Growing up, I was always drawn to anything soft, pretty, and glamorous, from makeup tutorials to outfit planning to quiet moments of routine. But I often felt alone in those interests. My mother, a minimalist shaped by the aesthetics of the 1990s, wore no makeup and kept her femininity practical, almost invisible. She was effortlessly thin, elegant in a way that didn’t need embellishment. My sister and father shared a love for sports, stats, and loud games on TV,  a language I never understood and still don’t care to learn. In a house full of people, I felt quietly out of place, especially when it came to expressing my version of girlhood. YouTube became something like a secret refuge. Long-form girly vlogs; the kind where someone films their “day in the life”,  applies makeup while talking to the camera, or walks through a favorite products haul,  felt soothing, safe, and completely mine. These videos were calming in their repetition and immersive in their aesthetic: soft lighting, slow edits, glass skin, silk robes, blush palettes. I could get lost in the simplicity of someone else doing their makeup, not because I was looking to change myself, but because it felt like a way of understanding myself.

There’s also something emotional, even therapeutic, about watching these women live lives that feel curated but real enough to hold onto. I sometimes worry that my connection to them edges on the parasocial,  that I know too much about people I’ll never meet. But the truth is, it brings me comfort. It’s not just passive watching. It’s an active, emotional kind of learning. I study Toni Bravo’s videos because she looks like me. We have the same skin tone, a similar sense of style, and watching her feels like a kind of visibility I didn’t grow up with. Finding beauty creators who looked like me was rare when I was younger, and in Toni, I see someone who not only reflects me, but also offers practical advice for looking and feeling good in my own skin. Lauren Luo, in contrast, lives a life I know I’ll never have, she shops vintage, travels endlessly, and floats through the world without a 9-to-5 job or visible stress. But I love her for that, too. Her detachment from reality feels aspirational, not in the material sense, but emotionally. She seems unbothered, unburdened. Watching her is like watching a version of myself that doesn’t carry so much, a version that just lets go.

Over the past few years, long-form “girly vlog” content on YouTube has become more than just background noise for me, rather it’s become a kind of emotional anchor. Videos where creators film their daily routines, apply makeup, or talk softly about their favorite products have a strange way of providing a sense of calm I struggle to access in my own life. These creators are not just entertaining, but because display different versions of femininity that feel either deeply familiar or impossibly aspirational. In this essay, I reflect on how my relationship to this genre has evolved, using Joke Hermes’ concept of everyday media use as emotionally meaningful practice, and Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken’s insights into how media shapes identity through visual culture.  I argue that girly vlogs soothe and sustain viewers by selling a fantasy of femininity that is calm, luxurious, and disciplined,  a fantasy that reflects and reinforces broader structures of race, class, and gender.

To better understand the emotional pull and cultural significance of girly vlogs, it helps to turn to media theory, particularly the work of Joke Hermes and the duo Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken. In Media, Meaning, and Everyday Life, Hermes challenges the idea that media audiences are passive recipients. Instead, she proposes that “meaning is not simply consumed, but actively made,” emphasizing that people use media as a “resource for managing the self and one’s emotions in everyday life” (Hermes, 1993). Watching girly vlogs isn’t just about aesthetic pleasure or killing time for me; it’s about managing stress, softening the day’s chaos, and grounding myself in something familiar. These videos offer a daily ritual of gentle attention,  a space where I can slow down, observe someone else’s curated life, and in doing so, process my own emotions. As Hermes frames it, media becomes a way to “perform and rehearse identities,” and my repeated engagement with these vlogs is part of how I shape my own femininity, even if it doesn’t fully match the lives I see on screen.

Cartwright and Sturken, in Practices of Looking, take this further by arguing that media doesn’t merely reflect the world but actually structures how we see it. They describe visual culture as a system that produces meaning, not just through content, but through style, framing, and repetition. Girly vlogs are built on a very specific visual code: soft lighting, pastel tones, skincare textures, whispery voiceovers, clean apartment aesthetics. These elements are not neutral. They reinforce a version of femininity that is delicate, affluent, emotionally regulated, and self-possessed. “Images are invested with power,” Sturken and Cartwright write, and that power lies in their ability to “naturalize” social norms, especially around gender and class (Sturken & Cartwright, 2018, p. 10). Watching Lauren Luo sip matcha in vintage Chanel while traveling to Japan on a whim isn’t just entertaining, it quietly instructs. It shows me what a beautiful life could look like, while also making that life feel distant, aspirational, and, in some ways, unattainable.

These theorists help clarify why this content is so magnetic. Hermes reveals the emotional labor viewers bring to media,  how we use it to care for ourselves, to cope, to daydream. Sturken and Cartwright expose the ideological work media performs, how it shapes our desires, our values, and our sense of what is “normal.” My attachment to girly vlogs, then, is both intimate and political. These videos soothe me, but they also discipline me. They teach me to value control, beauty, and softness, even when those qualities are often only accessible through wealth or privilege. Recognizing this tension doesn’t undo the comfort I feel, but it helps me name the systems that structure that comfort and why I’m drawn to it in the first place.

This brings me to the vlogs themselves, the actual, visual rituals that make up this genre and keep me coming back. In a recent video by Toni Bravo, she opens her “get ready with me” by lighting a candle, sipping iced coffee, and gently talking through her skincare. There’s a softness to the entire sequence: muted music, gentle camera angles, the soft clink of product lids. She speaks to the camera like a friend, casually explaining her favorite concealer for hyperpigmentation. What strikes me is how intimate it feels,  almost like I’m in the room with her. And because we share similar skin tones, her advice isn’t abstract or aspirational. It’s tangible. Her presence feels like a balm to the years I spent watching beauty tutorials where no one looked like me. 

Contrast that with Lauren Luo’s content, where the aesthetic remains soft but the world she inhabits is wildly different. In one vlog, she casually books a flight to Seoul, shops at Loewe, eats pastries by the water, and reflects on how she doesn’t feel “productive” enough lately. It’s both absurd and beautiful. There’s a strange comfort in watching someone live a life so untethered from financial stress or labor. And while I know her reality is curated, perhaps even edited to hide difficulty, I don’t watch her for realism. I watch her for emotional fantasy, for the feeling of being unburdened. As a viewer, I’m not just admiring her life; I’m rehearsing a version of mine where ease and pleasure are possible.

My relationship to girly vlogs hasn’t disappeared, but it has deepened and become complicated. I still watch them. I still let them play in the background while I clean or try to calm my anxiety. But I no longer watch them without noticing the patterns. I notice how these creators all live in high-rise apartments with neutral-toned furniture and expensive glassware. I notice how the same brands: Glossier, Mejuri, Chanel, Aritzia,  appear over and over again like a soft chorus of consumption. I notice how emotional wellness is always tied to routines, candles, gym sessions, and products. Watching used to feel purely soothing. Now it feels a little bit like watching a commercial for a life I’ll never fully have. And yet, that doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. I think one of the biggest shifts for me is realizing that I can hold both truths: that girly vlogs are genuinely comforting and that they participate in a larger system of aesthetic labor, digital femininity, and consumer capitalism. The comfort isn’t fake, but it’s structured. These creators are crafting a visual language of ease and control, and I’ve learned to speak that language fluently, even if I’m not always fluent in the reality behind it. The glow is real. So is the curation.

What I’ve learned, especially through Hermes, is that media doesn’t have to be “deep” to be meaningful. The fact that I turn to these videos when I feel most anxious, most lost, or most tender says something about the role they play in my life. I’m not ashamed of that. If anything, I’m grateful. They taught me how to pay attention to softness, not just as a look, but as a practice. A way of holding myself when the world feels hard. But I’ve also learned to be more careful. More discerning. Watching Lauren Luo book last-minute flights to Japan no longer makes me feel inadequate, but I also don’t mistake it for a life I should expect. Watching Toni Bravo still feels like a gift, but I now understand the labor and algorithms behind her visibility. I can love this content and still critique it. I can be soothed by the fantasy and still want something more expansive.

Girly vlogs haven’t lost their magic. They’ve just changed shape. They’ve gone from pure escape to something more textured: a space of comfort, beauty, and longing, yes, but also a site of cultural production, performance, and ideology. And maybe that’s what makes them so powerful. They’re not just about products or routines. They’re about who gets to feel at ease. Who gets to be soft? And what does it cost to maintain that softness? In the end, girly vlogs have become a kind of mirror, not just reflecting what I want, but showing me how I’ve been taught to want. They hold space for beauty, comfort, and emotional care in a world that often denies all three, especially to women who look like me. But they also come with limitations,  aesthetic, economic, and ideological. As I continue to grow, I’m learning how to hold that complexity without having to resolve it. I can find comfort in the glow of someone else’s morning routine, even as I question what makes that glow possible. I can study soft lighting and blush techniques while also studying the systems that make softness a privilege. Maybe that’s the real evolution: not letting go of the media that shaped me, but learning to live with it more consciously, with tenderness, and with eyes wide open.