You already know her. Beige wardrobe, perfect skin, and a fridge that looks like a wellness brand’s press release. She’s slim, glowing, effortlessly chic and crucially, always selling you something, whether it’s a serum or a lifestyle.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with taking care of your health, eating avocado toast, or going to pilates. But the clean girl isn’t just an individual choice, it’s a template. It sells the illusion that “wellness” is simple and attainable, when in reality it requires disposable income, endless free time, and a very specific kind of body. Minimalism, but make it £40 water bottles and a 12-step skincare routine.
And here’s the real problem: when food is clean, it means other food is dirty. When bodies are clean, it means other bodies are not. The language may sound wholesome, but it’s the same old moral hierarchy of diet culture dressed up in pistachio-green branding. That’s not mindfulness, that’s orthorexia in soft lighting.
This aesthetic is exclusionary by design. Women who are working two jobs, women with disabilities, women of colour, women with acne, where do they fit in? The reality is that they don’t. Because the “clean girl” is built on the fantasy of perfection: slim but not muscular, natural but heavily curated, rich but pretending to be minimalist.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another TikTok trend, but the consequences are bigger. Diet culture is insidious precisely because it adapts. It never presents itself as harmful; instead, it's self-improvement, optimisation, discipline. The clean girl aesthetic makes it aspirational, aesthetic, and marketable. And while the look will inevitably expire, the machinery behind it —the wellness industry — will only find a new name, a new product, and a new way to tell women they’re not enough.
Because that’s what diet culture has always been: a moving target that keeps us chasing an ideal that doesn’t exist.