While scrolling through my TikTok For You page the other night, one of my favorite influencers held up the viral hair serum that I’d been eyeing for months. To my surprise, she began brutally criticizing the product, warning viewers against buying it. For the next 60 seconds, I felt a rush of relief seeing an influencer being honest and urging me to save my money.
But that relief only lasted for a moment. Just as I was about to scroll away, she pulled out three drugstore “dupes” that, according to her, were better than the original. Her previous honesty had convinced me of her credibility, compelling me to trust her cheaper recommendations without real substantiation.
Successfully avoiding one expensive serum only to buy $36 worth of cheaper alternatives is exactly the trap of modern “deinfluencing.” While the deinfluencing trend markets itself as a rebellion against consumerism, it ends up disguising another sales pitch as honest advice, ensuring that consumers are still spending money.
Deinfluencing is inherently flawed because social media platforms are designed to drive consumption. Platforms convert attention from engagement — clicks, views and interaction — into advertising revenue. Content that generates viewership, like product-related posts encourages spending behaviors and habits that keep the consumer active. As a result, deinfluencing isn’t actually separate from the consumerist ecosystem that social media platforms are built to sustain.
We’ve even seen brands paying creators to deinfluence their competitors. Even when influencers criticize or deinfluence a product, they still profit from that content, upholding the consumerist cycle. In some cases, rather than simply telling audiences what not to buy, creators often redirect viewers toward affiliate links or sponsorships according to the brand that they’re actually working with. The product being criticized might change, but, overall, the underlying incentive to monetize consumer attention remains the same.
Studies show that traditional and overly polished advertisements have lost their efficacy, leading viewers to lose trust in the influencers they watch. Deinfluencing aims to recapture that trust and attention by doing the exact opposite — bashing popular products to cultivate a trustworthy image. This manufactured trust establishes a reliable platform for the influencer to recommend an alternative product and subsequently generate profit. Viewers also inherently pay more attention to negative reviews than positive ones, making individuals more susceptible to this form of advertising.
This tactic is noticeable in social media influencer Abbey Yung’s content, specifically her “Abbey Yung Method.” Yung gained popularity on TikTok for shading expensive haircare brands like Kérastase and instead promoting drugstore brands like L’Oréal and Pantene. She then coined an 11-step haircare routine with detailed descriptions on which drugstore product to buy according to each step.
While buying drugstore alternative shampoo initially seems like a financial victory, Yung actually encourages her viewers to purchase an excessive number of products, ultimately causing costs to be the same — or even higher — than the original product. Considering this, deinfluencing rarely tells viewers to actually curb their spending altogether. Instead, it encourages people to shift from an expensive, viral product to a cheaper alternative.
Yung proves that deinfluencing isn’t about buying less, but more so about buying differently. The trend’s ultimate goal is to still keep money flowing from the consumer’s pockets to the producer, and ultimately, to the influencer while maintaining a trustworthy facade.
However, there are some that argue that deinfluencing is actually a form of financial education, because it can teach consumers to look past virality and save their money, especially in a financially illiterate generation. But, while it might stop someone from buying one specific $50 product, the overall trend still keeps consumers in an endless cycle of overconsumption.
Because inexpensive products feel like low-risk purchases, they can make impulsive buying seem harmless, which inherently encourages people to shop more frequently and justify purchases they otherwise wouldn’t have made, simply because they can excuse it for it being cheap.
The popularity of dupes reflects this problem. Dupes are often marketed as financially reasonable alternatives to expensive products, and because of this, they can reinforce the same compulsive shopping habits that influencing culture helped create. Replacing expensive products with cheaper ones does not break the cycle of overconsumption, instead, actually intensifies it by making shopping feel more affordable, which can be used as an excuse to let it become more frequent too.
Additionally, this cycle keeps consumers fixated on the belief that we always need a second opinion. Today, we are too dependent on influencers to dictate our choices, rather than trusting our own research and judgement. Essentially, we surrender our judgement as consumers and let an influencer’s approval substitute for actual decision-making. However, influencers can never fully understand our individual selves and needs. By researching products ourselves, we make decisions that are better suited to our specialized needs rather than someone else’s recommendations.
The most effective anti-consumerism action we can take is stepping back from social media entirely. Avoid constantly seeking a second opinion from your favorite influencer, regardless of how trustworthy they seem, because you are capable of making your own decisions.
Sophia Franco is an Opinion Columnist writing about social media’s impact on our everyday lives. She can be reached at sifranco@umich.edu.
