‘Girl hammers’ go viral as women share items they use instead of tools
You’ve heard of girl dinner and girl math — get ready for the latest trend in girlhood: girl hammers.
TikTok’s For You pages are full of DIY interior design projects, but not all of them are suitable for beginners who might not have a legit toolkit at home.
Lack of tools, especially hammers, have led people to use random everyday items they do have lying around, such as shoes, brushes, books — really anything you could think of that can withstand smashing a nail.
Yes, these alternatives are being dubbed #girlhammers — and clips showing them off have pounded out a whopping 4.2 billion views as of Friday.
TikTok user @madtod first popularized the term after posting a video of her using a variety of items to hang up decor in her house, including a hairbrush and a leaf-scented candle.
The footage — which has already racked up 699,300 views and 135,400 likes — was captioned, “Everyone is talking about girl dinner, but nobody’s talking about girl hammers.”
People rushed to the comments, sharing all the things they’ve used in place of a hammer.
“THE CANDLE SO REAL,” one person agreed.
“Heavy? handheld? hammer!” another justified.
“Candle, bluetooth speaker, random wooden box, heavy book, empty pot ANYTHING I CAN FIND,” someone else shared.
“Me and the white direct tv remote were besties when i was younger. homegirl was a BRICK,” another chimed in.
“Alternating between soup and candle always,” one admitted, while another breathed a sigh of communal relief: “I thought i was the only oneee.”
Others revealed their family faves: “THIS: I’ve used a candle, a snowglobe, a cup, literally anything I could find in my room,” one said, while another declared: “My earliest memory of this is my mom using her heels.”
The popularity of all things “girl” has heightened recently with a summer full of Barbie, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, bringing women to the forefront of the pop-culture sphere and shaping conversations on girl power.
The latest trend comes amid a summer of makeshift meals (girl dinner), fudged numbers (girl math) and straight-up cute decor (the grocery girl aesthetic), to name a few.
Clicking through #girldinner on TikTok will yield posts with a mouthwatering 1.3 billion views.
Though many have branded the trend “disturbing,” there might be more nutritional value to this snack-like dinner than one might think.
Olivia Amitrano, the “OG wellness influencer,” previously told The Post that a “girl dinner” can actually be “one of the most balanced ways” to prepare a meal for the gut microbiome — which is integral to digestion and generating nutrients — and to enrich gut diversity.
However, the trend arrives amid criticism that TikTok promotes “toxic” diet culture and “glorifies” excessive weight loss, and alongside an alarming rise in adolescent eating disorders since the pandemic started.
Amitrano noted that unhealthy versions of girl dinner can happen because people are too exhausted to put together a nourishing meal.
“Sometimes ‘girl dinners’ on TikTok can look a little sad — it’s just too little food,” she said. “I think that there is a risk there that we might not be meeting our caloric needs. Just eating enough is so important when you’re having ‘girl dinner.’”
Women on TikTok are also sharing what they like to call “girl math,” or rather, their ways of justifying spending money.
For example, if something is less than $5, that something is actually free, according to girl math. If you buy a concert ticket in September, it’s free by the time the concert comes around in March.
“If you convince yourself that something you paid for is free when it isn’t, then you can quickly end up overspending and seriously hurting your finances,” Jacob Channel, a senior economist at LendingTree.com, previously told The Post.
But Samantha James, who coined the term, said #GirlMath “is not about math as a science — it’s just supposed to be fun, light-hearted logic.”