‘“[يمكنك] خداع نفسك للاعتقاد أن صداع الكحول ليس حقيقياً,’ قالت صانعة المحتوى ألان بلمبرغ. صورة: فكتوريا سكوركوفا/غيتي إيميجز عرض الصورة بحجم كامل ‘“[You can] trick yourself into thinking that your hangover isn’t real,’ said content creator Allana Blumberg. Photograph: Viktoriya Skorikova/Getty Images Alcohol Why gen Z are ‘romanticizing’ their hangovers: ‘It’s lowkey a beautiful thing’ For young people, flaunting eye bags and bed rotting has become a cheeky rebuttal of body optimization culture
Alaina Demopoulos Wed 8 Jul 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 8 Jul 2026 17.38 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google Picture a typical hangover: a morning spent curled under a comforter, chugging Gatorade and shame spiraling about what you might have said at the bar the night before.
Not so for the young people who are “romanticizing” their hangovers on TikTok and Instagram. Instead, they are flaunting their dark eye circles and raging headaches as the aftereffects of a good time, broadcasting their bad decisions to the world with a glowy sheen.
“Romanticizing my hangover bc I’m a young ho and that means I had a fun night,” one woman captioned a clip where she dances while brushing her teeth, clad in an oversize hoodie and sweatpants. “Like that’s lowkey a beautiful thing.”
[Gen Z] are saying it’s OK to have balance Mary Anne Porto “Feeling hungover but full of love and happiness,” another woman wrote over a video of her smiling through a sunny day-after walk. Yet another creator turned her crapulence into a flex: “I’m rotting in my nyc apartment and im hungover from running around nyc til the sun came up,” she wrote, punctuating the sentiment to the soundtrack of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York.
Read more You could read this budding trend as a cheeky rebuttal of body optimization culture, with its fixation on biohacking, restrictive dieting and Oura rings: so what if I overindulged last night ? “People are sick of hearing about wellness culture,” said Mary Anne Porto, a senior editor at Punch, a drinks-themed digital media company. “I personally don’t think we should be romanticizing feeling gross, but it’s about not beating yourself up over having a good night. They’re saying it’s OK to have balance.”
Posting aspirational hangover content also feels transgressive in an era of hypercurated social media feeds, where one can scroll for hours watching picture-perfect influencers extolling the benefits of strength training or green juices.
“Alcohol and hangover [content] sort of taps into that ‘I’m colorfully destructive,’ devil-may-care type of thing,” said Dave Infante, who writes Fingers , an independent newsletter about American drinking culture. “That’s always been an attractive persona for young people.” He cited millennial figures such as Cat Marnell, a beauty writer and “reformed derelict” who released the addiction memoir How to Murder Your Life, and elder party stateswoman Chelsea Handler during her Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea days.
People in their 20s are poised to revive the archetype. “Romanticizing being hungover because that’s what Alix Earle would do,” one woman captioned a TikTok that has been liked more than 222,000 times. That would be a reference to the popular influencer who became famous documenting her hard-partying days as an undergraduate and titled her podcast Hot Mess with Alix Earle.
View image in fullscreen Allana Blumberg luxuriates in her hangover in a Tik…