‘Cleanfluencers’: New Female Role Models?

As I found myself in the depths of B&M home section on yet another Thursday late night, wondering if I’ll make it over to the adjacent Home Bargains in time for closing, I wondered – When on earth did I get so obsessed with tidying up? Should I be more KonMari? Is my female role model… a ‘Cleanfluencer’?

‘Cleanfluencers’, that’s influencers who clean, are part of a new wave of content creators who cater to the latest organisation hacks and cleaning trends. They’re appearing on our social media, our daytime TV, our Netflix recommendations, and in our bookstores. Think, Marie Kondo, but see also: Mrs Hinch, Stacey Solomon, The Label Lady.

Kondo, a Japanese ‘organising consultant’, (who knew that was a real job?), is the OG ‘Cleanfluencer’. She rose to fame in 2011, after publishing her first book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and since then, has published three more books, starred in two of her own Netflix series and been listed as one of Time’s top 100 most influential people.

Since starting out, Kondo has organised an empire worth 8 million dollars. Her famous ‘KonMari’ method swept the world up: instructing users to sort their belongings into categories, take a long look at their pile of things, then discard anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’.

‘Cleanfluencers’ like Kondo have cracked it. In 2015, the Office for National statistics found that women carry out an overall average of 60% more unpaid domestic work than men – if our unpaid work went paid, we’d earn £259.63 per week – and Kondo’s not the only one who’s caught on to the fact that us girls just love being told to tidy up.

Am I normal to yearn for a neat, bare, white flat? To fill it with leafy green houseplants? To fill the cupboards with plastic free, labelled glass containers? (Sustainable Queen). To finally own my own Shark hoover?

Probably.

After we kicked up all that fuss a couple hundred years ago during what was it again? Suffragism? Feminism? We appear to have scrubbed the old views, started a clean slate, and embraced the world of ‘Cleanfluencing’.

In 2018 Sophie Hinchcliffe, better known as Mrs Hinch, created an Instagram account dedicated to her home. She documented domestic hacks, reviewed her favourite cleaning products, and spruced her grey and white home.

Since creating @mrshinchhome, Hinch has bagged herself 4.6 million followers, multiple brand partnerships, and four book deals. Boasting a net worth of an estimated £1.5 million, Hinch is the highest paid Cleanfluencer in the UK, second only worldwide to Marie Kondo.

Sophie 'Mrs Hinch' Hinchcliffe

Marie Kondo

Considering that a whopping 74.9 and 74 percent of Hinch and Kondo’s Instagram followers are female, it’s not hard to argue that not only are women bearing the brunt of domestic and household chores, but we’re being told by society and mainstream media that we surely must like it too!

We are literally being sold the idea that we love to clean. The past years, Amazon has oh-so-helpfully compiled a bundle of books they recommend ‘For Her’, including Hinchcliffe’s ‘Life in Lists’, ‘Hinch Yourself Happy’ and Solomons ‘Tap to Tidy’. Mid-lockdown 2020, Mrs Hinch helped Brits organise their homes with her collection of cleaning routines, mopping the floor with author Hilary Mantel while simultaneously scouring David Walliams off the UK Book Charts top spot.

In the cleaning aisle, you’re bound to be bombarded with Minky cloths and bottles of Zoflora – As Seen By Mrs Hinch! Staggeringly, Star Brands, owners of The Pink Stuff, claimed sales of their product increased 350% in 2019 after Hinch got her followers hooked.

As if capitalism wasn’t bad enough, we’re now being sold the fact that we love to clean - that we need instructions on cleaning - that cleaning is our new hobby - that clean is bound to spark joy!

So after all that hard work we did demanding the right to vote, to work, to own our own homes - why are we so willing to bear the brunt of domestic duties? Why are the men in our lives, our equal counterparts, not being sold the idea they must master the art of cleaning?

It’s because no matter how much you dress the issue up, or wash this issue down, no matter how appealing or glamorous you can make cleaning seem, domestic responsibility is, and always has been something that women have shouldered.

When Victorian thinkers began granting women education, they did so on the primitive basis that girls were taught the principles of household management. Is it any surprise that in 2022, Actionaid found that women perform 75% of unpaid work globally, their role in society so deeply entrenched?

Our beloved ‘Cleanfluencers’ – they haven’t done much for us. Of course, I tip my hat to the Kondo’s and the Hinch’s, to our sisters who have made success building businesses convincing normal people to clean their own homes - But what’s happened here isn’t a reclamation of domestic labour.

Just because we think we like it, doesn’t mean we’ve ‘owned it’ – we certainly haven’t Girl Bossed it.

All that’s happened, is that suddenly, someone’s put a price on all that unpaid labour we’ve been doing, and it’s going into someone elses pockets.

Now there’s a thought that doesn’t ‘spark joy’.