Don’t let them take your whimsy away. Kinda chic. I want to be niche. These are all phrases I’m constantly hearing, and they’ve become TikTok’s newest personality trend.
Before these words consumed my Tiktok feed, I used to associate whimsy with Lisa Frank notebooks and Barbie movies, specifically “Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses.” The word chic was something printed on a shirt from Justice that I wore religiously at the age of 10. And niche? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you.
Right now, all three words are used to describe the most ordinary things. Doing a bedazzled face mask makes you whimsical. Going out alone is kinda chic. Listening to an underground artist makes you niche. Honestly, at first I found it funny, but now it makes me wonder: when did having a personality become another trend to shop for?
White the intention behind all these buzzwords was to bring harmless joy into people’s lives, TikTok turned that message into a tutorial on how to follow capitalistic ideals.
For example, let’s look at the bedazzled face mask trend. Bedazzling has been around for ages and became especially popular in the 70s. But it’s recently been given a new name on TikTok: Whimsymaxxing. Kylie Jenner’s 29th gem-covered birthday party is a prime example of this look. ?
Soon, my feed filled up with tutorial videos on how to literally bedazzle a face mask and make it aesthetic. It started to feel less like creativity and more like instructions on another look we’re supposed to buy and recreate.
Gluing plastic rhinestones onto your single-use face mask and plastic cups to post on your feed isn’t whimsical- it’s simply wasteful. With plastic pollution already causing so much harm to our planet, do we really need to glue more plastic on things we are about to throw away?
Brands have even started using these buzzwords to promote their own products. Sephora, for example, has a whimsical fairy makeup shopping page. ?Now the word whimsy feels less like an imaginative and playful lifestyle and more like a performance for an audience.
The same thing happened with the word chic. Scrolling on TikTok, I’ve seen people call something as ordinary as eating toast chic. I have also seen influencers promote what the chic girls are buying, eating and wearing. To me, it feels awfully dystopian to have a checklist of things you need to buy in order to be chic.
And then there’s niche, which has personally been my least favorite of these buzzwords. Online, it’s been used as a competition to prove how unique and unusual your interests are, even when thousands of people follow the same advice on how to stand out.?
At the end of the day, you shouldn’t need the internet to tell you who to be and what to like. Maybe the most whimsical, chic and niche thing you can do is be yourself, even when it’s not a trend and nobody is watching.
