Women are showing off their outfits moments before dumping someone in 'get ready with me' TikToks

• People on TikTok are filming themselves getting ready to meet up with their partner to break up.
• They apply makeup and try on outfits, sometimes talking through the reasons for the impending split.

Rori Thomas, a 19-year-old public-relations student in Michigan, applies her favorite lip gloss — glassy, not goopy — and starts the long process of selecting an outfit. She's on her way to break up with her boyfriend of three years, and she wants her jeans and top to make her feel beautiful and powerful.

On her phone, Thomas taps "record." She zips up her cargo-style pants, lifting her leg to give viewers a better look, and tosses on a flannel that she'll later tell a commenter where to buy (it's from PrettyLittleThing).

Thomas titled her TikTok "GRWM To Go Breakup With my Boyfriend," adding the caption "sad gal to bad gal." The TikTok, posted on September 14, has been viewed about 24,000 times.

Get Ready With Me, or GRWM, videos are one of TikTok's house specialties; the hashtag #grwm has over 50 billion views. (For context, there are currently 8 billion people on Earth.) Creators — typically women — treat viewers to a stylized sizzle reel of a makeover montage: the outfits they tried on before landing on the perfect dress, the step-by-step application of their makeup.

Some of the videos are set to music; others feature a "story time" as a creator clamps down her eyelash curlers or styles her hair. The tale can be banal (offering career advice, or detailing plans) or serious (dealing with a stalker for six years, or getting "disowned" by a religious family). Often she'll pause to mention the brand of highlighter or eyeshadow she's using.

For the teens and 20-somethings who make up TikTok's primary user base, this level of openness is nothing new, even when it comes to heartbreak: Several videos of people sobbing into the camera about a breakup have gone viral.

Blend the two together, and you get a new genre: GRWM for breakups. A creator shows us the outfit or the hairstyle she's chosen to dump her boyfriend in. She'll tell millions of viewers what happened (he cheated) and how she found out (a Tinder Plus email). Comments roll in: You deserve better, you're beautiful, good for you, it'll get easier.

Fusing a video centered on clothes and makeup with an imminent breakup might strike some people as superficial or even callous. Thomas doesn't see it that way.

She told Insider that getting ready made her feel empowered. Showing up to a breakup "looking bad" wouldn't feel "liberating," she explained.

"Sometimes your outer appearance can make your inner self feel better," she said. "You know you look good, so you start to carry yourself like you do."

Thomas has posted a few GRWMs before — for date nights, trips to an apple orchard, or a night out. When she made her breakup GRWM, she hadn't planned to tell viewers what she was getting ready for. But searching the app, she saw a host of related videos. So why not?

"I might as well," she said, "because I wouldn't be the only person going through this."

A culture of immediacy encourages some young people to post their worst moments

Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist who wrote the bestseller "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone," said that life online has created a culture of immediacy for young people that nibbles away at the idea of "sitting with" a feeling before posting.

Thomas said her GRWM was indeed an impulsive decision. "I definitely posted in the moment to get out of the sadness I was in," she told Insider.

Thomas said that while she had to deal with some people "trying to be nosy" and asking for breakup details, she still stands by her choice. "My feelings haven't changed," she said. "I loved that I could be transparent and relatable."

Gottlieb said that in addition to its ability to turn a moment of impulsivity into a permanent digital record, social media has created a landscape so replete with the details of other people's lives that it can make the line between public and private feel not just porous but transparent.

That vulnerability can be positive in some ways, Gottlieb said. But as we're often reminded, the internet doesn't forget, and posters may make a decision based on how they feel in a fragile moment that they later regret.

Creators said that their partners didn't know about the videos in advance — but that they also didn't mind

Tisha Potijaroen, 18, and her boyfriend of 1 1/2 years, Kai Pembo, were splitting up amicably before they headed to college in the fall. After they went on their final date, she spontaneously decided to post a breakup-makeup routine and date montage on TikTok.

In the June 21 clip, which has been viewed 87,000 times, Potijaroen's boyfriend smiles at the camera as they cheers at dinner.

Potijaroen's most viral TikToks, with 11.2 million views apiece, are another GRWM and one of her applying lashes at the airport. For her, the format wasn't necessarily a tool of liberation — it was a familiar hook.

But she also wanted her GRWM breakup video to represent another side of heartache: that "a breakup can be a good and mature thing," she said. "It can be positive — one last super fun date together."

While she posts on TikTok regularly, Potijaroen said her ex-boyfriend didn't initially know she'd made the video. "He kind of laughed about it," she said, adding that when his friends saw it, "he was a little embarrassed at first." But ultimately, she said, "he doesn't really care" and remains supportive of her TikToks. (Pembo didn't respond to Insider's request for comment.)

Not every creator cares what their soon-to-be ex thinks. For Thomas, her boyfriend's feelings were beside the point.

"I knew that he was going to see the video, and he did see the video, but I didn't care," Thomas said. "It was his fault, and he saw the breakup coming anyway."

Thomas and her boyfriend have since gotten back together. They've talked about the TikTok, and "he was supportive and wanted me to do whatever I wanted to heal," she said.

But she doesn't regret posting the video. "I couldn't care for his feelings if he totally disregarded mine in the first place," she said of their pre-breakup relationship.

Online vulnerability can be a good thing — but it can also inhibit fully grieving

Emma K. Adam, an applied developmental psychobiologist, said it's a positive thing that TikTokers are willing to share a not-picture-perfect life online: It can normalize grief, mental illness, and other issues.

But Adam said she's wary of the superficiality of self-betterment in some videos that advocate "putting on makeup and looking good" as a coping mechanism.

Creators "were willing to show themselves in less than their best light," Adam said, "but sometimes only as long as they were transformed in the process of the TikTok." If people feel they need to make themselves attractive in order to share their messy moments, the videos may be less empowering than they seem.

For example, in some GRWM breakup videos, creators narrate choosing outfits and makeup based on their partner's preferences. "I know he likes me in really tight clothing," Christina Page told viewers in a TikTok video posted on August 6.

There's also the issue of the online echo chamber. Pauline Boss, a therapist who's an expert on loss, described a TikTok as a monologue. When you upload a controlled message and the algorithm delivers it to people whose tastes and worldviews might resemble your own, they might be more likely to validate your opinion unchallenged and en masse.

"These posts, in some ways, are the immediate gratification of filling the hole of pain and loss inside us," Gottlieb noted. "But the work of grieving is to not fill up that hole immediately."

'You never know how it could help someone'

Potijaroen said that while she didn't post looking for support, she ended up finding it anyway.

"It helped hearing from people who've done this before. It helped me see a light at the end of the tunnel," she said. Commenters who'd gone through similar experiences shared that they'd eventually gotten back together with their high-school sweethearts.

Potijaroen said she doesn't want to discount the importance of her in-person support system, but the online validation still helped her grieve — and for others, that may be the only option.

"Some people aren't as lucky," she said. "Some people don't have solid friends or parents or siblings that they could go to for help."

She encourages skeptics of the GRWM videos "to keep an open mind."

"I feel like it's very easy for the older generation to critique everything. They're like, 'Oh, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? It's too much information, nobody cares,' and stuff like that," she said. "But it's like, well, think of it from this point of view: You never know how it could help someone."