It only took the staff of tbh Skincare a few minutes to film their own take on the latest TikTok trend. They didn’t expect it to attract so much attention — or hate.
tbh Skincare is an Australian cosmetic brand that last week posted a video of its co-founder Rachael Wilde and fellow female employees taking part in the “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” trend popularised on TikTok last month.
The video shows the young staff in their office, dancing and chanting things about themselves like “Gen Z boss in a mini”, “itty bitty titties and a bob” and “fake tan hands and a hoop”.
tbh Skincare’s TikTok and Instagram accounts feature plenty of videos of their staff jumping on the latest trends, but this one went viral and has been viewed millions of times across various platforms. Even for a company built on the savvy use of social media, this video was a particular hit.
The tenor of the response changed when the video made its way to X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Wilde.
“Essentially, we just ended up finding ourselves on the wrong side of the internet. We were surprised to see innocent fun upsetting so many people online — not sure how us doing a dance in the office warranted so much feedback and hatred like this,” she said in an emailed statement.
The initial post on X was by user @Alkibiades_ with the caption “Is this the longhouse?” which, according to meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme, is a reference to the concept of a matriarchal society that’s become popularised in misogynist and far-right online communities as a nightmarish scenario.
From there, versions of the videos circulated the hateful fringes of the internet, culminating with manosphere influencer and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate tweeting the video with the caption, “If you do not escape The Matrix women like this will be your boss.”
Beyond those circles, the video still earned its fair share of derision. Daily Dot’s Anna Good argued that the video “feels extremely forced, especially given that these employees were recording the video for the company they work for rather than for their personal social media platforms”.
While corporate cringe no doubt played a role, the ferocious and sizeable sexist reaction to tbh Skincare’s video only happened after it was shared to X, despite blowing up days before on other social media platforms. After this, even the comment sections of the video posted on other platforms were flooded with abuse.
The company’s video backlash is one example of how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has transformed it into an online Petri dish for all strains of hatred, including misogyny, to spread across the web. And it can’t be escaped by merely opting out of the platform — like in the case of tbh Skincare, all it takes is one X user to choose you as the target of the day.
