The latest and most laughable online fad erupted in late January, when beauty influencers on TikTok—many of them young white women—started uploading clips of a particular, but not particularly novel, skincare hack as part of their nighttime regimen: lathering their faces in Vaseline.
Called “slugging,” the practice is meant to act as a kind of age-freezing elixir. Its name is drawn from a corner of South Korean TikTok and alludes to snail slime, which has a gloss similar to Vaseline (another common brand used by sluggers is Aquaphor). In one video posted that month, marketing student @Abbikuy’s face is caked in the gooey substance as she mimics the audio of a Black creator, a common trope on the app. The video is layered with text that reads: “When my bf asks me why I come to bed looking like a greasy founding father.” At 4.3 million views, it is among her highest-performing posts. But despite the video’s viral appeal, it was nothing new. Petroleum jelly has been used in Black households for generations as a restorative balm—equal parts moisturizer, lubricant, and healing ointment.
What the popularization of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing, and unmistakably American, battle over ownership: the masking of cultural theft as cultural literacy. It should come as no surprise that slugging videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven through with appropriation. Ownership is a shared vocabulary on the app. Nothing is ever one’s alone.
It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream. What’s happening currently is an acceleration of a phenomenon that began in the late 1980s, when corporations started to deliberately mine Black cool as hip-hop was becoming a global force. The incorporation of social media into this—which enables people to make, shape, and share anything they want and call it their own, even when it’s not—further helps to distort what we experience on these platforms. Feeds are flooded with culture that, translated through the screen of a creator who is only interested in clout, comes across as hollow and cheapened.
What is surprising, however, is how slugging videos on TikTok—along with a cacophony of other macro- and micro-crazes across the social internet—have ushered in a remarkable, and remarkably demanding, new period. Generated, propelled, and legitimized by social platforms, trends will never be the same.
A generation’s currency is measured in trends, the moments that make an era mouthwateringly memorable. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform. An idea’s artistic or cultural cachet depends on how easily it can be executed with the tools provided. Before the internet demanded our attention 24/7, television, radio, and lifestyle magazines had a very specific grip on the zeitgeist, combing youth culture to determine the next craze. Now, gauging cool is a far more democratic endeavor, and the escalating speed of digital culture means that fads can come and go before they even peak. Mediated through platforms, all trends, to a degree, become memes, our primary language of the internet, the digital tongue we all speak.
