Video: ashparkerley, mariadelmar2111, southernwestsunshine.
If you aren’t optimizing sleep to become hotter, in the year of lord 2024, what are you even doing? Those eight to ten hours aren’t just for rest anymore; those are prime snatch-your-face hours. Just ask the TikTok influencers who have been proclaiming that the only way to wake up pretty is to go to bed ugly. (Their Amazon storefronts are ready for you if you believe them, by the way.)
Since sometime around midsummer, women online have been sharing their “morning shed” routines on TikTok and Instagram: videos of themselves just out of bed, walking groggily up to a propped-up phone and ring light with their hair and faces shrouded in a shock-baiting assortment of products that they then peel off one by one to reveal an effortlessly gorgeous face and camera-ready hair. It’s a perfect recipe for virality and press coverage: flagrant displays of overconsumption mixed with women just trying to exist in overoptimized late-stage capitalism. Watch enough of these videos, and you might start to worry that you’re not doing enough to achieve ultimate reverse-aging hotness levels. That you’re not self-caring enough. That little two-step routine of gentle cleanser followed by squalane moisturizer just won’t cut it anymore. If you’re not going to sleep in a pink face-shaping chin strap that makes you look like Hannibal Lecter Barbie, you’re slacking.
The morning-shed canon of products has four categories: “Normal” (a silk bonnet for healthy, undamaged hair), “Fun, Why Not?” (heatless curlers and an overnight lip stain to look like you’ve just stepped out of glam), “Debatable Goop Science” (mouth tape to prevent open-mouth sleeping and whatever open-mouth sleeping supposedly does to you), and, finally, “Why Are They Doing That to Themselves?” It’s in this last category where we find the ubiquitous pink chin strap seen on so many morning shedders. (Also called a chin girdle or chin corset, if you’re feeling more Victorian.) “You can instantly see how it’s raising my cheekbones,” creator Mayte Myers says after wrapping the $8.99 Graphene V-Line V Shaped Face Mask under her jaw, pulling it up from the straps at her cheek and securing it tightly at the top of her head. It’s the 15th of her 16-step getting-ready-for-bed, pre-shed routine. Myers has been posting her morning sheds since late June, skyrocketing her content views from under 10,000 views per video to consistently as high at 10 million.
Morning shedders will swear to you that their routines are game-changing, that they’ve hacked the system. Some are mothers to young children, like Ashley West, who was featured in Glamour talking about the benefits of the shed as a busy mom. It’s understandably difficult to fit in a blowout when you have drop-off at 7:30 a.m., and sometimes you just want to look like you’ve had a blowout. Some, like Isabelle Lux, an anti-aging influencer who was early to the morning shed-trend, find that a nightly routine of silicone face patches actually saves money in the long term, eliminating the need for more expensive facial treatments. Even better, as Lux tells me over email, the mouth tape and comically large silk eye mask she wears have helped her wake up less often throughout the night. The chin strap, however, is a bridge too far even for her: “The whole contraption was very uncomfortable … the whole thing seems ridiculous and unsustainable.”
But the pink TikTok chin strap is at least addicting to behold. Video after video of women strapping their jaw shut for the sake of beauty, then taping their mouths closed — visuals you might see in a feminist body-horror film (yes, I’m talking about The Substance) — it’s self-loathing and over-the-top enough to glue your eyes to the screen out of curiosity.
Similarly watchable is the rapturous way these women talk about the stretchy apparatus. “Bury me in my chin strap,” says stay-at-home mom Ashley Parker in the caption of one of her at least six chin-strap videos. They all feature a link to the JURSON Double Chin Reducer, which you can order directly from her TikTok showcase. The text she overlays onto her videos all insist that her “double chin” is reducing.
Another creator, @mariadelmar2111, has been posting consistently to her 10,000 followers about the chin strap since June, providing before and after photos of her facial profile, running her finger along her jawline when she takes it off, and saying things like “the girls that get it get it” and using captions like “… you went from a 3 to a solid 10.” It’s an impressive commitment to the bit, with undertones of snake-oil salesman and high-school bully. Each of her videos has a “creator earns commission” tag under the link to the strap.
This is where I tell you that there is no scientific or medical evidence that chin straps can effectively eliminate a double chin or permanently alter your facial structure. Nonetheless, to see if I too would “get it,” I bought the $9.99 Meto Reusable Face Strap from Amazon. I lasted an hour wearing it before I felt I had been squished enough. Did I take a lot of selfies wearing the strap? Obviously. Did it snatch my face in that hour? No. But it did make my cheeks feel a little numb. Chin straps are used medically in post-surgical recovery and have been linked to treating snoring, similar to mouth tape. For more official insight into the legitimacy of the chin strap, I reached out to my former dermatology physician assistant, Alexandra Gold, whose credits include curing my hormonal cystic acne in 2019. “Chin straps apply gentle pressure to the chin and neck area, which may temporarily reduce swelling and give the appearance of a tighter jawline, but once the strap is removed, the skin usually returns to its previous state. Chin straps have no impact on fat,” she explained in an email. Then, disappointingly, she added, “Realistically, there is no cheap alternative to plastic surgery while producing the same outcome.” Dr. Daniel Barrett, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon with 2.4 million followers on TikTok, also found no good things to say about the TikTok strap. “My recommendation is to throw this in the trash,” he says in a video, tossing the stretchy pink fabric below his desk. “I’m literally wearing mine rn,” says the top comment.
For each sale of a chin strap, a creator can make between 1.8 and 10 percent in commission, depending on the platform (usually a TikTok showcase or an Amazon storefront). Which, for a product that only costs between $2 and $19, is likely not enough cash to quit your day job with. So why are so many women hawking a product that feels so clearly like a scam? Selling obscure e-commerce branded chin straps is a lot different from typical influencer-brand partnerships and discount codes; it now feels harder to tell where something trickled down from and who is actually profiting from it. But, at the same time, I suppose, why shouldn’t they sell it? All it takes is posting a few videos for the possibility of some extra cash. The most money an aspiring chin-strapfluencer could lose is the $9.99 they spent buying the strap, after all.
To quote Susan Sontag, who would have loved TikTok chin straps, from The Double Standard of Aging, “People let the direct awareness they have of their needs … be overruled by commercialized images of happiness and personal well-being.” The potential of a morning shed is irresistible when the routine is coded as self-care optimization and when anything is available to you in two clicks. A chin strap that promises overnight facial reconstruction is just another product in our relentless quest for being younger, hotter, and maybe a little richer.
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