GRWM stands for "get ready with me", a social video format in which a creator films themselves preparing for something - a night out, a wedding, a job interview, a school day - while applying makeup, doing their hair or choosing clothes, usually talking to the camera as they go. Each product appears in use rather than on a shelf, and the routine supplies a natural running order. The format began as a beauty tutorial variant on YouTube. On TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts it became a vehicle for personal storytelling, and that combination of intimacy and visible product use has made it one of the most common settings for paid placements, gifted products and affiliate links in the creator economy.

How a GRWM video works

The structure is simple and largely fixed. A creator opens with a hook, often the occasion or a promise of a story ("get ready with me for my first day at a new job"). Steps follow in the order a person actually gets ready: skincare, base makeup, eyes, lips, hair, outfit, accessories, with a final reveal. On short-form platforms the steps are compressed through jump cuts. Shelby Bell, a makeup artist who started posting in 2020, told TODAY in 2023 that creators need an engaging opening line within the first few seconds to keep people watching.

What changed over time is the soundtrack. Early GRWM videos on YouTube usually had no voiceover, according to an August 28, 2023 post on YouTube's official blog by Madeline Buxton, its culture and trends manager for the US and Canada. Creators listed products in the description box and linked to blog posts. Today's versions layer a monologue over the routine - a breakup, a medical appointment, an anecdote about being fired. "For creators, this is a vehicle for storytelling," Earnest Pettie, a trends insight lead at YouTube, told the Associated Press in November 2023. GRWM videos, he said, "become an excuse to share something about your life."

The commercial mechanics sit on top of that structure. There are four common routes:

  • Gifting and organic mentions. Brands send products, and creators may use them on camera with no payment and no obligation.
  • Paid integration. A brand deal pays the creator to include a product, sometimes with scripted talking points. Disclosure is required, through on-screen text, a hashtag such as #ad, or the platform's paid-partnership label.
  • Affiliate links and codes. Creators tag products through YouTube Shopping, TikTok Shop's showcase or Amazon's influencer storefronts, or add discount codes, and earn commission on resulting sales. A 2025 Boston College Law Review note cited examples including a video tagged #UrbanDecayPartner and another carrying the code "20ALAINA".
  • Paid amplification. Brands license a well-performing GRWM and run it as an ad from the creator's own account, through TikTok's Spark Ads, Meta's partnership ads or YouTube's creator partnerships boost. Paid reuse requires separate usage rights.

On the buy side, beauty, fashion and personal care brands, their agencies and influencer platforms recruit creators and brief them. On the platform side, the plumbing is affiliate programmes and creator marketplaces. YouTube's Shopping affiliate programme pays commission through AdSense; in March 2026 PPC Land coverage cited an example rate range of 8.5% to 11.2% for beauty items.

Origin and evolution

Videos of people getting ready are almost as old as YouTube, but the labelled format dates to the early 2010s. Know Your Meme identifies a January 14, 2011 upload by Shaaanxo, a New Zealand beauty creator, as the earliest apparent "get ready with me" video: makeup applied over music, each product held up before use. YouTube's own history agrees that creators did not upload GRWMs regularly until the early 2010s.

The format spread through beauty YouTube over the following decade. It was popular enough to be parodied by 2016, when SaraBeautyCorner posted a comedy sketch on March 10. Celebrities adopted it: Kylie Jenner posted a "drunk get ready with me" with Khloe Kardashian on August 8, 2019. Publishers followed, with Vogue's "Beauty Secrets" series built on the same premise, according to the Associated Press.

TikTok changed the format's shape. Its length limits favoured quick cuts over detailed instruction, and outfits began to share the frame with makeup. TODAY reported in 2023 that the #GRWM hashtag had passed 99 billion views. By November 27, 2023, the AP put the figure above 157 billion. YouTube said videos with variations of "grwm" in the title drew more than 6 billion views between January 1 and June 5, 2023, and temporarily redesigned its logo to celebrate the genre. Those numbers are cumulative, platform-reported and unaudited, and hashtag counts include videos that use the tag without following the format.

The creators who defined this phase blended routine and confession. Alix Earle, then 22, built a following of nearly 6 million TikTok users by discussing acne, an eating disorder and panic attacks while doing her makeup, according to the AP. The Boston College Law Review note reported, citing press accounts, that she earned between $40,000 and $70,000 per brand partnership video. Sofia Richie Grainge joined TikTok in April 2023 and used GRWM videos to show preparations for her wedding.

Why it matters for marketers

GRWM is product demonstration presented as companionship. "It's almost like you're watching your friend on FaceTime with you," Camilla Ramirez Diaz, a 25-year-old optician, told the AP, adding that she had bought a freckle pen after seeing it in GRWM videos. For a beauty brand, that is a demonstration, a testimonial and a usage occasion in one clip.

The money around it has grown. US creator economy ad spend is projected at $43.9 billion for 2026, according to the IAB. Beauty is the category where the format is most concentrated, and it dominates social selling too: in a set of 18 TikTok Shop creator playbooks published in June 2026, beauty and personal care accounted for at least eight. Budgets are also moving from paying creators to post towards boosting creator content that has already performed, which suits a format that generates large volumes of organic clips.

No platform sells GRWM as an ad product or targeting segment. It is bought through brand deals, affiliate programmes and creator ad formats.

Limitations and criticism

Disclosure is the main legal fault line. The same intimacy that makes a GRWM persuasive makes a paid mention hard to distinguish from a personal preference. The US Federal Trade Commission announced revised Endorsement Guides on June 29, 2023, the first update in roughly 14 years, clarifying that a material connection, including free products or affiliate commission, must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. The guides are not binding rules, but on November 15, 2023 the FTC warned about a dozen influencers and two trade associations that further violations could carry civil penalties of up to $50,120 each, according to the Boston College Law Review note. The note argues that FTC enforcement remains reactive and cites a practice of brands asking creators to omit disclosures on gifted items. In Europe, Sweden's consumer agency has pursued around 100 influencer labelling cases.

Children are a second concern. A 2026 study in the journal Young Consumers by Arantxa Vizcaíno-Verdú, Beatriz Castillo-Abdul and Luis M. Romero-Rodríguez analysed 198 TikTok videos featuring children or adolescents with identifiable beauty brands, collected between November 2024 and January 2025 through hashtags including #grwmforschool. The authors coded 92.4% as organic promotion and 7.6% as paid advertising, and usage demonstrations such as GRWMs made up 70.7% of the sample. Organic videos drew more engagement than disclosed ones, which the authors called a "disclosure penalty" while noting that the sample was purposive and the link correlational. The pattern overlaps with the "Sephora kids" debate of 2023 and 2024 over pre-teens buying skincare marketed to adults.

Measurement is the third weakness. GRWM is a convention, not a category any platform defines. View totals measure the hashtag, not the format, and sales attribution depends on which link or code a viewer used, if any.

GRWM versus adjacent formats

  • Haul. A haul shows a batch of purchases being presented, usually after a shopping trip. A GRWM shows products being used for a specific occasion.
  • Unboxing. An unboxing records the opening of a package and first impressions of packaging. A GRWM assumes the product is already part of a routine.
  • Tutorial. A makeup tutorial teaches a technique step by step, with instruction as the point. Early GRWMs were close to tutorials, but the modern format puts narration and personality ahead of teaching.
  • Vlog. A vlog follows a creator through a day or event. A GRWM is confined to the preparation, though "GRWM and vlog" hybrids are common.

Recent developments

Platform changes in 2026 have mostly touched the commerce and disclosure layers around the format. On March 27, 2026, YouTube opened its Shopping affiliate programme to channels with as few as 500 subscribers, down from more than 10,000, letting smaller GRWM creators tag products directly. Amazon began placing Sponsored Products campaigns into creator content on August 10, 2026. On September 3, 2026, YouTube said it would automatically label branded content that creators fail to disclose, with detection due "in the coming months" and no published start date as of October 2026. And on October 7, 2026, Meta published a white paper in which L'Oréal separated sponsored content, organic advocacy and boosted advocacy for measurement, with Meta claiming partnership ads cut the cost per incremental purchase by 45% across 20 lift studies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Timeline

  • January 14, 2011 - Shaaanxo uploads what Know Your Meme identifies as the earliest apparent "get ready with me" video on YouTube.
  • March 10, 2016 - SaraBeautyCorner posts a widely viewed parody of GRWM videos.
  • August 8, 2019 - Kylie Jenner and Khloe Kardashian post a "drunk get ready with me" video.
  • 2023 - TODAY reports more than 99 billion views for #GRWM on TikTok.
  • June 29, 2023 - FTC announces revised Endorsement Guides, effective July 26, 2023.
  • August 28, 2023 - YouTube reports more than 6 billion views for "grwm" titled videos between January 1 and June 5, 2023, and changes its logo to mark the genre.
  • November 15, 2023 - FTC warns influencers and trade associations over undisclosed paid posts.
  • November 27, 2023 - The Associated Press reports more than 157 billion #GRWM views on TikTok.
  • November 2024 to January 2025 - Researchers collect 198 child and teen beauty videos for the Young Consumers study published in 2026.
  • March 27, 2026 - YouTube lowers Shopping affiliate eligibility to 500 subscribers in qualifying markets.
  • August 10, 2026 - Amazon begins serving Sponsored Products through creator content.
  • September 3, 2026 - YouTube announces automatic labels for undisclosed branded content.
  • October 7, 2026 - Meta publishes partnership ads research featuring L'Oréal.

PPC Land has not published an article on GRWM itself. The following cover the commercial and regulatory systems the format runs on.

Summary

Who. Beauty, fashion and lifestyle creators, from celebrities such as Kylie Jenner to small accounts; the brands, agencies and affiliate programmes that pay them; and regulators including the FTC and European consumer authorities.

What. A video format in which a creator films their preparation routine for an occasion, typically makeup, skincare, hair and outfit, often narrating a personal story while products are shown in use.

When. Labelled GRWM videos appeared on YouTube from 2011 and spread through the 2010s; the format reached mass scale on TikTok in the 2020s, with more than 157 billion hashtag views reported by November 2023.

Where. Mainly TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube, both long-form and Shorts, with commerce running through TikTok Shop, YouTube Shopping and Amazon's creator programmes.

Why. The format turns product use into intimate, story-led content that viewers treat like a conversation with a friend, which makes it effective for placements and affiliate sales, and also the reason disclosure and children's exposure are contested.