Lashgate, #BeautyTok Burnout, & De-influencing: Trying to Establish Mental Ad-Block

Marya Tiwana

Section Editor: Campus Life, Arts and Entertainment & Metropolis

This January, TikTok’s largest beauty controversy in recent years hit the fan: Lashgate.

Mikayla Noguiera is a familiar personality to anyone who’s perused #BeautyTok, favoured by the algorithm for creating content people felt was blunt, straightfoward, and honest. She had been sitting at nearly 14 million followers, before things came crashing down. Noguiera had already taken a break from TikTok, after her complaints about working as an influencer were criticized and memed by those who found her comments ‘out of touch’ and ‘tone-deaf.’ Some also felt that her comments had been taken out of their original context, where she was responding to a hate comment urging her to get a 9-to5 job.

Nearly six months later, in a review and paid ad for the latest L’Oréal mascara, she appeared to put on false eyelashes between clips, which inflamed viewer sentiments once more. Comically enough, Mikayla states that her lashes “look just like false lashes” to start the review; however, this was not enough to stem the wave of negativity. Criticism poured in from casual watchers, previously-adoring fans, other influencers, companies, and previously obsolete beauty creators, who took the opportunity to chastise her for what appeared to be blatant lies.

As TikTok worked on wearing out the #lashgate tag, with many videos under the tag sitting at over one million views each, and likely more than 100 million total, discussions popped up, with many questioning the authenticity of these socalled ‘honest influencers.’ This set the stage for de-influencing to crawl up the ranks in popularity.

De-influencing began as an effort to combat the overconsumption spreading across social media, but especially on TikTok. Initially, it sought to do exactly what it sounded like: to stop convincing people to buy more, do more, have more, and be more, and instead, to remind people that the direction social media offers isn’t always direction we should

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