Get Ready With Me has never gone out of style A history of the beauty format that, from YouTube to TikTok, has changed form countless times without ever disappearing

I know, I should be working. I have deadlines, articles to finish, emails to answer, bills to pay and at least three things I keep putting off until tomorrow. Instead, I’ve been watching a girl for the past hour who, with a single pencil, draws two lines and a circle like a five-year-old left alone with a box of crayons and, voilà, her make-up is done. She does it in a forest, among the hills of Derbyshire, in San Francisco, inside a moving taxi, on a plane, in an elevator, on a rooftop or in front of a herd of Highland cows. The location is irrelevant. The result is always cool. The girl in question is Emily Wood. She’s 29, describes herself as a “face decorator” and all she has to do is open her makeup bag, pull out a blush or an eyeshadow and start getting ready to keep the nearly 310,000 people who follow her on TikTok glued to their screens. Myself included. I’m someone who can apply foundation with the same grace as spreading plaster on a wall, and who is still capable of achieving the infamous makeup pilling effect, so I watch, hypnotized. And while I’m thinking that maybe I should stop watching makeup videos and get back to my article, I realize what makes the Get Ready With Me so addictive. On an internet that turns every trend into an archaeological artifact within two weeks, the GRWM just keeps surviving. It has watched beauty gurus, influencers and celebrities rise and disappear. It has made it through clean girl, de-influencing, twelve-step skincare routines, no-makeup makeup, blush up to the temples and the return of brown lipstick. It has changed platforms, length, editing style and the number of products involved. It’s always there. Sometimes in front of a mirror. Sometimes on a train. Sometimes while someone tells us how their marriage ended.

The evolution of Get Ready With Me videos

2010: before TikTok, there was a webcam

Before GRWM, there were YouTube beauty gurus, grainy webcams, lighting that made everyone look slightly orange and bedrooms transformed into tiny TV studios. We watched people do their makeup because we wanted to learn. How to apply eyeliner. How to choose the right lip combo. How to create a smokey eye without looking like you had just walked out of a fight. It was basically the digital version of Makeup for Dummies. Then, around 2010, the Get Ready With Me arrives. Creators like Shaaanxo start posting videos that begin with a bare face and end with a complete look. There’s music, products, a few speed-ups and a final transformation. The difference? We don’t have to learn anything. We simply have to sit there while someone else gets ready.

2013-2018: the golden age of GRWM

This is the era of long videos. Very long videos. Someone sits in front of the camera and opens a makeup bag that could easily contain everything you’d need for a week in New York. Primer, foundation, concealer, contour, blush, highlighter, three eyeshadow palettes, hair, outfit. And life, in the meantime. They tell us about their favorite products, opinions, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends and, in some cases, enough material for an entire season of reality TV. Somehow, we feel like we’re there with them. We want to know what they think, what they buy, where they go, who they’re seeing and, ideally, what happened over the weekend. Makeup has become an excuse for an endless conversation. It doesn’t even have to be extraordinary anymore. The person doing it just has to be interesting.

2019-2021: TikTok arrives and cuts everything down

Then TikTok arrives and thirty minutes suddenly feels like an eternity. TikTok GRWM takes the old format and puts it through a spin cycle. One second of foundation, cut. Blush, cut. Mascara, cut. Hair, cut. The entire routine no longer needs to be shown. It just needs to be implied. The real revolution is the voice-over. A creator can do their makeup while telling a story recorded separately, turning a beauty routine into something resembling a mini podcast with concealer. The gesture keeps your eyes busy. The story keeps your brain busy. Multitasking, but with blush. And the format explodes. In 2023, YouTube recorded more than 6 billion views for videos with “GRWM” in the title. TikTok didn’t kill the old GRWM. It simply taught it how to run on the language of short-form content.

2021-2023: “while I do my makeup, let me tell you something”

At this point, GRWM has almost stopped being beauty content. It has become storytelling with a beauty routine happening in the background. The formula is now familiar: get ready with me while I tell you... and after you, pretty much anything can follow. A breakup, a disastrous date, an argument, a betrayal, an absolutely terrible day, a job interview or any story that, under normal circumstances, would require a friend, a phone call and possibly a drink. GRWM has basically become a form of individual reality TV. No crew, no confessional, no producer yelling “good take!”. Just a face to do makeup on and something to talk about. In the meantime, mascara becomes the microphone.

2023-2025: okay, but can you do it on the subway and maybe sell us something?

When everyone is doing GRWM, you need a way to avoid looking exactly like everyone else. The solution is to move. GRWM on the go leaves the bathroom and ends up in cars, airports, trains, elevators, basically anywhere where doing your makeup isn’t necessarily socially required. The location becomes part of the content. And if that isn’t enough, everything gets even more complicated: three products, two products, one product, as if this were the natural evolution of a competition to see how little makeup you can possibly use. One eye pencil for eyes, cheeks and lips while the train pulls away. Meanwhile, the format discovers that it is almost suspiciously good at selling things: in 2025, GRWM was the most popular beauty search on TikTok Shop UK. The mechanism is almost too efficient. You watch someone get ready, you become attached to the person, you notice the blush, you search for the blush, you buy the blush. It even works as ASMR. At this point, GRWM can simultaneously be entertainment, personal storytelling and shopping.

2026: after all this, are we back where we started?

Maybe. But not really. After years of increasingly fast edits, improbable locations and challenges involving a number of products that seems dangerously close to zero, the Get Ready With Me appears to have reached a more stable phase. It’s not the return of the thirty-minute YouTube video. It’s the return of a recognizable format. Bare face. First product. Routine. Conversation. Or not. Final look. Inside that familiar structure, though, anything can happen. There can be a story, a review, a sponsored product, a tutorial, a confession or a girl drawing a circle on her face in front of a herd of Highland cows. Even the opposite works. Get Unready With Me takes the same grammar and runs it backwards: makeup comes off, skincare goes on, and we head back to bed. Because by now, the container is so recognizable that it can hold pretty much anything.