marketing expert Americus Reed II described the movement as influencer culture "self-regulating" — a natural pendulum swing away from excess. Some researchers agreed: a 2025 study in the Journal of Business Research found that de-influencing had genuine positive effects, helping some users feel less pressure to conform to beauty ideals and make more intentional purchasing decisions.

But here is where the trend becomes more complicated. As PBS NewsHour pointed out in its coverage of de-influencing, many of the same creators who were telling followers not to buy certain products were turning around and recommending cheaper alternatives, with affiliate links. Clicking "don't buy the Dyson Airwrap" led viewers directly to a commission-generating Amazon storefront. De-influencing had not rejected consumption. It had simply dressed it up as wisdom.

Researcher Aidan Moir, writing in the journal Television & New Media (2025), argues that de-influencing reproduces what he calls "gendered neoliberal discourses of acceptable consumption." In other words, de-influencers are still primarily female creators telling other women how to spend, or not spend, their money. The figure at the center of de-influencing content is the smart, thrifty woman who has figured out the game. She is aspirational in a different way, but she is still aspirational. And she still tends to look a lot like the clean girl.

This is perhaps the most telling critique of de-influencing as a feminist or counter-cultural movement: it did not challenge who gets to be at the center of the frame. The women leading the de-influencing trend were, overwhelmingly, the same demographic as the women leading influencer culture — thin, white, conventionally attractive by Western standards. As The DePaulia noted, TikTok beauty culture broadly tends to market the "liberated woman" as a way to sell products, and de-influencing follows the same logic: the woman who has opted out of overconsumption is still performing a very specific, recognizable type of femininity.

Shohat and Stam's framework from "Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation" is useful here. They argue that counter-representations are only truly subversive when they challenge the underlying structures of who is represented and how. De-influencing changes the message (buy less, spend smarter) but not the messenger. The bodies doing the de-influencing are still held up as the standard, and the underlying assumption that women's identities are inseparable from their appearance and consumption habits remains untouched.

Taken together, the clean girl aesthetic and the de-influencing trend reveal something important about how TikTok shapes gender representation. Both trends claim to be about self-improvement; one through aspiration, one through restraint. But both ultimately reinforce the idea that a woman's worth is tied to how she looks and how she consumes. TikTok's algorithm rewards both kinds of content with reach and visibility, because both are profitable: the first sells products directly, and the second generates trust that can be monetized just as easily.

Media criticism helps us see beyond the content of these trends to the structures that produce and amplify them. As researchers studying TikTok and body image have found, the platform's algorithm "tends to prioritize content that features individuals with specific body types, looks, and physical attributes, thus reinforcing narrow and unattainable beauty ideals." That structural reality does not change when the hashtag shifts from #cleangirlaesthetic to #deinfluencing. The scroll goes on, and the standards stay the same.

workers work in unsafe environments with no protection from chemical, get 3 minutes of a break per day, are constantly in a rush, can be fired at any time for being sick, they would need 2-3x as high of a salary to live a normal life, they never go on vacation since it's unaffordable, they have practically no rights as workers, they can get blacklisted for other companies or fired if they complain or ask for more breaks

12-16 hours per day for 6-7 days a week