The corner of TikTok where people scrub grout, restock fridges and pour coloured chemicals into toilets to a satisfying sound, from about 2020 onwards. Descended from Mrs Hinch's Instagram, it became the app's most soothing and most sponsored genre. The record's entry for the pleasure of watching someone else's mess disappear.
For whoever reads this in ten years: CleanTok arrived in 2020 and for about a month it was the only correct response to anything. Then it became a response to itself.
Correction to the headnote: CleanTok was not coined, it was noticed. Someone said it, someone else screenshotted it, and the screenshot is the coinage.
Seen in 2023, a CleanTok creator restocking a fridge with decanted juice in matching jars while nothing in the fridge was actually low. The record calls this the genre's defining move: cleaning as choreography.
You were there. What happened?
