The Difference Between a Seasonal Glow-Up and Real Becoming

There is a version of change that feels transformative but isn’t. You update the wardrobe, refresh the hair, overhaul the Instagram grid, even sign up for that online course you’ve been eyeing for a while.

This time, you tell yourself, things will be different.

And you know what? They are.

For a week, maybe two, you look better, feel lighter, have a bounce in your step that wasn’t there before. Then, just as you reach out to fully embrace this new normal, it dissolves, leaving you right back where you started.

The worst part is this isn’t a one-time thing. It’s happened again and again (and again), serving as a repetitive lesson that ‘changing your life’ is never as easy as you’d expect. It’s not as romantic as the feel-good novels and movie montages would have us believe, and certainly not as methodical as the self-help books present.

Added to that: there are no set rules for how best to go about becoming the idealised version of ourselves. Truth is, most of us are flying blind, hoping that our overtures to progress will eventually amount to something.

The Glow-Up of It All

When it comes to the matter of transforming one’s life, we as women tend to start with the most evident of our issues: physical appearance. Hence the term ‘glow-up.’

A glow-up is modern slang denoting a person’s physical transformation into the hyper-real, good-better-best version of themselves. Think the ugly duckling makeover trope peddled to the masses since time immemorial, from the classic fairy tale Cinderella to the more modern Hollywood depictions in Grease, The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, and more.

With a lot of these stories, the conclusion is that inner beauty is what matters the most. And yet, despite these good intentions, the lesson never resonates as much as the one on the importance of outer beauty. Thus, with every empowering ending to a feminist-leaning film or novel, there arises a new pop anthem/reality TV show/counter-cultural movement to oppose it.

In the 2010s – and perhaps in a bid to remedy this dilemma – the world collectively shifted from the spoon-fed rhetoric of mass media to the more democratic sphere of online blogs, vlogs, and forums.

These spanned platforms and cultures, with the underlying message skewing toward the same glamourous sentiment: that the power to transform our lives is within our grasp, whether that be through a well-chosen wardrobe edit, a reclaimed morning routine, a decluttered workspace, and in one particular fever dream of an era, a perfectly filtered avocado toast Instagram post.

That decade also saw a couple of shakeups in the status quo of world culture, such as the Me Too movement in 2017, and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These are but two seminal events that shook us out of our outward-focused stupor into more internal reflection. In this manner, What’s In My Bag videos gave way to self-actualisation think pieces anchored in philosophy, spirituality, and religion. The centre of that Venn diagram was, invariably, mental health.

This brings us to the current era, chock full of TikToks, Reels, Shorts, pins, everything, that combine all of the above into easily digestible pieces of content bearing on-the-nose titles such as “Becoming Her,” “In My Glow-Up Era,” and “Watch me transform my life.”*

These pieces of content weave physical, mental and spiritual health into a single, tidy package. And yet, despite the well meaning behind them, many of them still feel surface-level, like the cringe-y 2000s ethos we’ve been trying to escape.

In other words, more glow-up than actual becoming.

Why Becoming Is Not Just About a Glow-Up

We can all agree that a glow-up has the power to shake you loose from stagnation and provide the momentum to begin. At the same time, we have to admit that more needs to be done to save us from our collective ennui.

Yes, elevating one’s appearance and adopting healthier habits are par for the course in any becoming journey, and they do serve to improve one’s circumstances. That early morning fitness routine and Monday-Friday work schedule is not for nothing.

However, without a solid foundation to hold this resolve, falling off can be as easy as 1-2-3, and in extreme cases, detrimental to one’s overall health.

With that understanding, a glow-up is not the problem, per se. The sticking point occurs when we treat glow-ups as the journey’s destination.

Aesthetic change operates on the surface. It upgrades the container while leaving the contents untouched.

Stick to the routine, and you may very well end up morphing into the most elevated version of yourself: someone who photographs well, and whose inspiring quote posts go viral ninety percent of the time. However, should you fail to do the rest of the internal work, you’ll at best plateau at this version of yourself, at worst, revert to the version you were trying to escape from the start.

Cue the longer depressive episodes, the existential dilemmas, the mid-life crises. At some point you’ll find that it is possible for you to have it all; live in that big house and always with perfect hair and nails, but despite that, still be mired in extremely dark thoughts.

More glowing-up won’t save you when that happens.

This of course begs the question: what does the internal work of becoming actually entail? Is it a lifetime subscription to therapy? Transcendental meditation morning, noon, and night? Abandoning everyone you love for a mountain retreat?

What Becoming Actually Requires

Real transformation – the kind that holds – demands something the glow-up does not: a reckoning.

Honest questions requiring honest, uncomfortable answers that account for the gap between who you have been and who you are capable of being. 

Not punishment. Not a performance of self-improvement. Not avoidance dressed up as hours-long scrolls through a never-ending feed. But simple honesty amid the uncomfortable sound of silence.

The questions would vary from person to person, but they’d more or less amount to the following three:

• Where have your stated values and how you show up in the world been out of alignment?
• What behaviour are you tolerating that no longer belongs in this next chapter?
• What are you building toward, and does your current structure support it?

This is where becoming gets uncomfortable. You start bumping up against old narratives: the standards you set for yourself and then quietly abandoned, the timeline that didn’t materialise, the work that went unrecognised.

Growth requires you to name those compromises and losses before you can move past them. And make no mistake about it: the grief you will no doubt encounter along the way is not a detour from the process. It is the process.

The Structural Difference Between a Glow-Up and Becoming

Here is a practical way to understand the distinction:

A glow-up is additive. It layers something new on top of what already exists. It improves the appearance of the structure without changing the structure itself.

Becoming is composite. It asks whether the structure is sound in the first place, is willing to rebuild if it isn’t, and considers the various elements that are required to do so.

This is why two women can go through ostensibly similar ‘transformations’ and arrive at entirely different outcomes six months later. One updated the surface. The other changed the foundation and worked outwards from there.

The surface update is faster, easier, and more photogenic. The architectural work is slower, quieter, and far more durable.

How to Tell Which One You’re Doing

Ask yourself: when this good feeling fades – and it will – what will remain?

If the answer is a healthy, sustainable habit, a clearer sense of what you’re building and for whom, a more honest relationship with your work or your time (or yourself)… that is becoming.

If the answer is a collection of things you bought but no longer use or need, or a grid that looked good for a season, that was a glow-up.

Neither is shameful, but only one of them compounds.

If you’re nodding along as you read this, then you’ve probably done the glow-up more than once. You’ve felt the high and watched it plateau. You’ve tired of the Sisyphean cycle.

What you’re after now is something that doesn’t require constant reinvention to sustain: a standard that holds, a structure that works, a version of yourself that you don’t have to keep rebuilding from scratch.

When you get there, you’ll look up one day and realise… Hey. Being me is enough. I’m okay working with what I’ve got.

That is what becoming looks like when it is working.▪

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*I realise the irony of this platform being called Now She Becomes. Let’s shelve that topic for another day.