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Good morning! I’m Lavanya Ramanathan, editor of the Today, Explained newsletter, and I hope you’re enjoying our best stories delivered to your inbox each day. 

In October, after a few months of seeing a nutritionist and dabbling around with healthier habits, Vox senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings decided to immerse herself in something slightly more extreme: a viral TikTok challenge called “75 Hotter” — as in, 75 days to a hotter self. 

If you spend any time online, you’ve likely seen at least some of the countless videos on how to perfect your concealer technique or why you should be taping your face; the Botox before-and-afters; the hair-oiling tutorials. 75 Hotter, in some ways, rolls them all into one challenge and throws in tidiness, dating, and exercise goals, too.

Rebecca found that her “journey” — to use the language of the self-improvement industrial complex — to glass skin, thicker hair, and a slimmer figure revealed a lot about the self, our sense of community, and feminism in 2025. 

It would, she writes today on Vox, “lead me down ever more dire algorithmic straits and a forest of complicated feelings about one’s purpose as a woman at this precise moment.” She felt better and worse all at once.

I caught up with Rebecca to talk about the new American pursuit of hotness above all, and why we ought to ask what we might be losing in the process.  Be sure to read her whole story here.  (Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.) 

Lavanya Ramanathan: Can you tell us about the “75 Hotter” challenge and why you decided to try it? 

Rebecca Jennings: The 75 Hotter challenge is kind of based off of 75 Hard, which people might be more aware of. 75 Hard demands that you work out twice a day, that one of the workouts be outside, that you stick to a diet, and it demands that you start over if you miss a day. Realistically, I was like, I'm not doing that.

But on TikTok, a woman had come up with a modified version of a 75-day challenge that encourages exercise and eating healthier, but it's not as strict. This one was like, get 10,000 steps a day, prioritize protein and greens at every meal. It’s like, clean your space before you go to bed.

There were definitely days when I didn't get 10k steps or I ate something that was not very “prioritizing protein and greens” of me, but it was still a good framework to make some healthier habits. 

Let's talk about your experiment. Tell us what you did over the course of a few months. 

I started last spring, really, by seeing a nutritionist, and that was honestly great. 

I love to eat. I love to drink. You know, I'm a fun person, generally, but sometimes that has resulted in some unhealthy habits. So, I was like, okay, I'll take this next year and really just have some healthier habits. And I really, really enjoyed it. Then in October, which is what started this story, I kept seeing all these fitness and glow-up challenges. And I was like, what if I did one? 

I interviewed a therapist and many influencers about their own glow-ups and listened to all the videos on my feed that were like, this is what you need to be doing for your skin, this is what you need to be doing for your hair. 

I completely redid my skin care routine: I got niacinamide drops, and I started using an under-eye retinol, I started using a better moisturizer, and then for my hair, I got K18, which is a bond-repair thing that you're supposed to do. 

What is happening with Americans that we no longer just diet but now are obsessed with pursuing a full-on glow-up? For a lot of people who try 75 Hotter, their end goal is not to lose 10 pounds: It's a full-body, full-face, lush-hair glow-up. 

I could not believe the amount of glow-up and self-improvement content that was on my feed over the past year. Obviously, at this time of year, people are getting all this stuff thrown at them to eat better, drink less, work out more, lose weight, and be productive. 

Now we have to worry about this year-round. And I think there's just something in the air right now and for the past couple of years where people, especially women, have turned inward and determined that the most important thing about me is the way that I look, the way that I present myself to the world, and the image that I want to portray. And one way to do that is by focusing all of your time and money and attention on the sort of inner project of glowing up.

And they're often referred to as journeys. It's like, I'm on a protein journey, or I'm on a skin care journey. It's fundamentally a very lonely way to describe something that you're doing in your life, but it's the way people really have found meaning in it.  

How much of this is self-care gone off the rails, and how much is sort of a post-Covid phenomenon? 

Covid changed so much of the way we think about our health and what our responsibility is. It showed everybody that Americans are fundamentally only interested in what they can do for themselves and that we’re not really interested at all in collective work toward making us all healthier. We are more focused on how can I live forever and look young forever and be the skinniest possible weight I can be to show how well I am. 

A big part of this is backlash against body positivity, which feels so fleeting now, looking back. I've seen so many more people be so comfortable saying that all they care about is being thin, and a lot of women in their comment section saying, “Yes, you said it girl, you're so brave.” It’s really depressing in that way. And, you know, I think obviously Ozempic plays a huge role, too. People are more like, okay, everyone's getting skinny now, so I need to get skinny now.

I wonder how much of this is also just an extension of the idea that we, as women, have long felt that we have to work harder, be more educated, and be more successful in the workplace. It feels like just another way we’re pressured to optimize ourselves.  

It definitely reminded me that, as a woman, you're never enough. You're either not successful enough, not thin enough, not young enough, not rich enough, not happy enough, not smart enough, whatever. Something that I've really noticed a lot in the past couple of years is a reaction to the girlboss era, where it's like, you know, I just want to give up, I'm just a girl. I just want to be a trad wife. I just want to be taken care of. 

And I see this glow-up culture as a little bit of a piece of that: Your job is not to become a millionaire. Your job is to marry one. Your job is to be hot enough so that you can land a rich man who will take care of you.

I don't think I fell into that trap. I've never wanted to not work. But there's this fear women today have that unless I'm really hot, I will never have the kind of life that I want. You know, the idea of home ownership, or the idea of marriage, or the idea of having kids — all these things that many of us want feel very out of reach. It's like, well, at least I can look hot.

What’s poisonous about that? 

There’s a message that you are the only thing that matters, and specifically, how you look is the only thing that matters. And this is sometimes explicit from influencers who are pushing whatever programs are there, who are like, your job is to not get fat,  and that's your only job. 

And I think that's such a sad, solipsistic way to live. It's so cruel and ungenerous and uncurious, because that isn't what matters.

I think it makes us decoupled from our sense of identity, our sense of self, and it allows us to be worse — be worse friends, be worse family members, be worse citizens, be less engaged with what's going on in the world. Because if all you're doing is worrying about how to improve yourself, you're not worried about how to improve the lives of people around you. And these are the things that make a good society.

Related story:

My descent into glow-up madness

By Rebecca Jennings 

Did a 75-day TikTok challenge make me uglier on the inside?

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you Monday!

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