It has never been easier to romanticize your life. Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and VSCO mean that with a few taps, your life can look like a movie. Flecks of sunlight sprinkled across a tastefully decorated room. A dinner plate with vibrant food in perfect composition. Glitter tracing cheekbones under neon purple lights. The possibilities are endless.
Then, merging from the chaos are two seemingly-opposite aesthetics: “That Girl,” and the repurposed “2014 Tumblr Girl.” That Girl is trying to become the best version of herself. She sticks to a regimented daily routine, striving towards physical, mental, professional, and personal goals. She wakes up early, eats her fruit and vegetables, does yoga. She dresses in simple, but well-fitting and high quality clothing, frequently athleisure. Even her rest is productive. She might journal, read a book, even stream a show. Everything in moderation.
Beauty is the tension between ease and control.
If That Girl rises with the sun, Tumblr Girl comes to as it goes down. She knows herself best in the dark. Influenced by fashion, pop culture, and media ranging from the late 90’s to the present, she has an eclectic sensibility that is unified by dark femininity. A glance at any Instagram account curating this aesthetic reveals a grid of dark blues, grays, and blacks interspersed by the occasional pastel pinks and whites. Pearls, cigarettes, and black coffee. Dark eyeliner. There is a smudged edge to everything she does.
The content these accounts feature resemble the format of the Whisper app, which was used to anonymously make confessions. Secrets revealed by white text over aesthetic images laden with unrealized desires. While That Girl claims herself, past and present, and commits to a bright mundanity, Tumblr Girl’s true identity is obscure. She falls deeper into herself as she tries on different identities like she’s playing with the filters on Instagram reels. That Girl exists in the everyday, in repeated actions and evident results, while Tumblr Girl experiments with the real and unreal, the space in between.
Beauty is the tension between ease and control. One its main appeals is simplicity; it does not have to be analyzed or thought about to be pleasing. It just is. It is symmetrical, balanced, easy to understand. At the moment of experience, it is exactly what you want it to be.
If That Girl rises with the sun, Tumblr Girl comes to as it goes down. She knows herself best in the dark. Influenced by fashion, pop culture, and media ranging from the late 90’s to the present, she has an eclectic sensibility that is unified by dark femininity.
That’s the problem with beauty, though. To maintain it, you must toil. You have to put in hard work. And hard work is messy, ugly, exhausting. Hours of labor go into a single perfect moment, which disappears the second it is tampered with. Beauty exists in a vacuum. Engaging with it takes away what makes it special.
Despite the differences between these two aesthetics, beauty is at the core of both. That Girl is about simplicity and control. The underlying idea is that if you can organize your life enough, you can solve whatever issues you are dealing with, and become the person you are meant to be. In this mode of thinking and being, anything is possible, so long as it can be organized into a consumable image devoid of clutter and chaos and uncertainty.
For the modernized Tumblr Girl, beauty is about making the unappealing pretty. The bitter taste of cigarette ash and risk of lung disease is diminished by how cool it looks. Mental illness is not a problem if it makes you unique, if sadness is alluring. If That Girl tries to order her issues into nonexistence, the Tumblr Girl wears them proudly and finds the beauty in the suffering. Thus, beauty is key to each aesthetic; That Girl needs to romanticize the monotonous tasks she endures on the daily, while the Tumblr Girl must romanticize the anguish lurking in her mind. Both want the ease of beauty without admitting the pains it takes to achieve it.
Aesthetics are fun to try on; they forge paths for self-experimentation, crucial to development and growth. But life does not have to be beautiful to be worth living.
I have never felt twenty-two more than when doing the research for this piece. How strange it is to have grown up in the internet era and watch the pendulum of trends and time swing back and forth so fast. The last Tumblr era feels so long and so short ago, yet here it is again. It is peculiar to watch today’s teenagers go through the same unbeautiful becoming that you yourself once did.
That is to say, despite it all, I understand. Every morning I make my bed, smoothing down the cream-colored comforter and refolding my blankets. Sometimes I wait hours before sitting on it again. Any action from me would immediately disturb it. The image of a perfectly put-together bed conceals all the tossing and turning from the night before, hours laying in despair, spilled coffee, dirty sheets, stray cat hairs. I know that there is much more below the surface, but seeing it nicely arranged still puts my mind at ease.
Aesthetics are fun to try on; they forge paths for self-experimentation, crucial to development and growth. But life does not have to be beautiful to be worth living. And an aesthetic is so close to anesthetic, to loss of sensation. A way of numbing yourself to pain. At times, that’s the only way to make it through the day. More and more, I want to revel in the messiness.
