Shelly Hendy was at home, recovering from a miscarriage, and depressed. When a few friends suggested that she watch cleaning videos to relax, Hendy thought the idea was “ridiculous,” she told me recently. But then she started watching videos posted by Sophie Hinchcliffe, who has over two million Instagram followers. Soon enough, she was hooked.
Hinchcliffe, better known as Mrs. Hinch, is perhaps the best-known of the “Cleanfluencers,” a class of mostly female social-media stars known for posting videos of themselves cleaning their homes. They’ve emerged over the past few years as a niche within the larger trend of lifestyle and wellness gurus, and some of the most popular ones attract millions of video views, leading to book deals and product lines. One Cleanfluencer, Megan Hickman, says she was able to purchase a 4,500-square-foot house in Savannah, Georgia thanks to the income she’s generated on her YouTube channel “Love Meg.”
In the United States and Canada, Cleanfluencers tend to find their audiences on YouTube, where they post time-lapse videos with titles like “Clean With Me” or “Extreme Cleaning,” that last anywhere between 10 and 25 minutes long. They usually include calm play-by-play commentary sharing tips and providing glimpses of the person’s home life, as the kind of non-offensive music you’d expect in a doctor’s office waiting room plays in the background. Over in the United Kingdom, the cleaning community largely clusters on Instagram, where cleanfluencers post cleaning updates to their Instagram Stories, and product recommendations and inspirational quotes on their grids.
All told, it’s inoffensive and unflashy, which is part of the appeal. Cleanfluencers wear the kind of clothing you’d expect anyone to dress in to do chores, making it easier for viewers to see themselves in the footage. And unlike the makeup and clothing haul videos other influencers post, Cleanfluencers recommend cleaning products that are cheap, so most people can afford them. Comments on cleanfluencer posts are friendly, complimentary, and apolitical. And of course, each cleaning video has a happy ending; a home that’s spick and span.
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Influencers of many genres have built followings off of letting the Internet into their lives, and seeing them do the innocuous. Yet, these cleaning videos have a much more profound significance for many people like Hendy. “When I was in such a bad place, and I was so depressed, I found it hard to have the motivation to get up and do anything,” she explained. “But watching someone else cleaning, it’s an achievable thing.”
Social media is often the highlight reel of people’s lives, Hendy said, and her Instagram feed made her feel worse after the miscarriage. Scrolling through her feed as she sat at home in Hertfordshire, north of London, she’d see pregnancy announcements, pictures from Friday nights out in the city, dispatches from fancy trips to Dubai—things Hendy found aspirational but that she couldn’t do at the time. But in the Cleanfluencer community she found a place where people took refuge from the chaos of the world via the simple and universal act of doing chores. Hendy became excited to try new cleaning products. She began recording short videos of herself scrubbing around the house for her own new Instagram account, @MissHendyHome. Within weeks, she had hundreds of followers, and now thousands. With this supportive community—and taking a cue from Cleanfluencers like @Mancleany and @cleaning_my_anxiety_away who talked about their anxiety—Hendy also felt comfortable discussing her own mental health on her account, and why she turned to cleaning as a relief from stress.
“You can’t control everything in your life,” Hendy said. “You might have a very stressful job, but you can make your bed, you can at least be on top of that aspect of your life and sort of feel like you have your shit together.”
Kiera Inzana, a 20-year-old in York, Pennsylvania, told me that if she has trouble falling asleep, the time-lapse cleaning videos on YouTube help relax her. “With anxiety comes fear of what’s next and of lack of control in life,” she said. “Watching people clean their rooms and controlling their personal space makes my head stop rushing around for a bit.” A 19-year-old in South Carolina named Karen Mims said she’s watched these videos for a few years and feels better about herself by seeing that other people have messier rooms than she does. Lexi Jones, a 25-year-old in Pittsburgh, said she “gets extreme satisfaction out of cleaning my own house,” and she finds it soothing to watch someone else’s clutter disappear little by little in a time-lapse. “I think there’s a lot of aspects to our daily life that seems chaotic so watching something in a state of order is relaxing,” said Sahar Shahidi, a 24-year-old fan of cleaning videos who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
Part of the appeal is atavistic: Humans have evolved to develop tendencies that are good for us, explained Sam Gosling, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Cleaning gets rid of germs and other substances that could make us sick, Gosling said. But, of course, “for 99 percent of our evolutionary history there wasn’t a medium for representing it.”
“The rise of cleaning influencers is fundamentally about order,” said Stephanie Baker, who teaches sociology at City University of London, and authored a book on lifestyle gurus. “It is about more than having a clean home. It is about creating a structured environment in which to flourish.”
Research has found that women who felt their homes were chaotic or messy had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and that people with clean homes tend to live healthier overall. But Reid Wilson, a psychologist in North Carolina who has written a book about dealing with worry, said it makes sense that people can find a similar sense of anxiety relief through simply observing others cleaning. He explained that watching a time-lapse video of something mundane and attempting to track all the changes can help curb anxiety by simply taking up more space in a person’s working memory. “There’s very little room left for the worries,” Wilson said. “Less worries lead to less anxiety.”
Brooke Erin Duffy, a Cornell University communications professor who wrote a book about women in the social media economy, said Cleanfluencers remind her of the women’s magazines that flourished throughout the 20th century. Cleanfluencers, she said, similarly take “something that is typically invisible and typically in the private space into the public realm.”
The vast majority of the Cleanfluencers are female, and while the trend could be seen as fitting into conservative mores of women taking care of the home, a number of the creators make a point that they are feminists, and appeal to independent working women. Several, like Melissa Maker of Clean My Space, also feature their husbands or partners and note that chore duties are evenly split off-camera.
[Read: Doing dishes is the worst]
Maker originally created cleaning videos to draw attention to her cleaning business in Toronto. Around 2013, she noticed her channel started to take off. She started receiving emails from fans: widowers who felt lost because their late spouse had previously taken care of the cleaning; mothers whose children had severe ADHD, and Maker’s videos helped them learn to do a task. A video on emotional clutter inspired messages from viewers who said they didn’t know what to do with stuff left behind by a parent that recently died.
“We get emails like this every single day. It is unbelievable,” Maker said. “We’ve helped people get through depression. We’ve helped people with mobility issues.” The personal and emotional connection viewers have to the cleaning videos may help explain why the comments and interactions between Cleanfluencers and the fans are almost universally positive. “People just appreciate that you’re trying to help,” Maker said. “Even though I hate cleaning, I really, really love the impact that this has had on people.”
from Technology | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Kkggu3