The TikTok trend "bathrooms designed by women" has been absolutely owning me this week. If you've seen it, you know: creators listing every feature their dream bathroom would have if a woman had actually been in the room when the blueprints were drawn. If you haven't seen it, pause. Go watch fifteen of them. Then come back here angrier than when you left.
I live in a one-bathroom apartment. Not large, not fancy. It has a single overhead light positioned in such a way that it illuminates the ceiling beautifully and my face like I'm a body at a crime scene. Every time I do my makeup in there I look fine, walk into the green room or wherever I'm going, catch a glimpse of myself in a non-crime-scene mirror, and realize I've done half my contour in shadow. I look like a raccoon auditioning for a theater production of itself.
This is not an accident of my specific apartment. It's a pattern. And I have thoughts.
the lighting problem is not a small problem
Let me tell you something about bathroom lighting that apparently did not make it into the architectural curriculum for most of American history: overhead lighting is for the shower. For making sure you don't slip on a wet floor and crack your skull. It is NOT for doing anything requiring precision near your own face.
The mirror needs light on the sides. Side-mounted sconces or vertical strips at face height, that's what you need when you're applying eyeliner in black or, in my case, the specific dark plum I wear basically every time I perform and have been wearing since I was nineteen. You need to see what you're doing. You need light hitting your face the same way light hits your face in the world, which is from in front and to the sides, not from directly above your head.
Every film and TV set I have ever been on, even the rinky-dink ones where craft services was a single sad bowl of individually wrapped granola bars, has a mirror with lights around it. Every theater dressing room has this. Professional makeup artists figured this out before I was born. And yet somehow residential bathroom design missed the memo entirely and we're all standing under a fluorescent tube on the ceiling wondering why we look tired.
I own two clip-on ring lights, a freestanding mirror with built-in LEDs, and a small LED strip I stuck to the inside of my medicine cabinet. My bathroom looks like a pilot filming his own YouTube channel. I should not have had to do this. Someone should have just designed it right the first time.
the outlet situation is frankly criminal
And then there are the outlets.
My bathroom has one outlet. One. It's behind the door, roughly three feet from the sink. This means when I plug in my hair dryer, which I do approximately every other day, I'm standing with my back to the mirror, arm bent at an angle that would concern a physical therapist, trying to dry my hair in a configuration that makes no aerodynamic sense. I have a very long extension cord. It snakes across the floor. I have absolutely tripped on it.
A bathroom designed with women in mind would have outlets at counter height, on either side of the mirror, with appropriate GFCI protection because obviously. Maybe a dedicated outlet for a flat iron that doesn't require you to drape the cord across the sink. Maybe enough outlets that you don't have to choose between your hair dryer and your electric toothbrush charger on the same day. Not a radical ask. This is geometry.
The average American woman who does any kind of styling spends meaningful time in that bathroom with electrical tools. Hot tools. Hair dryers, straighteners, curling wands, the little diffuser attachment I use exactly once a year when I try to embrace my natural waves and then give up. These tools have cords. The cords need to reach the mirror. This is not complicated.
counter space: we deserve surfaces
My counter space is fourteen inches wide. I've measured it. Fourteen inches of usable surface between the sink basin and the wall. On that fourteen inches I have: my two-step skincare routine (recently streamlined), my toothbrush situation, a small basket of hair ties because I lose them faster than I can buy them, and the sad little candle I light when I need the bathroom to smell like something other than a bathroom.
My dry shampoo lives on the back of the toilet. Extra contacts solution lives under the sink behind the cabinet door that doesn't close all the way. My collection of hair clips lives in a cup on the windowsill, which means every time I open the window, both times per year, during the magical weather weeks when the city is neither freezing nor melting, I redistribute my hair clips across the bathroom floor.
A bathroom designed for how actual humans live would have storage. Real storage. Deep drawers that can hold a hair dryer without requiring you to coil the cord into a shape that slowly destroys the wire. Shelving inside the mirror cabinet that fits more than chapstick and a travel-size bottle of something you forgot you owned. Counter surface wide enough to set down what you're actually using without playing constant Tetris with your skincare products.
I'm not talking about a spa. I'm talking about functional space for a functional life. The fact that this reads as a fantasy is the whole problem.
the dream bathroom, spec'd out
Okay so since we're here and I've already started mentally redesigning every bathroom I've ever lived in, let me tell you what I'd build if someone handed me a blank floor plan and said go.
The lighting would be warm. Not yellow, not that orange that makes you feel like you're inside a pumpkin, but warm white, around 2700K to 3000K, from sconces mounted vertically on either side of the mirror at face height. The overhead fixture would be on a dimmer. Bright when you need bright. Dim when you're washing your face at midnight and your eyes aren't ready for the world.
The mirror would be big. Like, bigger than you think you need. Because nothing makes a bathroom feel more like a bathroom and less like a luxury than a mirror that only shows you down to your shoulders. I want to check the full outfit. I want to see if the hem is even. Give me the mirror.
Outlets: three minimum, at counter height, on both sides of the sink. GFCI. Possibly USB-A and USB-C built in because we live in the present and I'm tired of bringing my charging brick into the bathroom.
Counter: deep enough that things don't fall into the sink, wide enough for the reality of morning routines, with actual drawer storage underneath. Real drawers, not that open shelf situation where you can see everything but access nothing without getting on your knees.
And my one slightly controversial ask: a small bench or ledge. Somewhere to set a bag. Somewhere to sit while your deep conditioner does its thing. Somewhere that isn't the toilet lid. I know that's a lot to ask but it's going in the manifesto anyway.
why this matters beyond my personal inconvenience
I know this might seem like the world's most low-stakes complaint. Girl mad about bathroom outlets, girl wants a bigger mirror. Okay.
But what I actually think is going on: design, the design of spaces and objects and tools and workplaces, reflects whose needs were centered when those designs were made. For most of recent history, the people drawing the blueprints and making the decisions were not the people spending the most time in bathrooms doing hair and makeup. So the bathrooms got designed for quick in-and-out utilitarian use, and everything else, all the labor that happens in there, got treated as invisible. As extra. As something the bathroom didn't need to accommodate.
That's not a conspiracy. It's just what happens when the people doing a lot of unpaid or undervalued labor don't have a seat at the table where their workspace gets designed.
The trend blowing up the way it has tells me I'm not the only one who's been quietly furious about this for years. The comments on those videos are tens of thousands of people saying YES, FINALLY, THIS. That's not a niche complaint. It's a recognition, loud and a little funny and sometimes feral, that the spaces we inhabit were not built with us in mind and we have noticed and we are done pretending otherwise.
My apartment bathroom is what it is. I've made my peace with the crime scene lighting and the fourteen inches of counter and the extension cord I trip over. HEATHEN HYMNS is out in the world right now and I keep getting messages from people saying the album helped them, and that matters more than my bathroom situation. But if I ever get to design a space, tour bus, green room, actual future apartment with a lease I choose, I'm bringing this list. Not apologizing for a single item on it.
The outlets. The lighting. The counter space. The bench. Consider this my formal notice.
Love you all. Go watch the TikTok trend if you haven't. Then go measure your bathroom counter and get mad with me.