Aesthetics are making an ass of us all
It's a sad beige world, and we're all living in it.
Sometimes, we are led to believe that the birth of the internet brought with it a whole bunch of new phenomena. However, I often think that many of these behaviours and attitudes predate the digital age and likely go back all the way to the Roman Empire.
The wonders of the online world have only expedited the communication and growth of such trends. What may have taken months or even years to become “fashionable” is now spreading within seconds. From the return of ballet flats to “beige flags”, we can never really know if a phenomenon is here to stay here or just making a fleeting visit to our news feeds.
You’d think the internet and its vastness would have opened so many new doors for people to “find their tribes” and even “be themselves” - and to some extent, it has - but, perhaps more commonly, we are seeing trends outgrow just clothing and hairstyles and becoming something even more all-consuming (and harder to achieve). That growth from a funny trend to a pervasive influence on someone’s life is what we call an aesthetic.
What is an aesthetic?
So, according to Merriam-Webster, an aesthetic (noun) is…
a particular theory or conception of beauty or art : a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight
a pleasing appearance or effect : BEAUTY
So, even at its core, an ‘aesthetic’ is only concerned with the external world.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of a highly influential aesthetic in the Western world was the popularity of pallid complexions, red lips and fair hair in Elizabethan England. And, much like Instagram, women adhering to this look often didn't really resemble their portraits, with painters taking artistic license to meet the beauty standards of the time.
Some 450 years later, we still can’t seem to shake the need to all look the same. The internet is a new playground for us to practice these age-old beauty ideals, with young women and girls on Instagram and TikTok working tirelessly to create (or curate) their lives around a particular aesthetic.
This isn’t the same as liking a specific clothing style or being ‘influenced’ to get your nails done in the same style as your favourite Instagram star. It’s when we curate and share content that fits with a desired aesthetic, thus confining our online personas into a space that conveys only the visual impact we want to make.
Common Instagram aesthetics include dark academia, grunge, minimalism and even maximalism. Where previously Instagram users would simply chuck an intense Lightroom present on top of an image to create an ‘aesthetic’ feed, many users will now go above and beyond to ensure their chosen aesthetic is portrayed at all times.
While there are many different subcategories to consider here, no other aesthetic has held the Instagram elite in a chokehold quite like the current trend of neutral minimalism.
Pioneered by famous influencers like Mrs Hinch, Molly-Mae Hague and Lorna Luxe, this look is all about sleek lines, effortless blow-dries, neatly organised homes, natural but perfect skin and just about every shade of beige there is.
The cult of beige
You may have seen these hilarious TikToks and Instagram reels by Hayley Deroche, who runs an account called Sad Beige, ridiculing the popular neutral aesthetic that has become very popular among parents in recent years.
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Perhaps the queen of sad beige and Love Island royalty, Molly-Mae, has shared dozens of images and videos of inside her home since giving birth to her first child in January 2023, including a shot of her daughter’s nursery that I genuinely thought had a sepia filter until I spotted the tiny baby in the odd, transparent crib.
Molly-Mae isn’t the only parent pursuing the beige aesthetic for her child. There are over 89,000 posts tagged with #neutralbaby on Instagram - perhaps the whitest hashtag I have ever seen, I had to scroll for a good few minutes before I saw a baby of colour in there.
While ‘sad beige’ has become a bit of a joke, the reality is pretty sad. Even the fact that the hashtags are dominated by white children perpetuates the positioning of white as the norm, something I really hoped we’d have moved past now - but clearly, we have not. If this isn’t a testament to how truly unachievable this aesthetic is, then I don’t know what is.
Research shows that colour is really important to a child’s cognitive development. In the first few months, babies perceive washed-out and low-contrast colours poorly when compared to higher-contrast hues. Typically, a baby will spend longer looking at a bright colour than a neutral shade.
Experts have also proposed a link between dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, and colour. In one study, scientists exposed the foetuses of pregnant rats to different colours. They monitored the production of dopamine, with both blue and green hues sparking the production of the neurotransmitter.
Even putting aside the scientific and cognitive significance of colour in our child’s development, the societal impact of thousands of babies and children growing up in an environment that has been curated for the benefit of Instagram rather than their own enjoyment is just plain disappointing.
And that’s where the whole idea of achieving an aesthetic truly becomes a dystopian nightmare. These trends lead to you trying to curate parts of your life, even as far as how you stock your kitchen cupboards or where your baby sleeps, to fit a certain ‘aesthetic’ and, ultimately, receive validation from our peers.
To top it all off, some of the most mainstream aesthetics, like those explored in this newsletter, are nothing more than a thinly veiled conduit for racism and ableism. In the same way that #neutralbaby yields a torrent of images of white children, the whole concept of aesthetic minimalism rarely reflects the styles or tastes of most cultures outside of the West.
In fact, the current trends are heavily influenced by Scandinavian tradition, with clean, functional furniture, washed-out hues and chic tailoring. Don’t get me wrong, I really like this style myself, but the universality of this sort of aesthetic can become damaging in its unrealistic appeal.
Photo and video editing tools are smarter than ever, allowing users to harness this AI-powered technology to fine-tune their appearances and more accurately portray the aesthetic of their choice. Some tools are offering skin smoothing and even skin lightning filters, so it's easy to see how this Euro-centric aesthetic has become more than just a fashion trend.
If most followed influencers don’t actually look like their posts… then how can we ever hope to achieve it?
Aesthetics are unrealistic as they are fixed perceptions of an external appearance, and we are so much more than how we look. You can't live like a photo.
Even if you invest in all of the right clothes, hairstyles, and nails and even finely tune your images with filters and editing, you are only curating yourself to fit a certain aesthetic within the realms of tiny squares.
If you cannot achieve something which is inherently unachievable, then you will feel like you are not enough. And who wins when we are “not enough”? It’s not us, that’s for sure. Big brands thrive on the trend cycle because it’s our constant chase to reinvent ourselves and try to become something we’ve seen online that makes them money. And what’s perhaps the most ironic thing about this whole debacle is that those people we are hoping to emulate don’t even fit their own aesthetics in real life either.
What do you think about the popular social media aesthetics? Let me know in the comments below or reply to this email.
In this week's Touching Grass, I'm super excited to talk about the Doing It For The Kids Manchester meetup that we attended at the weekend. The DITFK community is a wonderful group of like-minded freelance parents, and it was awesome to finally meet some people I've known online for a long time.
We had a pretty rough ride to get there, with an awful hotel stay the night before (and zero sleep), but all of the stress dropped away when we entered a professional space full of talented business owners and their kids! We took our daughter, and she played with other toddlers while we listened to some inspiring talks and chatted to our community members.
If you're a freelance parent and you feel like you're the only one struggling, then I highly recommend joining the DIFTK community.
This week, I've also been enjoying…
📚 Losing Eden by Lucy Jones - An earlier piece from the author behind Matresence (one of my favourite non-fiction works from this year). This one is about the vital link between our mental health and the wild world.
📺 Boiling Point (TV Series on BBC) - Taking place six months after the incredible single-shot film, the TV series follows the original cast in a new venture. We were both devastated when these four episodes came to an end as this show was absolutely fantastic and devastating in equal measure.
That's all from me this week, see you next Thursday for more of the same,
Ellen x
Another thing that you didn't explicitly mention, but it's heavily implied; adhering to an aesthetic, especially a white/beige one, is a coded show of wealth and privilege. It takes a lot of time and effort to curate a white/beige/neutral aesthetic. When you're talking about babies and only dressing them in these colours, you're implying that you can afford to constantly replace clothes when they're stained, or spend a lot of time and energy removing them.