Glow Up and Gen. Z anxiety
Season seven of the fresh-faced and perhaps intimidatingly youthful (make-up for the metaverse, anyone?) Glow Up is currently airing. There’s a cohort of creative and talented hopefuls, West Country heartthrob Val Garland, and Dominic Skinner diligently trying to sell ‘bring in the models’ as a catchphrase, as if anything but ‘ding dong’ could take that mantle.
Although designed for a young audience, Glow Up welcomes intergenerational viewing, as we can all equally marvel at the incredible creations on show. With Gen. Z contestants, Boomer and Gen. X hosts – plus Millennial guest hosts – it has wide generational representation. Usually, we see divides between these different groups bridged by a shared love of make-up, creativity and innovation. However, one episode from this season showed a stark volte-face from business as usual.
In this episode (season 7, episode 6), the brief is to create a look based on ‘decadence’. The Boomer, Gen. X and Millennial hosts talk through their interpretation of the brief, specifying indulgence and luxury. Their reference points include precious gems and costume jewellery, a proliferation of prosthetics, and general maximalism, leaning into an idea of frivolous extravagance. In contrast, all but one of the Gen. Z contestants portray decadence as a gateway to corruption, colonialism, toxicity, over-consumption, and in one case, literally ‘the downfall of society’. Clearly, there are drastic generational differences in the interpretation of this brief.
Perhaps we could argue the contestants take this spin on decadence because it feels more artistically interesting. However, I think such a striking difference speaks to the Gen. Z experience. While other generations can consider decadence as enjoyable, Gen. Z acknowledge that consumption causes crisis, and that people and the planet are hurt by the choice to push too far. It is clear that indulging is no longer safe or fun, in the way it was seen to be by older generations.
Through their creations, the Gen. Z contestants show us how easy it is to picture things going wrong, or getting worse. Which, of course, is very aligned with their experience of the world so far, and with the increasingly scary future looming. It is interesting that other generations are not so tapped into this mentality: it’s as if they still have a sense of being at the party, while Gen. Z are bracing themselves for an arduous clean-up once the guests have departed. That seems a large and lonely burden to carry.
As a therapist working through COVID, I was struck by the onset of the pandemic actually decreasing some people’s anxiety levels, rather than exacerbating them. Although everything was suddenly a lot scarier and highly unpredictable, some people were comforted by the fact that everyone else was now feeling as anxious as they did. People were naming their fears and talking about them together, in completely new ways. Despite everyone’s pandemic experience being different, the globe was united in experiencing the same thing at the same time, and everyone’s mind was focussed on this one, huge, thing. Although it was something terrifying uniting us, both the sense of a universal project and being able to share our emotional response to it freely went a long way to easing some anxieties.
This is a key difference in Gen. Z’s experience of the everyday world and the COVID experience: now, not everyone is talking about these things. Now, the fears feel less universal, less central to the world’s focus – despite the scary things having far bigger consequences than COVID. Now, they’re left trying to recycle the sequins that everyone else has chucked with abandon over their model’s face. Perhaps an undertone to the contestants’ pieces is the flash of a v-sign to the judges: because, of course, they are a part of the industries that the contestants are citing as having gone too far and caused damage. It will be interesting to see how the contestants create their own space within the same industries, from their new perspectives: how will they make up, after what previous generations have done?