Cleantok influencer The Clean Girl made the absolutely incomprehensible choice to clean up a neglected grave in the middle of the night, and the video is somehow even more unhinged than it sounds—and not just because she’s trying to sell you pink multi-purpose cleanser.
In the video, The Clean Girl brings her signature, almost unsettling perkiness to the process of cleaning up a stranger’s grave at night. She stops and eats a cupcake in the middle of it, comments, “Oh my best friend’s an Aries!” after reading the dead woman’s date of birth off the headstone, and repeatedly wonders aloud how this grave got so dirty.
Now, like most of the rest of her content this video acts as an advertisement, not just for the Scrub Daddy sponges that she’s partnered with but for her own range of cleaning products (that’s the pink stuff she’s using), which suddenly makes everything a lot clearer. Weird, viral videos have become an incredibly effective means of advertising in recent years, especially if people don’t realize they’re sharing an advert all over their social media platforms. The Clean Girl’s whole, wacky, deliriously perky vibe is the equivalent of a corporate mascot, designed to stick in your mind and catch your attention, something I have to admit it does really well.
As a piece of advertising this video is actually really clever because it’s designed to appeal not just to the usual audience of #cleantok fans (people who enjoy watching cleaning videos) but to cross over the algorithm to the horror and #spookytok crowds too. It’s absolute weirdness, as well as the completely unhinged concept—and I say this as someone who has repeatedly spent time in and written about a graveyard known for housing the UK’s most violent poltergeist, one who allegedly burned down the house of the man who wrote a book about it—give it great reshare potential, including by people who normally wouldn’t be interested in either type of content, giving it a decent chance of going viral.
It also makes it, at least in my opinion, somewhat distasteful. I was already on the fence before I realized she was trying to sell us something because while cleaning up a seemingly abandoned grave can be a nice thing to do, at least in theory, there are various religious, personal, and cultural reasons that people would rather their graves be allowed to decay in peace than be tended by strangers. It’s not something you should do without asking first, if not the family themselves (maybe you can’t find them or they’ll all gone too) then at least the people responsible for maintaining the cemetery itself.
There’s also the fact that, even if she hadn’t been using this video to sell something, she still put the dead woman’s name and the details of her headstone out there on TikTok, turning her and the supposed neglect of her grave into content. There are reasons people can’t always maintain their family members’ graves, like old age, disability, emigration, or just moving to another state, and the woman inside the grave died recently enough that it’s unlikely that there’s no one left who remembers her. This isn’t a hundred-year-old historic graveyard, this is from the 1980s, and seeing your relative’s grave turn up on your TikTok feed while some stranger speculates about them and why you let it get so dirty there is likely to be hurtful.
Maybe The Clean Girl had good intentions, maybe she’s cynically trying to sell something, maybe it’s somewhere in between; either way it’s part of a pattern of influencers turning literally everything into content with seemingly no thought about its impact offline.
(featured image: TikTok)
