Generational Trends
Jul. 26th, 2025 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneA couple of months ago, I don't know when exactly, I saw a link on Tumblr to an article about a "new summer trend" of not wearing mascara that the youths were (allegedly) referring to as "ghost eyelashes" (let's take the rant about the majority of people not wearing mascara as a given). Even though I find this kind of reporting (on beauty trends) mostly annoying, I frequently also find it... amusing, in an annoyed way, so I clicked to read it on the strength of my giggling bemusement at the headline.
The angle this beauty journalist chose to take was a Generational Divide one, pointing out how the trend was very young and positing that people older than their mid-20s would be uncomfortable with the shocking exposure of their natural eyelashes in full sun, and the article was peppered with links to other articles in the same website about generational trends that were so outrageous that I did what she wanted and clicked on them:
The angle this beauty journalist chose to take was a Generational Divide one, pointing out how the trend was very young and positing that people older than their mid-20s would be uncomfortable with the shocking exposure of their natural eyelashes in full sun, and the article was peppered with links to other articles in the same website about generational trends that were so outrageous that I did what she wanted and clicked on them:
- This publication has alleged in the past that wearing tapered or straight-leg jeans is an embarrassingly Millennial trait (no mention given of older generations: possibly the youth in question have forgotten that there are plenty of members of Gen X just among their own generation's parents, and obviously nobody older than their own parents is relevant, lol).
I went on an emotional journey of laughing, boggling, and remembering how in the mid-90s when the 70s-bellbottom revival was in full swing it became nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy tapered jeans or even straight ones for a brief time, and how my friends and I used to refer to extant surviving tapered jeans as "boa-constrictor-ankled". Of course since everyone my age was growing extremely rapidly throughout the period from 1995-2001, it was impossible for any of us to own old pairs of jeans that still fitted that we loved; in high school, you're lucky if you fit jeans for more than a calendar year at a time. Everyone who had jeans that were ten years old or older was an adult, and their clothes were a minority of the clothes we saw closely enough to pay attention to, which made them stand out, I guess. I remember being actively amused by tapered jeans in the late 90s. And I clearly remember the few years before 2010, in my 20s, owning lots of pairs of bootcut jeans that were in some cases 10 years old and still fit me, and finding it necessary to get out the sewing machine to make several of them into skinny jeans (but the earliest ones, say, pre-2000, were unsalvageable then, because I couldn't consider wearing mid-high-waisted jeans ca. 2007, when waistbands were super-low). So the end of this emotional journey was laughing again. - Another article in this publication alleged that the crying laughing emoji is also an embarrassing Millennial trait. Apparently nobody who isn't a Millennial would use this emoji. The article didn't contain a lot of detail - I would've loved statistics about emoji use frequency, or a detailed look back at the pre-emoji days of emoticons. I was a heavy user of "XD" before the crying laughing emoji, which is supposed to be a cartoon of it (although IMO XD does not imply tears on its own; that's what X.D is for). But anyway, I have been remembering this stupid article every time I used that emoji for weeks now.
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