The passionate gloving community on Reddit TikTokers thought was a joke

December 28 2025

Memes and jokey videos about the “gloving community” – devotees of a dance subculture involving gloves with LED lights in the fingertips – have been all over TikTok in the last month or so.

It’s a genuine dedicated community who compete to create the most impressive light shows with their hands – often in intimate one-to-one settings. They call it an art form and it has its roots in 1990s rave culture and a gloving craze in the mid to late 2000s.

It’s suddenly gone viral as a huge social media talking point thanks to a wave of satirical TikToks poking fun at the community – calling their passion cringey or just parodying them – alongside videos being posted by original glovers doing hand dance routines to trending songs.

This "husband gets caught by wife" example with 4 million views is typical of the way TikTokers are parodying how seriously the glovers take their art.

If you go on to TikTok today and try to make sense of the thousands of different videos being posted about gloving – and why people are also talking about "degloving" – you might have a hard job distinguishing between the serious glovers and the parodies.

By switching from TikTok to Reddit you can discover a genuine dedicated community who talk passionately about their art form in the r/gloving subreddit.

Here’s an example of one post with a lightshow from a gloving Redditor, who alludes to the TikTokers discovering it for the first time: “Here’s one for all the trolls.”

Comments on the post show the very different kind of reaction and informed discussion you get when you’re within an interest-driven community on Reddit:

• "Sheeeeeesh"

• "Don’t mind me, just picking my face off the ground…. Jesus Christ"

• "beautiful flail/whip combos, the stacking and morphing was a chefs kiss, the behind the back combo hng"

• "Holy fuck this is a god tier show dude, how long have you been gloving for" > reply: "12.5y! And thanks 👾"

• "THANK YOU DUDE!!! You’re a real one for this one, had me geeking from how mesmerized I was 🤯🤘🏽"

• "Very nice, I love Tipper . What diffusers do you have on these ?" > reply: "These are basic domes, came with the aeos stock setup"

• "Do you plan out your routine or do you improvise?" > reply: "All improvise but sometimes ill be sure to go behind the back at X point or something like that, some drops are somewhat planned but not down to every single movement"

Here’s an example of the community explaining what gloving is all about in response to a post from someone who's heard about it through the TikTok trend:

The long and often thoughtful replies give a lot of insight into what gloving entails and the nature of the community:

• "Gloving is an art form. It borrows both from dance and flow arts. Or basically it's people dancing with their hands with lights on their fingers. Typically these shows are more intimate, ideally one on one or to a small group, and up close in your face. That's all it is really. I love it."

  
  

• "It's a form of "flow art" and style of dance mainly in the rave and EDM festival scene. When you perform for someone, it's called a lightshow. Similar to poi, juggling, staves, hoops, whips, orbits, etc. You're dancing with your hands and flowing with the music. There are many different techniques and moves. Tutting, finger tutting, dials, whips, tunnels, digits, tracing, stacking, conjuring, impacting, finger roll. All of these terms are moves/techniques used in lightshows. The first and most basic move is the finger roll, most techniques are built on this one simple move. I think for most of us, it's just fun man lol. Shits silly as hell, everyone knows it, but it's fun so who cares. I made a lot of friends gloving over the years. A lot of people in the rave scene frequent shows, so you'd see the same people every time you went. Going to a show and trading with the homies was always a great time. There's a ton of tutorials on YouTube. There's also discords you can join. I suggest looking up Puppet, he has quite a few tutorial videos for beginners."

  
  

• "To add on to what others have said here: I think it, like any other art, has the potential to, or even to just say it does, aid mental health. Whether because it is an external expression of the internal or simply because it can be rather mindless/meditative. I pick it back up after a long hiatus in the past year, which has been rather trying, and it really has helped me to feel more grounded. To each their own, right? I love the art form. Art is expression, not matter the medium."

What does the gloving community think of the TikTok memes?

This post in the r/gloving subreddit asks the community what they think about gloving becoming mainstream in meme culture.

Some of the comments:

• "Good for the scene overall. Many will start ironically and then actually enjoy it." > reply: "Lol. This happened to my friend, but they committed to the bit and bought gloves. Now they're just a glover and it's great."

  
  

• "Thats what got me into gloving, I was given a light show and instantly decided I wanted to learn how to do it too!"

  
  

• "same here. Some 10 years ago my friends (puppet, mez, dynamiks, etc) have all been gloving for years at that point, went to my first rave in 2016, got a lightshow and eventually got my own pair of gloves less than 2 years later lol."

The mention of Puppet in some of the Reddit comments is a reference to one of the most famous of glovers, who’s quickly become the face of gloving on TikTok through his Infinite Puppet account, which has grown to 225,000 followers as he teaches people how to do it.

As the gloving parodies have taken off his comment threads on TikTok are being over-run by jokes and digs but he's been leaning in to the humour, posting TikToks like this one where he refers to "degloving" – a term TikTokers are coming up with all sort of definitions for and inspiring lots of "Gloving vs Degloving" memes.

Example comments on his TikTok:

• “genuinely one of the best creators to take a joke"

  
  

• "Puppet playing along with the memes is so peak I'm actually low-key interested in gloving now fr 😭🙏"

  
  

• "ngl this guy makes gloving seem cool cause his personality 😭😭"

And here’s an example of one of his one-to-one TikTok tutorials where he's explaining his thought process and techniques in creating a gloving lightshow.

We use Shooglebox to help PR and marketing teams tune in to to different communities of interest. You can see an example in this read-only box about the gloving community that uses a mixture of TikTok, YouTube and Reddit posts to get your bearings on the core community, its origins, the parodies, and the beginners who are just discovering the joys of gloving for the first time.

And here’s a TikTok showing one of those beginners opening a Christmas present to discover “No way! No fucking way!!! It’s gloves ... for gloving!”: