Understandings of Mental Illness Communicated by Social Media Makeup Trends

A Case Study Using Instagram and TikTok

Abstract

Content warning: mental illness, self-harm, and suicide.

The 21^st century has witnessed the massive rise of social media platforms. Perhaps most notably, this decade has included the emergence of platforms with photo and video-based content such as Instagram and TikTok. With this has come the rise of social media trends; one such trend involves attempting to use makeup to represent the experience of mental illness. Social media is massively popular and influential. This, along with the well-studied connection between art (which makeup is) and understandings of mental illness, makes analyzing messages viewers takeaway from social media makeup trends depicting mental illness is significant. This essay utilizes more than a hundred submissions of makeup trends on both Instagram and TikTok, a majority of which claim to represent depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, as a case study through which to explore answers to the following research question: what understandings of mental illness are communicated by social media makeup trends? It analyzes these makeup portrayals and considers the messages constructed by and within them to determine what they communicate to viewers about mental illness (whether consciously or not). This essay argues that through makeup looks posted on social media, young women represent mental illness as a source of suffering involving a loss of control and fractured self-identity where they struggle to be recognized due to their invisible illness. As such, they attempt to make what is invisible, visible to others. In doing so, many suggest a particular involvement of the brain which, perhaps problematically, reinforces a medical model of mental illness.