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What’s in your “everything shower” routine? For TikTok creators, it’s the most intensive and multi-stepped shower of the week, with videos breaking down belaboured routines complete with exfoliators, hair masks, multiple shampoos, deep conditioners, shaving creams, oils, body washes, moisturisers and self tanners. They showcase the many products used along the way on #showertok, and brands are finding an opportunity to cash in.
Shower content first appeared on social media at the end of 2021, with users discussing simple shower routines and mass market product recommendations from labels like Dove. It’s since continued to climb. In March, TikTok mega influencer Alex Warren posted a video of his influencer fiancé Kouvr Annon explaining what an everything shower is. It hit over 9 million views and 2 million likes. In the Vogue Business TikTok Trend Tracker, created using exclusive data from TikTok, #showerroutine was a top trending hashtag in June 2023, while #bodywash was one of the top trending hashtags in July of this year. #Everythingshower has an average of 7 million views a week on TikTok in the US alone (up until week ending 27 August), according to beauty analytics firm Spate. Pinterest, which is increasingly becoming a barometer for Gen Z trends, predicted shower routines would be a trend for 2023, after analysing people’s saves and pins in 2022.
It’s the latest way Gen Z is romanticising everyday parts of life and mining them for content, preceded by hot girl walks, bed-making and Erewhon smoothies. And, it’s given rise to a whole new roster of bodycare micro-trends, creating plenty of space for brands to be featured and see products go viral. Tree Hut body scrubs, Naturium body washes and Olay body washes are some of the top trending showertok products, according to TikTok data gathered by Spate. The trend has since become more elevated, with luxury brands wading in. Beauty retailer SpaceNK released an everything shower explainer last month, recommending products like Tatcha body oil (£61) and Olaplex shampoo (£38).
Space NK first became aware of the trend in April, says CMO Emma Simpson-Scott. “As it’s a relatable topic, we’ve seen [the everything shower trend] continue for months, rather than it being a short-term flash trend that quickly quietens down,” she says. “We review each trend in terms of its suitability for our brand positioning and our community. This shower trend felt perfect to tap into as it is relatable yet funny and something we felt our audience would understand well.”
The brand playbook
Naturium, the skincare label recently acquired by Elf cosmetics, originally focused on face serums and creams. But founder Susan Yara noticed an interest in the “skinification” of bodycare well before showertok started on TikTok, and began to develop products to pre-empt the trend.
“It was only a matter of time before ‘showertok’ became a trend,” she says. “We decided to take a page from our face serums playbook and lean into ingredient-based, efficacious body washes.”
Naturium has sold 500,000 units of The Glow Getter Multi-Oil Body Wash since its launch in January 2022. (The product rolled out to the UK in April this year.) According to Spate, Naturium bodycare receives 5,400 average monthly Google searches, up 203.2 per cent on 2022.
Before the rise of TikTok and consumers launching their own trends, Suzanne Scott, associate beauty director at communications and brand consultancy Seen Group, remembers trying to coin trends or buzzwords around brands’ products. Seen Group’s clients include Avène, Fenty Beauty, Aesop and Kiehl’s. Now, her work is centred on spotting trends early and if they’re a fit, using them as the basis for brand mailouts, campaigns or events.
“It’s a matter of going to where your consumer or your audience is, playing in an arena that they re already really enjoying,” she says. “They might already be naturally talking about your product, and being very authentic and kind of taking up space in an environment that s actually welcoming to you, rather than force feeding people a trend that they don’t necessarily want.”
In June, Fenty Beauty launched Cherry Dub Triple Action AHA Body Scrub, which has a fuchsia, grainy texture and a cherry scent that fills up the room when it mingles with steam. With showertok still a prevailing trend, Seen Group worked with Fenty to hold a launch event for influencers in London hotel Sea Containers, with treatments and branded showers, so guests could create content inside. The estimated reach across the influencers’ 54 posts was 8.2 million people, Seen says. The showertok messaging was also the lead narrative for email blasts and press comms, helping to put the product into the context of shower routines and the everything shower.
US-based haircare brand K18 also regularly appears in showertok videos, and it has sent some products viral, including the brand’s leave-in molecular repair hair mask, pH maintenance or detox shampoo and molecular repair hair oil. “We’ve seen huge success when it comes to the correlation between TikTok trends in general and an uplift in brand interest and awareness,” says the brand’s senior VP of marketing, Michelle Miller. “Whether it’s showertok, hairtok or ‘TikTok made me buy it’, we are consistently seeing the support from TikTok as creators mention us organically in these trending videos.”
When a trend begins to spike, K18 invests in gifting the creators who made the original trend videos to ensure K18 continues to show up, Miller says. To supplement this the brand’s content on its own feed is educational and entertaining, to explain the brand’s biotech background and instruct users how to use the products in their own routines.
Gifting has become a key part of the strategy for most bodycare and haircare brands to align with trends. TikTok creator Megan Murase started her showertok TikTok and Instagram @bodiedbybodycare in 2021, sharing product suggestions almost daily for shower products. She has a combined following of 230,000 across platforms and over the last two years, she’s done paid and/or gifted collaborations with brands including Olaplex, Dove, Tree Hut, L’Occitane, La Roche Posay and Sol De Janeiro.
Showertok’s endurance has made it possible for many beauty labels to wade in as the trend develops. “Gen Z is obsessed with detail and they love multi-step routines,” says Seen Group’s Scott. “For millennials, beauty trends can be more fleeting. For Gen Z, trends like showertok take root and snowball over a couple of years, morphing into other trends like the everything shower.”
As always, brands need to tread carefully around user-created trends. Too much involvement can create saturation, making it more challenging for brands to cut through the noise, which is why it’s important to also monitor beauty micro-trends like ‘strawberry girl summer’.
“There’s no special hack,” says Space NK’s Simpson-Scott. “It’s simply a matter of scrolling and saving trends that begin to pop up. When responding to trends we make sure we’re doing it in a way that our audience will respond to. Rather than forcing something together, we make sure it’s well suited to their needs and something we expect them to relate to.”
Brands should monitor their own customers as a first port of call, to try and pre-empt as well as react, says Naturium’s Yara. “I think it’s way more important for us as a skincare brand to stay focused on customer needs well before it becomes a trend. We don’t want to focus on trends that fade out, we like to already have the products launched to participate in trends or even inspire them.”
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