Why a 2026 rebrand is the most toxic way to start the year

A new practice of self-betterment has swept across social media promising prosperity for the new year. Lydia Spencer-Elliott explores the latest trend in New Year’s resolutions

‘The 2026 rebrand’ trend has become the internet’s new favoured form of manifestation (TikTok)

New Year’s Resolutions have, in recent memory, been quite a straightforward tradition. In a now-infamous scene of the 2001 film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary, Renée Zellweger sits cross-legged on her floor with last night’s smudged eyeliner down her face and yesterday’s underwear stuck to her leg, promising to become a better person. “1) Obviously, will lose 20 pounds,” she writes in her new journal. “2) Always put last night’s pants in the laundry basket. 3) Equally important, will find nice sensible boyfriend to go out with and not form romantic attachments with any of the following: Alcoholics, workaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping Toms, megalomaniacs, emotional f***wits or perverts.”

A long way back from this fictional, but ever relatable, list of betterments, are the originators of the ritual of New Year’s resolutions: the Ancient Romans. Every January, they made annual promises of improvement to Janus, the God of Transitions, in a notably more ceremonial way than Bridget, with prayers, offerings, and public ceremonies. Cut to (the end of) 2025 and the return of intricate pleas to the universe for personal growth appears to be inching ever closer, with the proliferation of the “2026 rebrand” among Gen Z users across social media sites including TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest.

According to Pinterest, searches for the word “rebrand” alone are up 290 per cent compared to data from this time last year. Meanwhile, searches for “rebranding yourself” are up by 240 per cent and “vision board ideas” are being looked up 385 per cent more than in 2024. “Over the past year, we’ve seen people increasingly looking for manifestation and ‘vision board ideas’, with specific priorities and goals including relationships, family, health and travel,” Pinterest’s managing director in the UK & Ireland, Caroline Orange-Northey, tells me. “As we head into 2026, it’s clear people aren’t just making resolutions, they’re visualising the life they want and mapping out how to get there.”

You might already be familiar with manifesting, a pseudoscience trend that gained popularity in 2022, where those employing the practice think various things into happening using the “law of attraction”. Rebranding is, to boil it down, a more aesthetic version of manifesting, where someone plans a detailed transformation for the New Year (akin to the old “new year, new me” adage) that will, in turn, make them anything from more academic to more healthy, rich, well-travelled or happy. The Romans would, perhaps, approve.

Initially, scheming a rebrand for 2026 is, simply, quite good fun. I make a list of my goals (to go to bed earlier, learn to style my hair with rollers, earn – and save – more money, eat fewer UPFs, spend more time outside, have a consistent skincare routine, keep exercising three times a week, stay reading two books per month and stop stressing about things I don’t need to). Then, I log onto Pinterest – the app du jour for moodboarding – and put together a collection of glossy images that allude to what I want to achieve. So far, it feels just like what I did in 2003 with nothing but a pair of scissors, a glue stick, and a copy of Teen Vogue. Although the publicly shared nature of it all does provide an added incentive to actually get these things done.

But then comes phase two, which is sort of like resolution prep. In order to hit the ground running on 1 January, some things need to go in the bin immediately: my lumpy old pillows, old receipts stuffed in drawers alongside expensive (forgotten about) skin products, gym kit that has lost its elasticity, and piles of old magazines. My clean out feels good, but I feel a jolt of concern when I see the 2026 rebrand videos I’m now being fed incessantly by the TikTok algorithm where some women are throwing out all their clothes and makeup in the pursuit of a better them. “I did this and now I have nothing to wear,” admits one woman in the comments. “Everything has to go,” chimes in another, overcome with new era giddiness.

Aside from this being insanely bad for the environment, there’s something sad about ridding yourself of the person you are at the end of every calendar year. The concept of simply rebranding like a product to be sold dependent on which “core” (cottage, coastal grandmother, Barbie) is trending online feels pretty soulless. “How to kill the old version of you,” reads one intense how-to guide. “Rewrite your identity,” demands another, as if a whole new selfhood is just a deep clean and £1,000 clothes order on ASOS away. But could the algorithms we inject really be changing who we believe we are?

“Algorithms can change people’s beliefs and what they think about themselves,” says social scientist Cameron Bunker, who examines the relationship between social media and the self. “TikTok is a very algorithmic platform,” he adds, nodding to Filter World: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Jaika as evidence of how digital tastemaking is slowly making our tastes homogenised. “All coffee shops kind of look the same, so do AirBnBs, we’re all listening to the same music. Jaika thinks algorithms are the driving force behind this,” Bunker explains. “I’m interested in whether this also occurs with our self-concepts, whether algorithms make us more similar to other people – and how we see ourselves.”

Bunker tells me that he conducted an experiment where participants filled in a personality questionnaire and were told they’d receive a profile of the type of person they were, generated by an algorithm based on their answers, within 24 hours. “Regardless of what they put, we gave them a fake prediction, but they didn’t know that,” he says. Half the group were told they fit the “masculine” profile that was independent and liked to take charge in workplace settings. The other half were told they fit the “feminine” profile. “Then we had them fill out a measure of how feminine or masculine they thought they were. They were more likely to say whichever the algorithm told them they were than at the start.” So, it stands to reason that if your timeline tells you the kind of person you are, you’ll believe it.

There’s been much debate about how and why you should rebrand for 2026 among talking heads trusted online. “You have been told that if you simply create a collage of a beach house, or your dream body, or a million dollars in the bank or a Maserati, that suddenly the universe is going to hand you those things,” says guru Mel Robbins, known for her “Let Them” theory. “If the only thing that is on your vision board is the thing that’s going to take you 10 years to get done, it’s gonna feel like you might as well move to Mars for crying out loud,” she says. “It’s not motivating at all. Why? Because you start to become present day in and day out to how far away you are and that makes you start to feel less motivated.”

Robbins argues: “In order to make manifesting work for you, don’t visualise the end, visualise the steps and the actions that you’re going to take to get there. That means all that hard and annoying and tedious stuff that you’ve got to do that you don’t feel like doing in order to make that thing a reality – that’s what you’re going to put on the vision board.” Similarly, Bunker reasons: “We know from research that if you make more specific goals, they’re going to be more effective. If you say, I’m gonna exercise twice a week, it’s gonna be more effective than, say, I’m going to be better-looking. In this case, rebranding might be more ineffective than a private New Year’s resolution. But, to play devil’s advocate, rebranding could be positive if it aligns with your values… Research shows that we often think of material objects as part of ourselves. Like, if we have a really nice car. So, if you’re very materialistic, rebranding could strengthen those values. It could have a positive impact.”

But like Robbins, Bunker puts emphasis on the importance of somewhat staying in your lane when designing the shiny new you. “Influencers have a lot of resources,” he notes. “They could be a good role model and make viewers motivated to change. However, it could also provoke feelings of inadequacy if you don’t have the resources to actually make what you want to happen a reality,” he warns. Alternatively, make it your New Year’s resolution to go analogue.

I didn’t take “rebranding” to extreme levels, but the process of picking inspirational images, clearing the cupboards and planning the changes felt both cathartic and productive. It inspired a little hope that next year would be more productive and promising than the last. Still, that didn’t stop me filling my online shopping basket with a new coat, T-shirts and makeup come the Boxing Day sales, thanks to targeted ads.

Maybe we don’t all need new, rebranded wardrobes; maybe we just need less screen time.