My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on activism and resistance, and starts with Laura Cervi, whose focus is on makeup activism. Such activism responds to gendered violence, for instance in the context of the Ni Una Menos or Mahsa Amini Woman Life Freedom protests and more recently the war on Gaza, by appropriating platform-native beauty practices for political protests, such as makeup videos on TikTok.
This project engaged in a purposive sampling of hundreds of such videos from TikTok for a comparative multimodal analysis. TikTok is not a neutral channel in this, however, but shapes through its algorithms how such content becomes visible; this also leads content creators to adapt their practices of political articulation for greater visibility.
There are several formats emerging from this. The first is fake beauty tutorials, which mimic conventional makeup tutorial videos but serve as a cover for contentious political messages. This involves political narration during the makeup process itself. Alternatively, such videos may invert the logic of makeup transitions: here, the videos show a transformation from beauty to simulated injury. Context-specific protest anthems provide a musical structure for the performance. Finally, such videos may also use faces as a canvas for political messages: this includes political slogans, flags, activist symbols, and the names of victims.
Generally, beauty content is structurally privileged by the TikTok algorithm: it generates high engagement and therefore has elevated commercial relevance; this provides favourable conditions for platform visibility, then. Combined with popular beauty hashtags, then, these makeup videos engage in algorithmic hijacking, and use beauty as a tactical infrastructure for political visibility.
But in doing so, these videos also question the political implications of makeup itself, which typically follows and enforces generic, patriarchal beauty stereotypes and is therefore also criticised from feminist perspectives. Makeup is this a strategic resource for platform visibility, as well as an aesthetic resource for political expression, and in doing so becomes an algorithmic shelter against platform censorship and for feminist protest. It generates shared platform vernaculars which are recognisable, imitable, but also adaptable to specific protest contexts.
