Down With the Morning Shed: Influencer Routines Are Just Anti-Feminism Dressed Up As Self-Care

How many steps is your skincare routine? When I was a teenager, the three-part cleanse, tone and moisturise formula was considered the way to go. As skincare became a more lucrative enterprise and trends from places like South Korea went viral, the steps increased to ten, even 12. Whatever your issues, there was a serum for it or a red-light tool you could invest in to make it go away. That preventative Botox won’t do the job on its own, nor will the make-up. Now, there’s a whole new regimen to commit to: the morning shed.

TikTok and Instagram is overwhelmed with morning and nighttime routines of young, dewy-skinned women no older than 27 showing off the increasingly ludicrous steps they take to ‘wake up hot.’ They roll their hair in long sausage-like curlers then cover their heads with a silk bonnet. They do all the usual skincare but end with a peel-off mask. They tape their mouths shut and then strap up their chins. Lotions and oils are covered on every square inch of skin. You go to bed wrapped up like a strange kind of mummy, then wake up to peel it off in a satisfying manner. Hence, the morning shed.

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A post shared by Angelo Landriscina, MD, FAAD (@dermangelo)

There are plenty of products for sale to help you prepare for your new hell. Silk bonnets, primarily associated with Black haircare, are now popular with white ladies who want to keep their locks bouncy when they wake up (or are on a plane - this whole routine is also popular with the worst people on flights.) Chin straps and mouth tape promise excellence in wrinkle prevention and face slimming. The masks let you wake up with hydrated and shiny skin that radiates health and beauty. All that and you can make it into an ASMR-friendly video to share with the world for fully satisfying results.

I don’t think I need to go long here on now the beauty industry is an inescapable capitalistic hellhole that exists to make us feel lousy about ourselves for the sake of profit. We all know that. It’s an issue that’s existed far longer than any of us have been alive, and it’s gotten more visible thanks to the proliferation of social media and targeted advertising. There isn’t a single part of our lives, no matter how mundane or personal, that hasn’t been co-opted as a way to sell products and claim our very beings are incomplete without them. Still, the hijacking of skincare into an all-encompassing wellness cult that perpetuates ever-impossible demands on our already beleaguered appearances has proven to be increasingly tedious. What do you do when there are no more steps to add? You bring in a whole new routine.

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A post shared by Angelo Landriscina, MD, FAAD (@dermangelo)

The skincare philosophy of our current time is one that has moved the goalposts of acceptability to new lows. Gen Alpha, a group of kids who barely have pores, have become obsessed with expensive brands like Drunk Elephant and are now being targeted with ‘kid-friendly’ products to give them training time before they ever know what a pimple is. Every celebrity has a skincare line to shill even though it’s an unspoken truth that no woman in their 50s is wrinkle-free and bereft of human flaws solely from serums and retinols. Most of the fake ‘problems’ we’re berated over and offered solutions for are focused on our visages: cortisol face, buccal fat, hooded eyelids, jaw fat, brow lifts, and so on. There’s never been a time where being anything less than beautiful has been the preferred status quo but now it seems as though every second of our lives should be dedicated to remaining young, thin, hot, and identical to everyone else (a matter made all the more infuriating by the changing trends: see the Kardashians going from appropriating Black womanhood to thinspo whiteness over the past couple of years.)

The morning shed is the skincare version of hustle culture. Oh, you’re just trying to get in your eight hours sleep? That’s weak. You need to maximize your productivity by sleeping in all of this crap so that you can wake up looking Instagram ready. No second can be wasted on just doing nothing. It’s seen as noble to exhaust your financial, physical, and emotional resources on maintaining a standard you never wanted in the first place. Never mind that many of the products designed for these purposes of ‘efficiency’ are either useless, counterproductive or potentially dangerous. Taping your mouth shut at night is a bad idea that could hinder your ability to safely breathe while you sleep (and the adhesives aren’t great for the skin around your mouth either.) But hey, it’s worth it not to get a couple little wrinkles around where you speak, eh?

Watching these influencers engulf their faces in serums, straps, and questionable products and committing to wildly time-consuming routines reminds me of those stories of housewives in the 1950s who would wake up early to put on make-up and look perfect so that their husbands never saw them looking like a normal woman. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this trend has grown in popularity at the same time as the tradwife takeover and the wider rightward shift of pop culture.

This sounds *exhausting*.

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— Tom Hamilton (@tomhamilton.bsky.social) March 29, 2025 at 6:11 PM

We’re in a moment of weaponized hyper-femininity being part of the aesthetic of fascism. Look at how the women of the GOP who are most vocally aligned with Trump have committed to that look of fillers, bouncy hair, and Sarah Palin-esque ‘hotness’ that fetishizes ‘f*ckability’ as a sign of your political alliances (it even has a name: Mar-a-Lago Face.) The incremental steps forward made by body positivity were appropriated into capitalistic bilge then quickly disposed of once Ozempic became the status quo. Huge swaths of right-wing perennially online losers have turned the idea of female characters in video games they don’t think are sufficiently hot enough into a terrifyingly overpowered hate movement. And, of course, there’s the explosion of transphobia across the political spectrum that has served to strengthen an impossibly rigid gender binary and punish anyone who dares to deviate from it. And in this frenzy, I find it hard to separate these obscenely expensive, time-consuming, and patriarchy-minded ‘wellness’ routines for women from the endless propaganda that wants us barefoot and in the kitchen but still beautiful. This is the female version of that one rich dude who doesn’t want to die.

Look, I get it. I get why so many women are terrified of ageing. Misogyny is a potent force made all the worse by ageism. Older women (by which I mean 35+) are treated as oddities in public life or reduced to homely mother roles in films and TV, even if they’ve adhered to those beauty standards and stayed smooth-skinned and thin. But how did we get to this point where the response to this problem is to be the kind of people who would eagerly take The Substance? We’re being sold a lie that is the worst excesses of both over-romanticised #goals and torturous labour disguised as self-improvement. It’s grotesque, and that’s before we get into the sheer amount of plastic crap these routines are dependent on. Why destroy just your own psyche when you can make a few more holes in the O-Zone layer at the same time?

Being old and/or unattractive, however that is defined, is a morally neutral stance. The abject fear of both is a potent and historical force but one that is long overdue for subversion. That we’ve only further empowered it by embracing pseudoscience and hard-right misogyny is depressing but not surprising. We deserve better. At the very least, we should be able to sleep in peace without our mouths being taped shut for fear of a mild crease forming on our lips. I’ll take being able to breathe properly over that.