Every couple of months or so, some sort of trend featuring users sporting their “glow-ups,” physical transformations into someone more conventionally attractive, resurfaces online. Dating back to 2014, during the peak of Vine, the emphasis society has placed on the visual and aesthetic of life is painfully evident.

At this very moment, #GlowUp on TikTok has accumulated over 46 billion views under its hashtag. These transformations glamorize users’ quick physical transformations to shock viewers into praising them for their achievement of fitting the beauty standard better, regardless of their methods of getting there.

Even YouTubers have hopped on this trend, participating in challenges such as the “24-hour glow-up challenge,” where individuals attempt to modify themselves into prettier people within a day’s time. The trend of breakup glow-up videos have also been popularized recently, despite the notion that most of the aspects being “improved upon” are as a result of unhealthy coping mechanisms such as rapid weight loss. Many call out its romanticization of eating disorders and its skewed message that one must again become more conventionally attractive after heartbreak to redeem themselves.

These trends target our insecurities and benefit from the misrepresentation in the media of what we should look like at a certain age. Since social media has instilled a culture of consuming each other as content and limiting one another to mere physicalities, people participate in these challenges in hopes of having their appearance validated in ways they hadn’t before conforming to society’s ideals of attractiveness.

In fact, I can recall yearning to be seen as attractive in my predominately white town my entire adolescence. I would often resort to harmful measures like restricting my eating, just so I could achieve a drastic transformation right before events. Yet, it was the obvious shift of attention and quality treatment that further enabled my unhealthy behavior.

Inside, I still felt like that young, overweight girl with a tooth gap and overwhelming guilt for exploiting that part of my identity to make my current self more palatable.

Not only does this obsession with glow-up culture insinuate that one’s worth equals their perceived attractiveness, but it has completely erased the experience of being a tween.

With the access middle schoolers have to social media, they can see what teenagers are doing and emulate their behavior with ease. They no longer suffer from the atrocious “awkward phases” we all remember, where we wholeheartedly expressed ourselves without any fear or self-awareness of how attractive we looked.

Nowadays, this line is completely blurred. Whereas we had this time to be lost, fashionably confused 12-year-olds, this new generation of tweens are now fully aware of how teenagers interact with the world, completely skipping this stage.

In fact, TikTok user @shamelesscloutchaser, known for conducting social experiments on the app, explained this phenomenon the clearest I’ve ever heard it.

“When you were 12 years old, you had no access to what 17-year-olds were doing...” he says. “But now, an 11-year-old can open up TikTok and see exactly what actual 17-year-olds are doing, what they're wearing, how they're talking, and it's allowing them to adopt that culture faster than ever.”

Contributing very much to this issue is the inaccurate portrayal of tween and teenagers in Hollywood. From shows like Riverdale to Euphoria to movies like Sleepover and Perks of Being a Wallflower, our obsession with attractiveness has transpired in adult actors playing the roles of very sexualized adolescents. This misrepresentation creates a disconnect between what the persona of what this age group should look and act like and their actual stage of life.

It also gives younger children, especially young girls, the impression that being considered conventionally attractive enough to be sexualized is empowering. With these glow-up challenges, one can see young girls comparing what they perceive as their now desirable state to prepubescent images of themselves, claiming that as their rise of attractiveness.

Even among Generation Z, which is just a few years older than Gen Alphas, various users expedite this race to age these kids with phrases such as “I didn’t look like that when I was 12!” and more predatory comments like “Age check, please” circling TikTok.

With all of these aspects of society serving the narrative that these kids are somewhat more grown simply because of the advanced presentation of their physical appearance causes us to forget just that: that they’re still children and should be treated as such.

Note: Everyone treats and expects young people to be adults. Products and things originally targeted for teenagers are neglected by them and absorbed by younger audiences. Don’t focus on media but society in general. Adult bodies portraying teenagers in the media heavily contributes to this and inclines minors to view being sexualized as empowering or sexualizing themselves.

Look At Me Now