Gone are the days where a shower only included a humble bar of soap. If TikTok hygiene hauls and routines are to be believed, it takes a village of products. #hygieneroutine has 29.7K posts on the platform. One user, @pickleflipflops, received 803.8K likes on her shower routine, another @vanilla_swirlxx, received 95.5K likes on a hygiene tips video. Some of the most prevalent brands in these videos include EOS, Sol de Janeiro, Bath & Body Works, and Tree Hut. That leads to a huge sales influx. Eos’ Vanilla Cashmere Body Lotion is one of the fastest selling body lotions in the US. The launch of Tree Hut’s Iced Coffee Shea Sugar Scrub on TikTok led to a 96% lift in sales and 867% increase in website traffic. Sol de Janeiro had 167.1% growth at constant rates in its sales, reaching €686.1 million ($720.9 million) at the end of 2024. Mix the hit of dopamine from a new beautiful smelling product purchase and the promise of increased desirability by smelling good, and you’ve got yourself a recipe to capitalize on a (predominantly Gen Z) audience.
Hauls themselves are nothing new. In the article “I Haul Therefore I Am” (a clever play on artist Barbara Kruger’s seminal 1987 work “I Shop Therefore I Am”), Vanessa Friedman traces the history of the haul back to YouTube content in the early 2000s, “tapping into the growing sense of shopping as vicarious thrill and emotional sustenance” and becoming “a form of performance art and shared practice, a cultural phenomenon,” all aided by the quickening pace through which retailers were able to offer up these goods to eager consumers.
“By embracing hauls, we are training ourselves, in a Pavlovian way, to chase the thrill of delivery, the joy of unboxing. By sharing endless haul videos, we are seducing other people into sharing our compulsion for more and more and more, because the more people who buy into any one idea, the less bad we feel about our own behavior,” Friedman writes.
Aside from the compulsion to consume more, the sustainability impact of plastic packaging, excess waste, and shipping miles that help to connect us with our products cannot be overlooked. Anti-haul and deinfluencing posts where posters emphasize the products they won’t be purchasing or don’t recommend emerged as an antidote, but don’t outnumber haul or routine posts. It’s the age-old dilemma of consumption and driving consumption asthe oil that greases the wheels of any consumer industry.
In "Hygiene Hauls Are Insane Overconsumption" YouTuber Ashley Viola dives into the problematic history underlying this excessive hygiene routine culture. The video begins with a TikTok influencer suggesting viewers use six products to cleanse and moisturize their skin: bar soap, body wash, an exfoliating towel, body polish, body oil, and body lotion. Other influencers post hygiene hauls, purchasing a bar soap, shower gel, body lotion, deodorant, and perfume dedicated to separate themes like vanilla or clean girl, repurchasing a similar scent in a new fragrance way each time. Others show their hygiene stash: shelves upon shelves of shower gels, scrubs, lotions, soaps, and body oils, which resemble more of a brand warehouse than an at-home shower routine. Gen Z appears to be the biggest demographic for these videos.
Extreme measures for the sake of hygiene have been taken before: in the 1920s Lysol was marketed as feminine hygiene product to use as a douche, with ads showing women being left by their husbands due to not practicing the ideal level of feminine hygiene. This concept of cleanliness holds especially strong in the Black community, where the association of dirtiness and Blackness emerged during times of slavery. Viola points this out, tying these excessive hygiene rituals to a response against systemic racism, as evidenced in the book by sociology professor Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body. Viola explores the subject further in another video, “Black Women and the Hygiene Olympics”.
According to Italian-American activist and social sciences professor Silvia Federici in Caliban & The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, cleanliness was also a means of class distinction and a moral duty to be performed by only those who had access to these then-rarer resources. The impact of these excessive routines also impact the environment, not just through excess packaging and products, but the amount of water used. With a five-minute shower using 10-25 gallons of water, the amount will go up even further as consumers wash off the two rounds of soap plus scrub. The fragrant experience leaves a larger psychological impact that remains long after the scents have faded into oblivion. “Our bodies do not need to constantly be drenched in artificial scents to feel clean. In order to be clean, we have been conditioned to believe that our normal scents are something that we should fear, something that we should be ashamed of,” Viola says.
She points out that another root of this performative hygiene is attracting the male gaze. “This idea that women always have to look and smell flawless, it's rooted in purity culture, and it places us on this hamster wheel of always trying to buy product at their product, to elevate our social status as women. Black women especially, have to work twice as hard to show that we're clean because cleanliness, or the perception of cleanliness, has always been used as a moral barometer of who is worthy of respect and who isn't,” she says.
Performative wealth also comes into play. While the products themselves may be mass market in some cases, the sheer size of these collections add up. In a cost-of-living and climate crisis, spending excess dollars on multiple body products and racking up large water bills is an almost bizarre middle finger to our environmental and monetary worries. As the weight of our collective consumer decisions grows, so we bury ourselves deeper into the product abyss. “Our planet is suffering under the weight of over consumption, and when we participate in this charade, we're co-signing on a system that actually harms women, not only us; not only the young people who are watching it, but the women in factories who are making these items and getting underpaid and exploited and abused. We're polluting communities,” Viola states.
Dr. Alexandra Bowles, board-certified dermatologist at Mona Dermatology, tells BeautyMatter: “First and foremost, I think it is wonderful that people are starting to prioritize their skin health and being more conscientious of their skin hygiene. However, as a dermatologist, I know that scented products can increase the risk of irritation and contact dermatitis, eczema flare-ups, or even irritating acne-prone skin.”
Dr. Bowles states that scented products are not innately bad as long as the skin can tolerate it but “using multiple different scented body products can increase the risk of contact dermatitis or an allergic reaction, primarily because you’re layering multiple ingredients that your skin might not tolerate well. Fragrances—whether synthetic or natural, like essential oils—are some of the most common triggers of irritation. Adding preservatives or colorants to the mix can make it more likely for irritation to occur, especially on thinner skin areas like your neck or underarms.”
The dermatologist reports an uptick in patients “presenting with things like perioral dermatitis, eyelid eczema, and acne flares. There does seem to be a common denominator with some of these patients who have recently started an extensive skin routine or added in new products. When this occurs, it is difficult for me to pinpoint the culprit due to multiple products being added to their routine at once.” Simply scaling back on the number of products used or going for unscented options developed for sensitive skin are helpful pointers in these instances. But given the pressure on female consumers to smell delicious all hours of the day, will not being able to partake have a negative mental health or confidence impact for those who can only smell like their true selves?
Hygiene is important and there is no shame in wanting to smell nice and wanting to have a fragrance wardrobe. Slathering oneself in a rich, thick body lotion that drapes the skin in a wonderful scent that wafts around one throughout the day is not a cardinal sin, it’s a simple pleasure that many a consumer can appreciate. But the excessive nature of six-step shower routines and hygiene hauls points has bigger implications than just a dent in one’s bank account. The psychological and dermatological impacts can’t simply be washed down the drain along with the soap and scrubs.
“When women are compelled to outspend and outshine and outgroom, it's not a performance of self-love … It's a survival mechanism that's born out of the systemic oppression that we face, some of us more than others. But I do not want women to just survive. I want them to thrive. Toni Morrison once wrote, ‘If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down,’ and these mountains of products, they're weighing women down,” Viola concludes in her video. “You are already worthy. You do not need a shelf full of body scrubs, body butters, perfumes, body oils to prove it.”
