These days on social media, we see makeup trends with a set of “rules” to be followed, and everybody doing the same things the same way, using the same products, same color palettes, same procedure. But do they work the same for everyone? Sometimes what you want to hide in yourself is precisely what someone else wants to highlight in themselves; and vice versa. But because there are these “rules”, sometimes it can feel like we are not allowed to bend them, to play around with it, to get creative, to actually…express ourselves. Especially because, to a reasonable extent, there are constraints to our freedom to choose what we want to see, and find which trends we most identify ourselves with. In my previous post, I wrote that we can try to train the algorithm, but it’s never perfect because the algorithms work in their own mysterious ways, which we don’t have access to control. We don’t always have a saying to what kinds content get pushed to us, and because there is some kind of freedom to find our own space in the internet, it’s also very easy to find ourselves inside a bubble and, paradoxically, very difficult to burst it.

Aside from setting standards of fashion and makeup anymore, there’s also trends for facial and body features. Plastic surgery trends and procedures are are becoming increasingly normalized in our societies. Aside from the widely praised and followed Kardashian trends, let’s look at another equally serious but more niche case:

In Brazil, there is a trend called harmonização facial (lit. “facial harmonization”) that kind of works as a “template” for what a “perfect face” is supposed to look like. Though it’s extremely invasive and potentially pretty dangerous, the trend has been largely normalized first in the celebrity world and then expanded to a relatively wide international scale within the past 5 years.

As a person who grew up in Brazil her entire life, I can surely say it feels, at the very least, strange and borderline crazy to constantly see actors, musicians and other artists I grew up watching slowly starting to look the same. From my point of view, they are all like this:

Source

Besides the algorithm mysteries, I also think that, because of all of the (sometimes extremely niche) aesthetics and fashion trends we keep seeing on social media, I think people are slowly starting to grow aware of the tendency of defining one’s personality and identity according to those, and as a result, the tendency of one’s authenticity slowing getting lost along the way; it’s like we are creating little boxes to fit ourselves that perhaps are a little too small. I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with following an aesthetic/trend because you feel like it represents you, and you feel like you are expressing yourself; as long as you don’t forget that it only represents some of the multiple aspects of your unique personality, and to find a way to represent and express those as well.

“Everything for the aesthetics”

There’s this enormous appreciation for aesthetics these days. And it’s honestly crazy to see how far some people will go just to make things aesthetic. I’ve seen people adopting the messy, “brat girl” aesthetic which is all about this laidback, not caring about how you look kind of thing, and spending minutes trying to get their headset look as messy and casual as possible, just to match it as an accessory with their outfit.

Sometimes it feels like we can’t own our unique quirks, or the multitude of other aspects within one’s personality that makes each of us who we are so as to not deviate from those aesthetics, to keep blending in with others until it becomes this homogenous mass where we cannot even distinguish one from the other because everybody is starting to look and act the same. And this is where I think we start losing track of ourselves.

I also wrote in my previous post about the feeling of being (dis)connected and its relation to being in the digital medium. Come to think of it, I think I should also have added that this detachment from aspects of self also contribute to the feeling of being kind of lost and disconnected. Do you know what makes you who you are? What is unique to you? And this is focusing way too much on personality aspects, but I also mean to encompass physical features, style, the way you communicate with others, owning your own opinions, many other things that represents one’s existence in this world.