“DO YOU THINK about me?”
So asks a disembodied voice at the beginning of a TikTok from user @velvet.mind. The question is followed by hypnotic synth pulses, hissing static, and sped-up, garbled human speech. An accompanying visual: a montage of immaculately made-up and stylish women who could all be models—indeed, some of them probably are. The text overlaid on the video reads “extreme beauty subliminal.”
The minute-long clip has nearly 300,000 likes and 1.4 million views. Why all this engagement for a bit of vaporwave ephemera? Because an online community of young women sincerely believe that sustained exposure to these sounds and images will improve their physical appearance.
According to the creator, the indecipherable words are a series of affirmations that include “My face is naturally symmetrical, balanced, and breathtaking” and “I have flawless, poreless, glowing skin.” Listeners are meant to subconsciously internalize and manifest such ideals; they echo that language in their replies, speaking their beauty goals into existence. “I am drop-dead gorgeous,” one comment reads.
Welcome to the world of “subliminals,” a subculture of feminine self-optimization that rests on the power of suggestion and hypnosis. Whereas recent media coverage has scrutinized young men’s extreme “looksmaxxing” strategies for enhancing their features, which arose from toxically misogynist web forums of the mid-2010s, the subliminals genre is perhaps even older (one subreddit dates back to 2012), albeit with far less mainstream recognition.
