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Things to talk about in a GRWM

A get-ready-with-me needs talk you can keep up while your hands are busy — no long setups, nothing you have to stop and think about. Here are 48, all answerable in under a minute without putting the brush down.

While you are still starting

Light enough to answer over the first step of a routine.

Small opinions, strongly held

The register the format lives in. Low stakes, real view.

This week, specifically

Recent and concrete beats timeless and vague, every time.

The ones that go somewhere

For when the routine is long and the conversation has warmed up.

The hard part isn’t answering. It’s choosing.

Spin it, then film whatever it lands on. You get the question you would have scrolled past, which is usually the one worth filming.

Press spin. You do not get to pick.

Does any of this actually work?

The format is older than the talking. Know Your Meme documents one of the earliest get-ready-with-me videos as Shaaanxo’s upload of 14 January 2011 — makeup applied over music, products shown, no commentary. That is a user-edited wiki and we did not confirm “earliest” independently, so take it as one of the earliest documented rather than settled. The observation that matters is ours: the early ones were music and product. Talking while getting ready came later, and it is now the whole appeal.

The scale is large but the number people quote is wrong. TODAY reported on 16 May 2023 that #GRWM had accumulated more than 99 billion views on TikTok. That is journalism citing TikTok, not a figure we verified at source, and it is now dated. The “157 billion” version circulating elsewhere we could not verify at all, and we are not repeating it.

How a GRWM is shot happens to be how strong parasocial response is shot. Thelwall and colleagues (Journal of Data and Information Science, 2022) content-analysed the highest- and lowest-engagement videos for each of 117 UK female influencers and found “gazing at the camera, head and shoulders framing, discussing personal issues, and focusing on the influencer associated with higher strong PSI potential.” The design is correlational and uses comment language as its measure. The link to GRWM is ours — a seated get-ready is filmed face-to-camera at head and shoulders almost by definition. They did not study GRWMs.

This only works if the getting ready is real. A GRWM where nothing is actually happening is a talking head with worse lighting and a worse angle, and viewers clock it immediately — the format's whole appeal is that you are doing something else, which is what makes the talking feel incidental rather than performed. If you are not genuinely mid-routine, film a piece to camera and let it be that.

Last checked 21 September 2026.