Australian beauty startup tbh Skincare has always courted social media fame. It just wasn’t meant to happen like this.
After sharing an innocuous and playful video on social media last week, the brand and the young women behind it faced a torrent of misogynistic slander.
Tbh Skincare has responded to that prejudiced commentary in a new suite of videos, attempting to channel the attention into a positive outcome for the brand.
The internet-savvy label is now shrugging off the worst insults, but the incident demonstrates a cruel undercurrent present in some online communities.
“Essentially, we just ended up finding ourselves on the wrong side of the internet,” co-founder Rachael Wilde said in a statement provided to SmartCompany.
It began when tbh Skincare published an Instagram video on Thursday, showing staff members dancing and chanting in a circle.
“Gen Z boss and a mini!”, they repeated in rhythm, as the phone camera zoomed on Wilde.
The phone camera turned on her colleagues, and new descriptors followed.
“Five foot three and an attitude”, the chorus sung, referring to one of their shorter coworkers; another was categorised by her Frank Green bottle and “sneaky link” — a romantic connection conducted on the sly.
Then came “secret product and a trench”, where one tbh Skincare staff member opened and closed her coat to hint at an upcoming release.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C9Mb4_LK5kZ/?hl=en
If the playful video — mimicking a video trend already present across Instagram and TikTok — was meant to build hype around a new product, it was a partial success.
The video has been viewed tens of millions of times since it was posted.
The issue is who, exactly, did the viewing.
Instagram accounts belonging to Microsoft and The Matildas commented on the clip; American comedians Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones then appeared in their own sing-song TikTok, seemingly copying the same video format.
Yet viewers aren’t just fans of an up-and-coming skincare label, or those looking to jump on a new social media trend.
Many of the views were driven by a horde of angry critics opposed to the playful video — and, in some cases, internet users opposed to the general idea of young, professional women.
In the days after tbh Skincare shared its initial Instagram video, users of Twitter / X copied and shared the clip onto the competing platform, exposing it to an entirely new audience.
One clip, shared on Twitter last Thursday, has accrued 44.1 million views.
“Is this the longhouse?”, the user questioned, referring obliquely to a niche, far-right panic about women-led communities.
The harmless clip then became a sounding board for bigoted and misogynistic commentary.
Notably, those responses went far beyond opposition to the ‘girl boss’ — the millennial-era idea of female empowerment through corporate success — which faces good-faith criticism from real feminists.
Instead, many of the comments, which remain live on Twitter, share hateful viewpoints SmartCompany has chosen not to publish.
Some supporters emerged from the murk, challenging mean-spirited comments on the video and its subjects.
“Really cool that these office employees of a skincare company hopped on a silly tiktoks [sic] trend and now thousands of men are debating if women should have the right to work a job,” one Twitter user wrote.
“What a great website we’re all on!”
Tbh Skincare responded in its own way, recognising that channeling internet notoriety is one of its key strengths.
“At the heart of what we do we are marketers,” Wilde told SmartCompany.
In a subsequent Instagram clip, Wilde and the tbh Skincare staff commented publicly on the Twitter furore, and decided to prioritise their own presence on the platform.
“We should create a Twitter page,” Wilde said in the clip.
“Why not? We’re getting the eyeballs, we may as well monetise it.”
The final retort came when tbh Skincare shared a second song-and-dance video on Saturday, where staff mocked some of the bile shared across Twitter.
“Gender pay gap bring it back!” they joked, using the same tone and rhythm that so infuriated a cluster of online haters.
“We were surprised to see innocent fun upsetting so many people online,” Wilde said.
“Not sure how us doing a dance in the office warranted so much feedback and hatred like this.”
For now, the brand is focused on positive messages of support, shared after its unexpected brush with the darker underside of social media — one that dislikes women in the workplace, let alone those having fun on the job.
“In amongst the negative comments there have also been so many that have seen the fun in what we are doing, and have also come to our defense,” Wilde said.
“We are choosing to focus on that.”
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Senior Business Journalist
Focused on the small business sector, David’s work covers the political, regulatory, and economic issues facing Australian entrepreneurs. Prior to joining SmartCompany, he was a reporter for Business Insider Australia. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
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