As The World Burns, Cleanfluencers Tidy Up

They want you to clean with them. They’re cleaning with steam, using elaborate whirring tools, and stirring up buckets of cleaning brews. “Clean with me,” they incant, beckoning you to join them as they restock their laundry products, decanting scent beads and detergent pods into aesthetic apothecary jars or into clever dispensers that line the shelves of The Container Store. They are cleanfluencers, and they are legion.

There’s Barbara Costello, who goes by BrunchWithBabs, and who promises to teach you to care for your home in a way your “mom never told you.” In contrast, there’s Jack Callaghan, whose sped-up videos of his “super Sunday resets” offer a twist on the usual notions of how most men in their 20s spend their weekends. “So therapeutic,” one fan commented on a recent Callaghan post. “So satisfying,” said another. Taking care of your own space has obvious mental health appeal; it seems watching someone else taking care of theirs is similarly soothing.

Really, it’s no wonder. Early 2020 saw an explosion of cleanfluencer content, which has only grown in popularity as we continue to navigate an especially chaotic time in history. (On TikTok, the hashtag #cleantok has more than 97 billion views.) “Finding order in chaos will always be appealing, especially when the world may be feeling chaotic,” says Jessica Ek, the senior director of digital communications at the American Cleaning Institute.

The COVID of it all cannot be separated from a discussion of the rise of cleanfluencers, but it would be facile to draw a single straight line between the pandemic and an obsession with #CleanWithMe videos. (Eleven billion views and counting on that one, by the way.) After all, the instinct to seek a trusted voice to guide us through life’s little messes is nothing especially new.

“Finding order in chaos will always be appealing, especially when the world may be feeling chaotic.”

Mrs. Beeton, an authority on household management, rose to prominence in Victorian England; in 1950s America, the newspaper column Hints From Heloise emerged to answer questions about cleaning hairspray residue from wooden doors and removing cigarette burns from saucers; in 1990, Martha Stewart launched the magazine Martha Stewart Living, which has covered everything from bathing chow chows to cleaning wallpaper (file to: Very Martha Problems). Cleanfluencing is not, in fact, even a modern construct — the ancient Greeks had their own version in Hygieia, the goddess of health, cleanliness, and hygiene, to whom offerings of a clean house were common.

And yet there is something different happening here, in this particular time: With the rise of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, publishing cleaning content is no longer subject to traditional forms of gatekeeping. And that means there is money, and a lot of it, to be made from this type of content, both for the creators themselves and for the brands that partner with them.

“It’s proven to be incredibly successful,” says Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, “because consumers have these deep parasocial bonds with the content creators. If you have a woman talking about the product that she uses, it’s going to perform better than just slapping a banner out on a website or doing email marketing, because it's leveraging that parasocial bond.”

“One other differentiator,” Lorenz says of traditional media versus influencer content, “is the niche market. You can serve so many more niches on the Internet at scale. Previously, the barrier to producing media was very high and reaching an audience was difficult with these platforms.”

You can find a cleanfluencer whose home looks like yours, whose laundry looks like yours, whose lifestyle looks like yours. Julian Thomas, a DIY and home lifestyle expert, was inspired to create content that reflected the values his house-proud parents instilled in him growing up in the D.C. suburbs.

“Societal gender norms for housework weren’t very common in my house,” Thomas says. “My dad would cook, and my mom would take out the trash. Everyone did what needed to be done.” As an adult, he adopted that philosophy and found an enthusiastic audience for his cleaning and homemaking content that he says represents a “shedding of toxic masculinity.” Thomas discovered there were other upsides in turning his chores into content: “As a Leo, I loved the attention, so I ran with it. Also, I really like showing the world a different side of Black masculinity than what is typically portrayed in the media.”

The flip side of representation, in a way, is voyeurism: Instead of seeking out people who are cleaning a home that looks like yours, you may find yourself peering into the home of someone whose life looks like none you’ve ever seen. Millions of people watch the Real Housewives; why should it be any surprise that millions of people want to watch real housewives, even if that real housewife is a gay man in Newcastle, England?

“To watch a room go from junky to spotless in under 90 seconds provides some sort of relief for folks.”

What’s funny, though, is as entertaining as these videos are, it’s not clear that they’re actually all that instructive. It’s hypnotizing to watch a space go from chaotic to orderly in the span of 60 seconds, but can you really tell what, exactly, the cleanfluencer is doing to achieve the end result? Comments on many of these posts ask about the products used, the methods employed — the action in many of these short clips is moving too fast for viewers to clock the details. In a recent headline on the phenomenon, the Wall Street Journal claimed that “Millions of People See Staying Home and Cleaning as Their Idea of a Good Time” — but what’s more likely is that millions of people see watching other people cleaning as their idea of a good time.

After all, much of the appeal of cleanfluencers’ content is, as Thomas puts it, “getting the satisfaction of seeing something get accomplished. To watch a room go from junky to spotless in under 90 seconds provides some sort of relief for folks. It has a calming effect.” Lorenz agrees. “A lot of cleaning content is very soothing,” she says. “It plays into that ASMR-type appeal. There’s also this natural progression to it that’s very visual, where something starts dirty and then it ends up clean.”