The Sleeping Beast
by Claire Rüffer
The overnight beauty trend has garnered traction on social media, especially TikTok, where #morningshed has gone viral with over 75 million posts as of 2025.1 In pursuit of waking up looking not only well rested but beautiful and “snatched”, participants go to bed covered in face masks and oils, jaws constrained by skin-tightening fabric and mouths taped shut. After a night of letting the mix of products seep in and allowing the body to do its regenerative work, they wake up and hit record to film the removal process. The absurdity of the look, somewhere between post-operation bandaging, Cindy Sherman-esque distorted glamour, and Halloween mummification, has triggered responses of both fascination and discomfort. While some admire the idea of saving time getting ready in the morning by putting in the work at night, others see yet another extreme consumer-driven beauty trend aimed at scrutinizing the female body.
The morning shed routine could be regarded as just that: the latest iteration of the ever-present pressure imposed upon women to constantly optimize their appearance. Yet, more importantly, it reframes sleep itself into an opportunity for beauty labour. Historically, sleep was regarded as an escape from the waking day, as a time for physical and mental restoration, which alone resulted in “natural” beauty. The morning shed, on the other hand, introduces a new visual and cultural narrative in which sleep alone is no longer enough. Instead, the sleeping body must be activated, used—turning the night into a continuation of self-optimization and productivity rather than a break.
The unofficial slogan of the trend—“go to bed ugly to wake up beautiful”—sums up the capitalist logic contained within.2 Like a financial investment, immediate gratification (genuine rest) is sacrificed for long-term growth (future increase in appearance). This investment thinking is also reflected in the visual logic of morning-shed videos, which centers on the suspense of the shed, specifically the reveal of beauty. Initially confronted with the product-covered, uncanny, mask-like face, the viewer awaits the transformation. Once the shedder unveils the glowing harmonic results, order has been restored.
This essay aims to interrogate the cultural shift in the visual narratives of sleep. From Renaissance sleeping Venuses, where beauty lies in passivity and visual availability, through Disney's Sleeping Beauty, where sleep functions as beauty preservation, to contemporary morning shedders, when sleep itself is no longer enough and beauty can only be achieved through continuous drudgery, discipline, and product consumption, even throughout the night.
Sleeping Venus
The female body has long played a central role in the visualization of rest, with early examples such as the The Sleeping Lady of Malta (4000–2500 BCE), a terracotta totem of a bare-breasted sleeping woman. The statue predates classical art by thousands of years, yet it contains elements that recur throughout Western art history: a connection between sleep, female beauty, and passivity.3
These motifs became strongly codified in the Renaissance in the image of the sleeping Venus. Giorgione and Titian's Sleeping Venus (1510) established a visual archetype in which the reclining female nude is displayed for contemplation. The treatment of the female form and the undeniable erotic charge of these depictions reflect not only the physical beauty standards of the time but also how ideal femininity was meant to be performed. Where throughout antiquity Venus had been portrayed standing upright, aligning with her role as powerful goddess of love and fertility, Titian and Giorgione's Sleeping Venus marks a decisive turn: the male artist renders Venus, the embodiment of female power, asleep.
Fig. 1: Titian/Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1508–1510, oil on canvas, 108.5 cm x 175 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.
In Sleeping Venus, the goddess’ body is extended across the canvas, her eyes are closed, and her posture seems relaxed. An arm is bent behind her head, causing her breasts to be fully exposed to the viewer as her left hand lies loosely on her groin. The composition invites the viewer to linger on Venus’s figure—to follow the soft brushstrokes of her body reflecting the movement of the landscape, whilst she herself is unable to return the gaze. The logic behind this one-sided visual spectacle can be interrogated through Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze. In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey explains, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”4 In her sleeping state, Venus is turned into an image to be looked at, rather than a subject with the capability of looking back.
Rooted in Renaissance ideals of harmony and Neoplatonic beauty, representations such as the Sleeping Venus linked physical beauty with moral virtue while emphasizing female passivity.5 Sleep plays a crucial role in underlining this beauty ideal. Apart from being physically immobile and mute, Sleeping Venus is also unaware of her own desirability. Her allure originates precisely from her physical vulnerability and exposure in combination with her psychological absence.
By portraying the goddess of beauty asleep, Renaissance art transforms Venus from a symbol of fertility and life into one of eroticism—an object for visual consumption.6 In Titian and Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, sleep does not symbolize rest. Instead, it is a visual strategy for voyeuristic spectacle, reinforcing a patriarchal beauty ideal in which female beauty is heightened through availability and unawareness.
Whilst this logic appears historically distant, it persists in modern-day beauty culture. In the case of online beauty practices such as the morning shed, the female subject is no longer made visually available through literal unconsciousness. Yet, despite being awake and active, she still acts in orientation towards the viewer's interests, reproducing a similar dynamic of one-sided looking. The power structure has not been toppled; it has merely been reconfigured, exchanging forced visibility for internalized self-regulation in accordance with persisting beauty standards.
Disney's Sleeping Beauty
Skipping ahead around 400 years, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) offers a modern mass-cultural continuation of the visual and cultural imagination of sleep, with a plot that revolves around sleep as the apex of female beauty.7 The tale can be traced back to 14th-century France and became most notably known through Charles Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (1697). The story creates powerful visual imagery: an exceptionally beautiful princess is cursed to prick her finger on the needle of a spindle and fall into an enchanted sleep, from which she can only awake by true love’s kiss. In Disney’s retelling, sleep is not merely a narrative device or way of voyeuristic presentation of the female body but a mechanism through which (youthful) beauty can be preserved.
The princess’ beauty centers around three aspects: her looks are predestined, closely connected to her virtuousness, and increased by sleep. Already as a young child, she is regarded as “the most beautiful person in the world”.8 She doesn’t become beautiful; rather, beauty is inherent and inseparable from her being, bestowing moral virtues upon her, mirroring the logic of the divine beauty found in earlier representations of Venus. Notably, Perrault’s tale avoids the detailed description of the princess’ physical features entirely, instead emphasizing moral qualities such as chastity, serenity, and grace.9 In Disney’s movie, this lack of physical descriptors is visually translated. Other than being blond and fair-skinned, she is less a portrait of a specific woman and more a perfected image of Western beauty standards. Physically generalized, yet universally attractive, allowing the viewer to project their own desires and ideals onto her.
Throughout the film, Aurora's beauty is underlined through visual framing and deliberate lighting. She is often shown with a soft glow around her with no apparent source, which might as well shine from within her—reminiscent of heavenly or divine light surrounding Virgin Marys in Renaissance painting.
Fig. 2: Still from Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney Productions, 1959.
This becomes most apparent when she falls into her enchanted sleep. Perrault describes the prince's encounter with sleeping Aurora as „[…] the most lovely sight that he ever looked upon […] the luster of whose charm gave her an appearance that was luminous and supernatural.”10 Disney makes this luminous beauty visible: Aurora, who shares her name with the Roman goddess of the dawn, is placed in the highest tower of the castle, removed from the world and elevated into an almost sacred space. The camera frame shows her full reclining body, recalling the composition of the Renaissance Venuses. She lies motionless in a carefully constructed pose; her hands are clasped symmetrically over her chest, holding a rose, and the soft internal glow illuminates her skin. With her eyes shut, she is unaware of the camera lingering on her body, inviting the viewer to do the same.
Unlike the nude Venuses, Aurora is fully clothed, with an additional blanket partially pulled over her legs. Nevertheless, the heavy fabric spilling over the bed onto the floor strongly echoes earlier painterly traditions—in both cases visually extending the body and emphasizing its beauty and feeling of luxuriousness. In combination with the constructed pose, Disney's Sleeping Beauty once again evokes the idea of the sleeping female body as an object to be contemplated and studied, made visually available but stripped of agency.
The narrative emphasizes that the princess is not dead—she is alive and vital. Yet she does not age. Perrault describes her “crimson cheeks” and “rich complexion”, echoed in Disney’s movie through her peaceful expression and glowing face, reassuring the viewer that, whenever kissed awake, she is ready to fulfill her duty: marrying the prince.11 When awakened, she “appears to be about fifteen or sixteen,” not having aged a minute, frozen at the threshold between childhood and womanhood.12 In this way, Sleeping Beauty becomes a symbol of idealised youth and suspended aging.
Aurora's enchanted sleep does not function as rest but as preservation. In this state she is immune to aging and thus able to maintain her desirability. In her 1973 essay The Double Standard of Aging, Susan Sontag argues that aging enhances a man but progressively destroys a woman.13 This dread of female aging, of a woman losing her perceived value by no longer looking very young, is encapsulated in the Sleeping Beauty tale. Sleep is not about rest (let alone healing, dreaming, or inner transformation) but about preserving value.
This preservation of value is tied not only to youth but also to a controlled representation of femininity. In the case of Sleeping Beauty, the overt eroticism and sensuality of earlier painterly traditions are replaced by magical, enchanted elements, as well as a narrative of purity, which shifts the focus from the physical body to a form of celestial, untouchable beauty. Yet, the historical logic of the eroticization of sleep remains. Passivity, unawareness, and visual availability are still central to the story and make up her value. Everything else—her voice, her musical talent, her grace—disappears as soon as she falls asleep. The only defining feature that remains is her beauty, which motivates the narrative and the prince's quest to save her.
Although Aurora is assured by one of the good fairies that she will be awakened by “true love’s kiss,” she has in fact already been promised to the prince at birth in order to unite the two kingdoms. The kiss does not grant her freedom; rather, it seals a family arrangement. Asleep, the princess waits for the prince, for marriage, for purpose.
Both Sleeping Beauty and the Venuses of the Renaissance were made visually available as they slept. The contemporary morning shed routines continue this trend, with the key difference of the female body no longer being passive. The “effortless” beauty of Sleeping Venus and Aurora is exchanged through active, meticulous labor. The women are awake, performing, seemingly in control through the chosen staging of their own bodies. What and how they present themselves to the digital audience is self-directed and even monetisable. Yet the tension between visibility and agency remains in both a literal and a psychological sense—manifesting as physical constraints through jaw straps and other beauty work, and as ongoing self-surveillance needed to comply with contemporary beauty standards. Even when strategically self-managed, this visibility is just as disciplined, governed by the logic of external standards as well as the logic of capitalist consumerism. In this sense, even sleep, which was once imagined as a space outside of visibility and discipline, becomes integrated into this capitalist dialectic of self-optimization.
Good morning, now shed
This extension of beauty labor into the night is not entirely new. As early as the 1920s and 30s, major cosmetic brands such as Elizabeth Arden promoted creams, oils, and tools designed to “use sleep” as a period of beauty maintenance and anti-aging practices.14 With the development of the mass beauty market during that time, caring for one's appearance became increasingly framed as every woman's duty. Influenced by Hollywood starlets and the sudden broad availability of beauty and makeup products, attractiveness turned from an ideal to a normative expectation and was presented as achievable for every woman.15 All one had to do was consume the right products, self-discipline, and self-manage.16
Devices such as the Arden Chin Strap Deluxe, first released in the 1920s, foreshadow the tools of today's morning shed routines, which are aimed at physically disciplining the sleeping body—squishing and constraining the face into overnight perfection.17 In a manual for do-at-home beauty treatments from 1928, Elizabeth Arden provides detailed instructions to women for their ideal bedtime routines, advising what products to buy and what exact steps to follow.18 Then and now, women were instructed on how to ridicule themselves, positioning the female body as something that needs constant correction, even during sleep. The difference, however, lies in visibility: what was then performed privately in women's bedrooms is today publicly performed and broadcast. Thus, the expectations persist, but the beauty labor itself has become more visible and thus more intense and self-surveying.
Fig. 3: Arden Chin Strap de Luxe, as advertised in Elizabeth Arden, The Quest of the Beautiful (New York, 1928), 35; Skims, Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap product photo, launched in 2025, URL: https://skims.com/en-de/products/seamless-sculpt-face-wrap-clay, last accessed March 3, 2026.
What emerges in the practice of morning shed is not only a continuation of beauty standards and ideals of femininity but also a shift in how these standards are presented and justified. As described by Rosalind Gill in Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility, modern media culture frames women's engagement in beauty practices as completely freely chosen, as autonomous behavior, devoid of external constraints or the goal of male approval.19
Gill's analysis, written in 2007, pre-TikTok and Instagram Reels, becomes ever more relevant in the present day, where engaging in beauty practices is framed more than ever as “self-care” and “wellness,” as opposed to hard labor. Morning shedding falls into just that category, in that the rituals are presented not as forceful obligations but rather as pleasurable self-investment. This notion of “self-indulgent,” pleasurable rituals is reinforced by playful and cutesy product aesthetics, soft lighting, and a lighthearted energy that the creators aim at through fun captions. No one is forcing the participants to engage in extensive night rituals, let alone film themselves and share them. Yet it is exactly this focus on autonomy and “choice” that obscures the labor involved, recasting what is socially expected of women’s appearance as voluntary self-improvement.
At the same time, the visibility and monetization of the routines through social media platforms make it ever more difficult to dissect the powers at play and where agency lies. These women are not only being watched but also curating the watching and profiting financially. What appears as control is not so obvious looking at the underlying power structures, as the pressure to present the body and engage in beauty persists. The only difference is that the implementation of these normative standards has now become more internalized and might only appear self-directed.
As Gill further notes, self-surveillance and the “constant anxious attention, work, and vigilance” have always been a requirement for successful performance of femininity; however, the modern media age is marked by a newly found extensiveness of that self-surveillance.20 Smartphones and social media platforms only amplify these regimes of visibility by enabling increasingly detailed forms of facial legibility through high-definition cameras, in which even the most minute “flaws” become visible. Every wrinkle, pore, and granular change in skin texture is rendered an object of scrutiny framed as needing ongoing monitoring and improvement.
A TikTok video: A timestamp tells us it is 5 am, and a creator presents her post-sleep, pre-shed face. The video has 372.3k views and the description reads: “Morning shed is so satisfying 😩.”21 The woman’s skin is covered in a transparent sheet mask, her hair is enclosed in a pink bonnet, her lips are covered in a black goo—a type of semi-permanent lip tinter—and her jaw is strapped into a sculpting strap that slightly squishes the bottom of her face and lips upwards into a constrained pout. The shed begins, and layer by layer is removed. The Velcro clasp opens with a satisfying sound, the ASMR of the products blending seamlessly into the clip, followed later by the sharp clicking of acrylic nails tapping on cosmetic products. The bonnet is removed, revealing silky hair, and from under the waxy lip tint, red, plump lips are unveiled. Yet the process does not end there. Several skincare steps and a luxurious makeup routine follow, demonstrating that the night routine in fact hardly saves any work in the morning, despite the promise of “putting in the work at night to save time in the morning”.
The videos are staged as a revelation in which the removal itself becomes the spectacle. After the video ends, however, the work for the shedder is not done, and for the viewer it has only begun: it is time to participate in the beauty market by buying and selling products. Morning shed content is not only designed for attention and virality but also functions as aestheticized advertisement, with long product lists, lucrative brand partnerships, and affiliate links embedded in the video descriptions. What was once a temporal limit to beauty labor—nighttime as a period of inactivity—has now been absorbed into cycles of consumption, expanding the reach of the beauty and wellness industry into previously unproductive hours. The videos generate revenue for creators while also greatly benefiting the beauty industry by offering ideal conditions to market countless new beauty products. This makes it a profitable situation for both the platform and beauty companies, while further pulling viewers into the never-ending cycle of beauty trends and corrective product consumption.
Fig. 4: Drawing by author inspired by videos by TikTok-creators @.m.egan, July 6, 2025, 372k views as of February 13, 2026; @manelparletrop, September 26, 2025, 50.8 million views as of February 13, 2026; @011wu, February 23, 2025, 150.7k views as of February 13, 2026; @eringetty7, September 12, 2024, 185.6k views as of February 13, 2026
Product Aesthetics
As mentioned previously, one of the most common products used is the chin strap: a sculpting band that packages the chin and jawline that is intended to shape and slim the jaw overnight.22 Kim Kardashian's brand Skims launched their Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap in 2025. The modern iteration of Arden's product was quickly adopted by countless other beauty companies, with “snatching” face wear now available at pharmacy online shops, Zalando, Amazon, etc. The product has caused a significant amount of online backlash, with people outraged at this next level of products aimed at “fixing” female faces, as well as questions regarding its effectiveness. As the cosmetic surgeon Dr. Anna Andrienko notes: “At best, they can reduce fluid retention short term. At worst, overuse may lead to skin irritation, breakouts, or circulation issues if worn too tightly or for prolonged periods.”23 Critics also point out the psychological effects such products exert on consumers. With every new product focused on another detail of the face or body, the pressure of having to adhere to the new aesthetic standard increases.
Beyond its questionable effectiveness, the visual language and aesthetics of these products and routines are striking. TikTok and Instagram Reels comment sections are full of non-adopters expressing their unease when it comes to the trend, many directly asking about the participants' comfort in their sleep, calling it “over the top,” and pointing out the uncanny, depressing, repressive feeling transported through the videos. The overt uncanny feeling, however, is not only derived from the greater societal implications—the nausea caused by watching overconsumption and dismemberment of the face into singular to-be-perfected parts—but also the images of distorted faces that this trend produces. Lifestyle reporter for The Independent Olivia Petter, for instance, makes the comparison between the sheet-mask-covered beauty shedders and Hannibal Lecter, evoking imagery of facial restraint and forced containment.24
This visual rhetoric and uneasy feeling is intensified through the use of mouth tape, marketed as a wellness tool to reduce snoring and help with nose breathing. It enxourages people to sleep on their back, underlining how the trend impedes comfortability in sleep and the health risks partakers are willing to take.25 More importantly, it produces images that resemble forced silencing associated with kidnapping or other forms of brutality. In this context, self-taping symbolises a form of self-silencing in the pursuit of beauty, framed as self-care, when in reality it is compliance: submission to a highly disciplined ideal of feminine beauty.
In this new mode of nighttime beauty pursuit, “ugliness” becomes part of the process. The more effortful and unglamorous the nighttime routine, the more “natural” the beauty that follows is framed to be. Transformation stands at the center of the trend. In this beauty purgatory, becoming temporarily ugly (i.e., temporary suffering/self-punishment) is necessary to become beautiful (i.e purification of the soul). Furthermore, the beauty culture expert Jessica Defino makes an interesting observation, stating the trend reflects a mainstream beauty culture rhetoric in which “the ‘ugly’ version of you isn’t real, that becoming the real you hinges on becoming beautiful.”26
Sleep as content
The morning shed operates under the logic of delayed gratification: work now, restrain now to appear effortless later. Discomfort during the night is not incidental but instrumental, dissolved in the morning in the form of controlled reveal: mask peeling, unclasping of straps, the removal of tapes. This moment of unveiling becomes the central spectacle for both the shedder and the viewer. All of this is far from older images of natural, effortless sleep, such as Sleeping Beauty. The sleeping female body is no longer defined by ease or unawareness, and instead it is disciplined and actively managed and self-controlled. What emerges is less a “sleeping beauty” than a kind of “sleeping beast”, a body that appears to be resting but in fact is working, metamorphosing overnight into a beautified self, ready for public display and participation in capitalist society. Sleep, then, no longer marks a retreat from visibility but operates as one of its conditions, promising beauty not as a natural byproduct of rest but as the outcome of continued bodily regulation even in unconsciousness.
As with every good beauty trend, the countermovement is already here: across social media, on fashion runways, and among pop stars, looking tired, unrested, and overall messy is framed as a form of resistance against “clean girls”, such as the morning shedders, and overall hyper-polished beauty standards. This countermovement presents itself in form of styles such as “depression hair”, as seen on model Gigi Hadid at Milan Fashion Week, and in Charlie xcx's party-girl persona, which evokes the residue of a long night out and so-called “tired-girl makeup”, accentuating dark undereyes. Social media creators furthermore cultivate this sensibility through “lived-in” in fashion, deliberately “messy” apartment furnishings and the revival of Tumblr-era grunginess, with its celebration of sad youth, cigarettes, and “heroin chic”. At first glance this turn towards excess, lack of rest and disordered lifestyle appear to resist rigid beauty discipline. Yet, what appears as a countermovement or rejection at a closer look, does not at all escape the underlying logic: the tired look is just as curated as the polished ideal, sustained through countless makeup and fashion tutorials and recommendations on which makeup products to buy and outfits to wear to achieve the trendy tired/messy look. It remains a controlled, time-consuming performance oriented towards an outsider's gaze—the aestheticization of exhaustion by no means restores rest; it reframes exhaustion as an aesthetic. Above all, it not only normalizes looking tired but subtly celebrates a system in which we are constantly overworked and depleted.
The End
Within this landscape of sleep optimization and “beauty while you rest“, the question remains whether there is still space for genuine rest at all. What was once imagined as passive, as personal time for mental and physical restoration, has become increasingly structured, curated, and oriented towards an outside audience. Rather than offering an escape from the waking day and a way to withdraw from societal optimization pressures, sleep increasingly appears as an extension of it, extending the demand for beauty construction and self- regulation even into the night.
From the reclining Venuses of the Renaissance, whose beauty was defined through unawareness and passivity, to the luminous figure of Aurora suspended in a moment of eternal youth, in sleeping untouched female perfection, to the contemporary “shedder”, who performs sleep and actively transforms their body through the night, the cultural meaning and visual translation of the sleeping female figure has shifted profoundly. What remains, however, is the emphasis on the female body as something that must be optimized, controlled, and observed.
If sleep itself is turning into another site of production—another frontier of the same systems that govern waking life—then resistance may lie in reclaiming rest as unproductive, as a safe haven from improvement or display. To sleep without the aim of becoming more beautiful would be refusing the expectations of constant betterment of the self and the logic that seeks to shape and extract value even off our sleeping bodies.
Finally, these trends appear to register a deeper desire: a true yearning for genuine rest, a longing for withdrawal and stillness. As made apparent in popular contemporary literature, such as Ottessa Moshfegh's My year of rest and relaxation (2018), rest-centered artistic practices such as the The Nap Ministry (founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey), or anti-work movements that advocate for the disengagement of constant productivity. Together, they gesture towards fantasies of getting a break, of opting out of cycles of improvement and performance—towards sleeping and being without purpose, and maybe even the chance of dreaming.
Claire Rüffer is a 26-year-old master's student in Art and Museum Studies at TU Berlin, with a bachelor's degree in Art History and Cultural Sciences from HU Berlin. She currently works as an assistant editor at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and has previous experience as a freelance curator and art guide at Haus am Waldsee. Her writing sits at the intersection of art history, pop culture, digital culture, and feminist theory, with recent contributions including an essay in GRAU Magazin and a forthcoming entry on The Lives of Pictures Blog. She is fluent in both English and German and writes in both languages.
1. Sara Radin, “The Morning Shed and the Endless Quest to Be Perfect”, vogue.com, September 8, 2024, https://www.vogue.com/article/the-morning-shed.
2. While widely circulated in TikTok “morning shed” culture, the phrase does not appear to have a single identifiable origin or author and seems to have emerged organically within online beauty communities
3. Louis Laganà, “Homage to Fertility?”, E. Azoulay, A. Demian & D. Frioux (eds.) 100,000 years of beauty, 1 (2009) : 256-259
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/22680/1/Homage_to_Fertility_Essay_in_100_000_of.pdf
4. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.
5. David Alan Brown (ed.), Virtue and Beauty. Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13.
6. Addison Cucchiaro, “The Sleeping Beauty: ‘Venus and Cupid‘ by Artemisia Gentileschi and the Spectacle of a Goddes at Rest”, QuaesitUM 12, no. 1, Article 2, (2025) 26, https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/quaesitum/vol12/iss1/2
7. The earliest known version of the sleeping beauty tale is found in the French narrative Perceforest, written between 1330 and 1344.
8. Charles Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1863), 8. [First published in Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités, Paris, 1697].
9. Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.
10. Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, 15.
11. Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, 11.
12. Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, 15.
13. Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging”, The Saturday Review (September 1972): 29-38.
14. Rachel Alexander, “Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-Up in the 1920s”, IJAS Online, no. 4, Special Postgraduate Issue (2015): 5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26556732.
15. Alexander, “Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-Up in the 1920s”, 5.
16. Elizabeth Arden, The Quest of the Beautiful, (New York, 1928), 6.
17. Arden, The Quest of the Beautiful, 35.
18. Arden, The Quest of the Beautiful, 8.
19. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 153, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898
20. Gill, Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility, 155.
21. Video by @.m.egan, “morning shed is so satisfying”, TikTok, July 6, 2025, https://www.tiktok.com/@.m.egan/video/7524022705943858454?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7571148205564380694
22. Skims: Seamless sculpt face wrap, product description on company website, https://skims.com/en-de/products/seamless-sculpt-face-wrap-clay [last accessed February 13, 2026].
23. Anna Andrienko, “Shapewear for your face while you sleep. Has Kim Kardashian taken it too far?”, bbc.com, August 2, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72rpzg0lpo [last accessed February 13, 2026]
24. Olivia Peter, “The ugly truth at the heart of TikTok’s viral morning shed trend”, independent.co.uk, May 30, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/morning-shed-tiktok-beauty-standards-b2755434.html [last accessed February 13, 2026].
25. Lisa Niven-Phillips, “How TikTok’s ‘#morningshed’ went viral”, in: theguardian.com, July 11, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/09/fashion-statement-tiktok-morningshed-beauty-routine-science [last accessed February 13, 2026].
26. Jessica Defino: “The Morning Dread (— I Mean, Shed)”, in jessicadefino.substack.com, 9.9.2024. URL: https://jessicadefino.substack.com/p/morning-shed-beauty-standards [last accessed 13.2.2026].