A new TikTok trend is helping people find beauty in their features. Set to an audio clip of 90s cult film The Craft, the trend involves women spotlighting their so-called “witchy” facial features – think: a pointed nose or prominent chin – and celebrating them for their power and tradition. The most viral example was posted by the user @amfibia16, who looks seductively into the camera and smirks menacingly in a video that has nearly ten million views, with thousands of comments praising her ‘unique’ and ‘powerful’ beauty.
Historically speaking, ‘witchy’ features have rarely been celebrated in the West. In fairy tales, witches are portrayed as old and haggard, covered in warts and hunched over a bubbling cauldron – the antithesis to the youth, daintiness and ‘femininity’ that is usually celebrated. According to Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, author of Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives, witches represent the inverse of everything that the patriarchy perceives as good in women: they are intelligent, powerful and self-assured being who needed to be suppressed. The tendency therefore is to portray them as ugly and evil.
@amfibia16 Тгк: алёна амфибия
“Real-life women who were called witches were often herbalists and consultants. Professionals, in other words,” she explains. “So, we had to caricature them as a little weird and maybe as ugly in order to keep the social order.” Whitefield-Madrano believes this trend is – to an extent – an empowering one. “This trend is about women being the subject, not the object. She’s controlling the narrative,” she says. For those partaking in the trend, it’s not about tweaking their appearance to conform to unattainable beauty standards – but rather creating a space for more inclusive beauty.
Chloe Reed, whose witch beauty video has received over 130,000 likes at time of writing, says she is glad her nose shape and facial structure is finally being celebrated on TikTok. “At the same time, I don’t feel it is seen as beauty so much as uniqueness. It does however make me feel empowered, seeing women with similar faces to me going viral and being uplifted.” According to Reed, the trend feels like a small step in the right direction when it comes to bending society’s rigid and unrelenting beauty standards. “I think many women are partaking in the trend to feel a sense of belonging,” she explains. “There’s definitely relief when you see someone being celebrated for having the same features as yourself.”
Caitlin Holly, another woman who participated in the trend, agrees that it gives people a platform to reclaim striking features from the negative connotations that have frequently been tied to them in the past. “I love seeing other people really appreciate features that usually would be something people would make fun of,” she explains. “I’ve always had witchy features such as a bigger sharper nose and pointy chin, and these definitely made me insecure – especially when witches were seen as undesirable, ugly or even evil.” The trend is anything but superficial, she explains – it’s representative of a sea change in society towards appreciating more unconventional beauty. “There has been a shift to appreciate and admire being different.”
But is there a more sinister undertone to the trend that we risk brushing over? Ultimately, all beauty trends are small cogs in the TikTok consumerism machine – certain features can have their day in the sun (for a limited period only!) before they’re discarded at breakneck speed in favour of an entirely different look. One day injectables are à la mode, the next, everyone is getting their filler dissolved.
“It’s the same old same old, regarding overemphasis on women’s appearance as a form of social and emotional currency,” says Dara Greenwood, associate professor of Psychological Science and director of Media Studies at Vassar. “Any beauty trend has the potential to tie self-worth to whether or not we are achieving an ideal, and keeping our attentional focus on the outside, versus the inside.”
On the flip-side, Greenwood explains, this trend does represent something different when held up against the plethora of other beauty trends on social media – there’s undoubtedly a refreshing edge to it. “Young girls and women are attempting to push back against beauty standards that accentuate child-like features, like big eyes, a big forehead, small nose and chin. They may be attempting to claim a more empowering identity,” Greenwood says.
Granted, most online trends teeter on toxic – but ‘witch’ beauty feels less about striving towards unattainable standards for the sake of fitting in, and more about forging an empowered female community. In many cases, boxing oneself into a rigid aesthetic category can be objectifying – clinically analysing whether or not you’re a ‘bottom teeth talker’, for example, or whether you’re ‘boy pretty’ or ‘girl pretty’ – but it’s not always inherently negative. “Categories can be limiting but they can also be informative or fun,” says Hannah McCann, senior lecturer in cultural studied at The University of Melbourne. “From astrology to gender, people use categories to define, understand, explain and communicate their identities.”
According to McCann, determining whether beauty trends like this should be condemned or celebrated is a dangerously binary way of looking at things. “Beauty practices can help people feel more in control of their bodies and how they present to the world,” she explains. “Beauty practices can sometimes feel like a burden imposed from the outside, but they can sometimes feel like something experimental that helps us figure out who we are and how we want to be perceived. Beauty is not either or, it is all of these things – often simultaneously.”
