The Clean Girl Aesthetic is Part of a Bigger Erasure Problem

When beauty and racism combine

Whitney Alese
Momentum
Published in
4 min readAug 18, 2022

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For weeks, beauty sites and pages have been promoting the “clean girl” aesthetic, a look that is essentially a maturation of the “model off duty” look with minimal makeup, glowing skin, full natural brows, pulled back hair (bonus points if you are using a claw clip) a glossy lip, and bold gold jewelry, usually…

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Whitney Alese
Momentum

Whitney Alese is a writer & podcaster, featured in WIRED Magazine (Sept 2020) & I-D Magazine (Dec. 2021), and NBC (Jan 2023). She is based in Philadelphia.