Latest and The funniest online fad broke out in late January, when TikTok beauty influencers—many of them young white women — started uploading clips of a particular, but not particularly novel, skincare tip, as part of their nighttime skin care regimen: a face wash in Vaseline.
Called “slugging”, this practice is meant to act like a kind frozen age elixir. Its name is taken from a corner of Korean TikTok and alludes to snail slime, which has a similar luster to Vaseline (another popular brand used by tradesmen is Aquaphor). In one posted video that month, marketing student @ Abbikuy’s face was frozen in slime as she sound imitation by a Black creator, a popular tip on the app. The video is layered with the text: “When my mom asks why I go to bed I look like a fat founding father.” With 4.3 million views, this is one of her highest performing posts. But despite the viral appeal of the video, it’s nothing new. Oil has been used in black households for generations as a restorative balm — moisturizers, lubricants and healing ointments alike.
What the prevalence of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing and unmistakable American battle for ownership: masking cultural theft as cultural understanding. It’s no surprise that slugging videos have racked up hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven with appropriation. Ownership is a shared vocabulary across the app. Nothing is its own.
It’s no secret: Black culture drives popular culture. It was the “original pioneer,” as Felipe Luciano, a former television producer, put it. But sometimes I wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite for Black culture to become mainstream. What’s happening now is the rise of a phenomenon that began in the late 1980s, when corporations began deliberately exploiting Black cool as hip-hop was becoming a global force. Incorporating social media into this – allowing people to create, shape, and share whatever they want and call it their own, even if it doesn’t – further distorts those views. what we experience on these platforms. The feed filled with culture, translated across the screen of a creator who only cares about influence, becomes empty and garbled.
What is surprising, however, is how video slugging on TikTok — along with a host of other macro and micro crazes on the social network — has ushered in a remarkable and demanding new era. Created, driven and legitimized by social platforms, trends will never be the same.
The currency of a generation is measured by trends, the moments that make an era memorable. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of designers. Instead, what is considered interesting is often determined by how attractive a trend is to the rhythms of a particular platform. The artistic or cultural cache of an idea depends on how easily it can be implemented with the tools provided. Before the internet demanded our attention 24/7, TV, radio and lifestyle magazines very specifically captured the fervors, fusing youth culture to define determine the next fever. Evaluating fun is now a far more democratic endeavor, and the escalating speed of digital culture means that fads can appear and disappear before they reach their peak. Mediated across platforms, all trends have, to some extent, become memes, the primary language of the internet, the digital language we all speak.
