Cleaning, social media and the imagined audience

I have been telling anyone who will listen over the past nearly 6 months that I am trying to get into journalism and in that time I have completed 1 (one) article. This is that article. TikTok keeps telling me that the things that embarrass you – the things you resist most – are actually the keys to your authentic self, what you actually want and care about most, so here I am, sharing my writing which is certainly something embarrassing but also something I do really care about, so thank you for reading :) 

Cleaning, social media, and the imagined audience  

I have a question. When did you – assuming a) that you are an adult living independently and b) that you ever did – learn how to clean? Were you taught? Did your parent or guardian sit you down with a laminated handout complete with diagrams? Or did you learn by osmosis, through observation, through watching said parent or guardian rushing about with a bottle of Jif? I have to confess, I was never really taught. What’s worse, I am still shaking off the reputation I have in my family for totally, deliberately, deviously avoiding clearing up after tea. My approach as a teenager was to walk busily around the kitchen picking things up and putting them down elsewhere authoritatively, all while talking loudly, thus creating an illusion of someone who is definitely pulling their weight, while actually contributing very little to the task. On my bolder days, I would just slink off altogether, BlackBerry in hand, hoping no one would notice, which they definitely did.  

This meant that everything I learned about cleaning was through observing others, and certainly against my will. I arrived at university knowing to wipe the surfaces, do the washing up and sweep the floor, and that was about it. I hasten to add that I always cleaned up after myself, however: I wasn’t that person in student accommodation leaving mouldering dishes piling up in the communal sink, bins overflowing; that person whose room you have to hold your breath while passing. My knowledge was basic to start with but, as with many aspects of adult life, you learn as you go along, out of the obligation you have to the other people you’re sharing a space with. I will be eternally grateful to the friend I lived with in second year who first showed me how to bleach a toilet – thank you Anna! 

Fast forward to now, I have what I’d consider a straightforward, sufficient knowledge of how to keep my living space clean and comfortable. Still, I find myself pondering the issue yet again – how often should I clean? Am I doing enough, am I doing it right? And this is something I find myself wondering even though I live on my own at the moment. How do you know you’re doing it right when there is no one around to tell you otherwise? I can set whatever standards I choose; isn’t that freedom terrifying? 

Actually, though, to say that there is no one around telling me how to clean can’t possibly be true, because there is, and they’re all on TikTok, or CleanTok, to be precise. Like all good Internet niches, CleanTok is a tree with many branches, but if you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on that app, you’ll have come across it at some point. There’s the stay-at-home mum vacuuming her gunmetal grey carpet, straightening her ‘live, laugh, love’ sign. There’s the 20 something in a matching athleisure set breezing around her big-windowed, high-ceilinged, already immaculate apartment, washing her snow-white sheets and sweeping invisible dust off her coffee table. There’s someone swirling every cleaning product money can buy around their bathtub – spirals of lurid pink, green and yellow falling, with a satisfying weight, in a kaleidoscopic pattern onto the ceramic – swearing that it’s the only way to really get it clean. A perhaps unlikely star among this roster is the 60-something Ann Russell, herself a professional cleaner, self-described in her TikTok bio as a “middle-class English old bag”. Russell exudes no-nonsense British matriarch energy and gives succinct, practical advice on everything from how to unclog your shower drain to how to get over heartbreak.  

 

Russell, like many other online creators, has managed to turn her internet popularity into traditional media success: her first book How to Clean Everything: A practical, down to earth guide for anyone who doesn't know where to start was published in September last year. She was also the first creator I saw drawing attention to the more toxic side of CleanTok, namely the aforementioned trend for mixing masses of different cleaning products, a phenomenon known as ‘product overload’. Presumably appealing due to the bright, pretty colours and the satisfying sound of bottles spraying, brushes scrubbing, and product pouring into the sink, this trend has been roundly criticised by cleaners and experts alike for a litany of reasons. Not only is there little evidence that mixing different cleaning products makes any difference to their efficacy (with many arguing to the contrary), it is an enormous waste of product that could spell disaster for our environment. The Unblocktober campaign, whose mission it is to “improve the health of our drains, sewers, watercourses and seas”, said in an October 2021 statement that “even if products are labelled as safe to use, they won’t have been tested in combination with every other cleaning product that’s out there. This means that homeowners won’t know the types of chemical reactions they will be creating, what happens to the pipes as these products move through the drains, or what effect this will have on local water systems as a whole.” An equally worrying aspect of this trend is the adverse health effects that breathing in the fumes produced by these combinations could cause. Russell sums it up with characteristic frankness: “Some of these overload things quite frankly are dangerous (…) it can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re mixing the wrong chemicals, you can very literally kill yourself.” 

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFHwjYhS/  

 

Unblocktober also advocated in that same statement for the use of cheap, natural cleaning products such as white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, an endorsement Russell has echoed in many of her posts. In fact it is this same no-frills, beginner-friendly approach that has won the TikTok creator no small measure of support and popularity. When asked about her recommended household essentials, rather than endorsing a particular brand (something she must presumably get plenty of lucrative offers to do) or sending you off to spend £30+ at Home Bargains on an armful of colourful plastic sprays, she lists items that you may already have under the sink: fairy liquid, white vinegar, bleach and bicarb, the cheap, basic items that your grandmother probably would have used, that people have been using since time immemorial. Anxious first-time renters and newly moved-in freshers wondering how to keep on top of cleaning are not saddled with a 50-step daily routine involving a magnetic fridge whiteboard, an assortment of coloured marker pens and (you guessed it) more stuff you have to buy; just a plain and simple a “10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening, just do as much as you can” approach. Russell gets lots of questions on how to start clearing up clutter and mess when dealing with a newborn, death in the family, or after a depressive episode or low period, and every time, her responses are like stepping into a warm bath. Her ethos is, in short, a compassionate and approachable one, a complete antidote to the general keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety that I associate with the online discourse surrounding cleanliness and household maintenance: do what you can, and as long as the way you live and your living space is not posing any actual health hazards, you’re probably doing enough.  

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYhj6woC/  

Because of this, Russell is defiantly, almost obstinately unmarketable. You’d imagine she’d be the stuff of nightmares to TikTok advertisers and social media marketers everywhere in that she never tries to sell you anything, apart from a couple of Arial ads encouraging viewers to wash at 30 degrees, and her own book, for which one can hardly begrudge her (if I wrote a book I’d probably tattoo the title on my forehead). Don’t go out and buy 100 new products; use and make the most of what you’ve already got; don’t worry, you’re doing fine, just do the best you can. Such messages are surely anathema to an app that relies on a heady cocktail of boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction with one’s lot and comparison with others to drive user engagement, entice you to keep scrolling that little bit longer and – obviously, crucially, as certain and sure as death follows life – to get you to buy stuff. Russell is, however, the exception rather than the rule; it is rare to see a creator who has shot to online fame that doesn’t (predictably, but also understandably) pop up again a month later with an ad for a product or brand collaboration. The first ‘cleanfluencer’ I saw taking this route was Sophie Hinchcliffe, or Mrs Hinch, who started her Instagram account @mrshinchhome in 2018. Through her cleaning/home/lifestyle videos Hinchcliffe has amassed millions of followers and at the height of her fame many of the products she recommended, such as Zoflora disinfectant and Scrub Daddy sponges, would quickly sell out. A quick Google search of ‘Mrs Hinch endorsed products’ brings up over 32,000 results, including articles from Hello, Metro, and Glamour, a ‘People Also Ask’ section (‘What does Mrs Hinch put in her Dishmatic?’ ‘What does Mrs Hinch clean her floors with?’) and an Amazon link to a Mrs Hinch Ultimate Cleaning Bundle, listed by the presumably unauthorised seller Gifthamperz, priced at £32.99. The aesthetic differences alone between Russell’s and Hinchcliffe’s recommended products – the visual onslaught of clashing colours and gaudy branding versus own-brand basics – speaks to the rich tapestry, the broad church, that is CleanTok. Incidentally, when asked for her opinion on Mrs Hinch and her side of CleanTok, Russel’s gave the following assessment: “Very often, these things are put out in a way that makes people who are unable or unwilling to do it feel a bit f****** s***, really.” 

Never one to mince her words, Russell’s assessment prompts me to consider the intention and impact behind this sort of content. You yourself may well be questioning the merit of the 1000 words I have just spent discussing the particulars of an internet subgenre that no one above the age of 40 will likely ever have heard of. It’s just TikTok, isn’t it, what harm can it do? What are these kinds of videos for – is it to educate, to serve as entertainment, to show off, to provide an example, an ideal? How can we discern the difference between content made to educate, to provide instruction and genuine help, and that which, deliberately or not, makes us feel a bit f****** s***? In an age where social media and having one’s own personal brand is becoming (has become already) a legitimate, lucrative and grudgingly respected job in its own right, the lines are becoming increasingly blurred, and this is never so perfectly encapsulated as by lifestyle content, under whose umbrella fall sensationally popular subgenres such as morning routines, evening routines and the dreaded Sunday reset, the trend that inspired this piece in the first place.  

The Sunday reset is what it sounds like: ‘resetting’ your living space on a Sunday in order to prepare for the coming week. In these videos, you will see the video’s creator doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, wiping down the surfaces, jiffing the sink, the hob, sweeping, mopping and sometimes, to top it all off, even cooking in their newly immaculate kitchen. On the few occasions where I have attempted to do a similar Sunday reset in my own flat, doing all my chores in one satisfying sweep so I can enter the new week riding a high of self-satisfaction, I have practically had a nervous breakdown. It might just be me, but I found trying to do a week’s worth of cleaning in one morning supremely stressful. My stab at the breezily edited, lo-fi soft jazz soundtracked, aesthetically pleasing Sunday reset turned out to be just me rushing around my flat in a giant T shirt, manically spraying Mr Muscle, half listening to a podcast, trying not to cry. By now I have come to terms with the fact that I will never be a Sunday reset girl – I have to do my chores in gradual increments like a right loser – but at first I was annoyed at myself, and stupidly baffled as to why I couldn’t do it, when my For You Page was full of people who apparently could.  

But of course, social media and TikTok is a performance; whether these creators in fact do these sorts of things in their private lives when the cameras aren’t rolling is anyone’s guess. Normally, when we are exposed to advertising – whether it be ad breaks on the telly, the product placements clunkily shoehorned into 80s/90s films or those cheesy product demonstrations on QVC you watch out of boredom in the dentist’s waiting room – we are aware, nine times out of ten, that we are being advertised to, and so on instinct an wall of scepticism goes up, a shield that the advert has to either charm its way around or beat into submission. The Advertising Standards Agency, who since 2018 has published several Influencers’ Guides on how to label content correctly and fined several influencers for their failure to do so, is unequivocal on the subject: “Consumers must always be aware when they are being advertised to, and both brands and influencers have a responsibility to ensure the content makes that reality clear upfront.” But it becomes a lot harder to remember this – to remain critical, suspicious, sceptical – when you are in your home watching someone you feel like you know, in their home, often quite literally in their pyjamas, charmed and disarmed by the intimacy and candour of seeing a stranger water their plants, wash their clothes, straighten their sleep-rumpled sheets.  

 

Even if these videos themselves are not sponsored, wouldn’t it still be fair to call them an advert of sorts? Aren’t they aspirational, an ideal, showing a way of life that you may well be comparing your own to, most of the trappings of which you can purchase on that TikToker’s Amazon storefront? You could have watched your favourite creator do their skincare routine, clean their bathroom or cook their dinner 20 times before, using and praising products they’re not getting paid to promote, and have thought nothing of it. So by the 21st video, where they’re using and praising products that they are getting paid to promote, you’ll probably hardly notice the difference; the sense of trust and familiarity has already been established. Despite how it may come across, I don’t begrudge creators at all for doing brand partnerships or sponsored content; everyone has to make money somehow, and if you can do it with an Instagram post, then good for you. But it’s meant that advertising is more persuasive and harder to spot nowadays, something I think worth bearing in mind as you are scrolling. Is the content you consume, whether sponsored or not, trying to make you feel a certain way? Is anyone benefitting from or profiting off that emotion it’s produced in you, and if so, who?  

 

For my part, I know myself enough well enough to know that I need to take this type of aspirational, beautifully shot lifestyle content with a hefty pinch of salt, and keep my consumption of it to a minimum. To my mind it is the digital equivalent of going into IKEA: it feels so satisfying and soothing to walk its halls and gaze at the beautifully arranged, immaculately clean fake kitchens – see the pinboard on the wall with the weekly schedule of the family we could be, the life we could have – but it also makes me feel inferior, because my reality neither looks nor feels anything like it, nor do any of the kitchens I have ever been in, eaten delicious food in, lived-laughed-loved in. Not only do they know that dissatisfaction, they are banking on it, designing entire business models around it.  We the consumers don’t see the weeks of planning, countless meetings and moodboards and trial-and-error that must go into these, just like I don’t see the lifestyle TikTokers setting up their camera before they get back in bed and act out waking up for their morning routine. And yet I have to wonder how I would look from this angle too; how would my life hold up, how would I be judged, what would be my score in front of this audience that isn’t there? I live on my own and no one is watching and still I feel the pressure to perform, I still wonder how to do it ‘right’. This is the challenge, I think: finding a path that works for you, that meets your standards and preferences in a world where we are now, thanks to social media, constantly subjected to the simple but disconcerting fact of how other people live their lives, inevitably in a way that differs to yours. 

 

But back to considering the instructive/educational potential of CleanTok, its limits are perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that, when it comes to cleanliness, no one can agree anyway. Look in the comments of any cleaning video and you will find people squabbling like rats in a sack over the ‘best’ method, fuming that the creator hasn’t done it the way their gran did it, and generally stopping just short of calling that original creator a filthy reprobate. This roiling sea of holier-than-thou disagreement isn’t exclusive to TikTok but can be found across the internet. Every other week on Twitter, a renewed debate rages on about any of the following: how often you should wash, brush your teeth; should you have showers or baths; is it better to shower in the morning or the evening; should you use a loofah or flannel; should you wash raw meat before you cook it? The tide of discourse provoked by Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’ admission that they only wash their children “if [they] can see the dirt on them” could have launch a thousand ships. If you were on Twitter during the great ‘Do White People Wash Their Legs’ discussion of 2021, you should be entitled to financial compensation; I still think about it nearly every time I (and I do!) wash my legs in the shower. The never-ending debate should be proof enough of the simple fact that people are different, have different needs and different standards, and as long as that remains true, the cleanliness Olympics will play on ad nauseam.  

 

For my part, I’m not giving up on TikTok (sorry braincells), but I will be sticking with creators who take a more realistic, humane approach, like Ann Russell and KC Davis, a speaker and author I discovered in the process of writing this piece. Davis has over 1.5 million followers on TikTok, a podcast (aptly named Struggle Care) and a book, How To Keep House While Drowning, which has sold over 70,000 copies. Davis’ work aims to help people struggling with what she calls care tasks (both of oneself and one’s living space) due to physical and mental health issues, as well as just those “hard seasons of life” that we all experience. Her message is simple but powerful: mess is morally neutral, being messy is not a moral failing and does not make you a good or bad person. I second that, and would add that as long as you’re not a danger to yourself or others, keep living and cleaning however you like. Your space isn’t supposed to look like a show home, no-one’s coming to inspect it, so do what works for you. The harsh yet comforting truth of adult life is that everyone’s too wrapped up in their own lives to care or be watching anyway; that is, unless you fancy sharing it, and running the gauntlet of the Twitter/CleanTok comments, in which case, good luck and God’s speed to you.