What ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos are actually delivering
A person, bare-faced, looks into the camera. As they tell you a story, they conduct the ritual. First, comes the cleanser, then the moisturiser, then the foundation- sometimes it is generous and changes the contours of a face and other times, it is sparing, just a touch here and there making a subtle difference.
Sometimes, the person is a celebrity using an expensive product or getting ready for a glittering award function. Sometimes, it is a Blinkit delivery driver, showing how he uses a regular moisturiser before wearing his bright yellow delivery shirt.
I don’t know about you, but I am frequently soothed by Get Ready With Me videos, even the overly performative ones. This may be because GRWM videos show us self-assembly in real time. They clearly illustrate the otherwise invisible labour to get from who you are to how you want to be seen by the world.
To some extent, we are all performing our own private GRWMs, all day long. And this may be its appeal. A visible version of something we all do privately. Moods change and contexts differ. We take on some roles easily or extricate ourselves from them. First this, then that, and somehow a personality is constructed and held together. There are even the un-GRWM videos where the make-up comes off, the pajamas come on and people share their wind-down rituals. By any measure, it’s one of the internet’s most persistent genres.
These videos show us that the self is not as fixed as we think it to be. That reinvention is possible and we can participate in the creation of a new self. We too can be demure, or mindful — or look “like a wow.” It’s why these videos cut across cultures, travel quickly and continue to reverberate around the world.
Appearance plays an outsized role here because it is one of the fastest ways to recalibrate the self. Wearing clothes that fit well, grooming the face, or striking a pose, each of these small moves can have a profound psychological effect. Research backs this up. The concept, which is called ‘enclothed cognition,’ shows that what we wear subtly alters how we feel and behave. GRWM videos dramatise this process without explaining it.
This may be partly why watching others “get ready” feels regulating. The sequence is predictable. The pace is deliberate. There is no demand on you to change, only an open invitation to participate in someone else’s ritual of preparation.
Through these snippets from strangers, we start to see that becoming presentable, coherent, and ready is an ongoing practice. It can be repeated, adjusted, and tried again tomorrow.
That may be what these videos ultimately deliver: a quiet belief that the self is mutable and that we have some agency in how we meet the world, even if only a little at a time.
Deliverables
