I’m in a completely toxic relationship with Instagram “Cleanfluencers”. On one hand, they have revolutionised how I felt about cleaning my house . I have been taught by adverts and a post-feminist society to believe that cleaning and tidying my home is not just boring and tedious, it is an anti-feminist act.
But then I got myself a house and a family and I realised that when you have a home and a family you will tidy and clean almost constantly, even if chores are divided fairly. It never ends and it’s not because you’re a woman, it’s because that’s life and you have to make peace with it somehow. Those Instagram cleaning ladies have given me the gift of understanding that the never-ending cycle of housework is not “unfairly” targeted at just me.
Yet while I was supine, gorging myself on my daily allotted 15 minutes of Instagram cleanfluencing, and learning this positive lesson, I started to notice quite how much stuff these types of accounts have. Quite how many single-use wipes are binned. Quite how many toxic cleaning products are merrily swished down the plughole.
One account that I cannot look away from in both envy and horror belongs to Rochelle Stewart, aka @operation_niki. Stewart lives in Nashville, USA, with her husband and three children. In her videos she cleans, demonstrates elaborate multi-step skincare routines and re-stocks her enormous fridge with nightmare quantities of ultra-processed foods.
The sheer volume of crap she has in her house �.