“Quit drinking if you want a free face lift,” one TikTok is titled. In it, the creator points to her cheekbones like a weatherman points to the sun on a map. In another, a toned influencer spins in athleisure: “14 months sober and glowing up every day”. In almost all of them, the creators claim that their eyes are brighter, skin clearer, faces ‘snatched’. It’s hard to tell through a screen.

Young people don’t need much convincing to go sober nowadays. 37 per cent of 18-24-year-olds don’t drink alcohol according to YouGov’s latest research, and 25 per cent reported cutting back in the past six months. Both rates are higher than any other adult age group. But for anyone on the fence, TikTok’s promise of hotness might seal the deal. It did for me, when I set my own NY Resolution to stop drinking for a month. Coming of age with the binge drinking culture in the UK, I found I often drank out of an instinct to please those around me. I hoped a month off might rewire my relationship with alcohol. When I craved a crispy pét-nat, it helped to remind myself of the health benefits – better-functioning organs, a stabilised nervous system, a happier brain. But it’d be disingenuous to pretend a sober glow-up wasn’t enticing.

As the weeks went by (my Dry January became 10 months and counting), some parts of my life improved. I slept more deeply by month two, achieved a bunch of career goals by month four, and now I have time and money for hobbies like surfing, boxing and starting an allotment. But my confidence in my appearance plummeted.

I was prepared for my glow-up to be subtle – I just didn’t expect to feel less hot. Withdrawing from the hedonistic environments associated with booze – parties, clubs, bars – meant I also withdrew from self-expression. Pre-sobriety, I’d always experimented with my hair, but during nine months without alcohol, I didn’t visit a salon once. Instead, my hair was usually scraped into a practical pony. Partially because new hobbies and exercise classes demanded it – but also, styling my hair would mean reckoning with who I was now, and these days, I wasn’t so sure. The smoky eyes that used to make me feel sexy felt weird in new, lucid environments: book events, surf classes, coffee hangs. Alcohol had previously papered over the cracks of my insecurities about my height, body shape, clothes, and teeth. Sober, I felt exposed.

I was prepared for my glow-up to be subtle – I just didn’t expect to feel less hot.

Any skin benefits sobriety might have offered were reversed as I turned to sugary treats for dopamine hits – another sobriety side-effect people rarely mention. My cheekbones and jawline weren’t transformed. Nobody told me my eyes looked brighter. It left me wondering: are the promises of sobriety influencers setting the sober-curious up for a fall?

And I’m not alone. Bethany, 25, who lives with body dysmorphia, found that her own sobriety complicated her body image. “When I was intoxicated, I could kind of ignore it. But I think my dysmorphia amped up when I went sober, because I had nothing to hide behind… It forced me to sit in my feelings...” She says she used drinking as a mask, presenting an image of herself she didn’t believe could exist while sober. “I felt, and sometimes still feel, that I can’t dress or wear make-up a certain way unless it’s for the drinking and clubbing scene.”

Aileen, 36, a sober-curious MUA, has also noticed clients and friends mentioning the link between sobriety and self-expression. “People who’ve gone sober tell me they don’t buy ‘going out’ clothes or wear much make-up anymore, because they no longer really go out,” she says. “I think I keep certain looks or levels of effort for environments where drinking... Getting ready is 100 per cent usually accompanied by alcohol.”

That raises a bigger question: why is the club so tied to aesthetic expression and confidence? Ariane, 30, has been sober for seven years and describes the club as similar to an art gallery, where people “exhibit the look” they’ve perfected at home, to receive feedback, applause, and to have their self-expression witnessed and photographed. It’s the dearth of sober-friendly spaces that led her to co-found Not Today, an organisation creating community spaces for sober and sober-curious people in London and Paris.

She also points out that for many members of the LGBTQ+ community and/or party scene, the club can be a space for freer, safer experimentation with hair, make-up, clothing or partial nudity. Speaking with Ariane left me wondering: did the answer to my confidence crisis lie in finding spaces where sobriety and safe self-expression aren’t mutually exclusive? 

My earliest experiences expressing a less straight version of myself were when drunk at club nights and parties. My first queer dates were in bars over whisky. Is it any wonder that removing alcohol felt like a rug-pull? Research shows LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately targeted by alcohol marketing, and DrinkAware found in 2024 that LGBTQ+ adults are more likely to experience harm from drinking. “Given the intertwined nature between queerness and substance use, it can be confronting for LGBTQ+ people to move away from the nightlife scene, as it has historically provided a protected space for queer people to explore identity and community,” says Lukas Sykes, spokesperson for Prism, an LGBTQ+ Drug & Alcohol Service in Bristol.

But as Sykes puts it, “your queer expression doesn’t have to mimic the sweaty tank tops on the dance floor, it can be found in quiz nights at home… walks in the woods, picnics in the parks, mocktail nights, movie nights, magazine nights... The exploration of your sobriety and self-expression can go hand-in-hand.”

For me, things clicked only 10 months into my alcohol-free experiment, at a queer-friendly hair salon. I had my practical ponytail cut off. In its place, a thrilling, shaggy mess of brunette and bleach panelling – impulse fringe included. At a later fringe trim, Rafael, my stylist, grinned through his sparkling tooth gems and red wet-look hair, I told him I felt like I was finding my way back to feeling myself, post-chop. “Sometimes you just need a boost of self-confidence that you’d otherwise get from alcohol,” he said, carefully sliding his scissors across my forehead. “Sometimes what you need is just a fringe.”

Maybe those sobriety TikTokers did feel hotter. Or maybe it’s a correlation – sobriety gives you time, money and mental space to make changes that lead to conventional ‘sexiness’. But in my own failed pursuit of the sober glow-up, I found something more useful by far. I figured out how to feel hot without alcohol or sobriety as a crutch.