Nearly every time I open Instagram, there is a new piece of clothing or object that I absolutely need to buy. From Brandy Melville’s pink and white striped tank top to new colors of Needohs, there are constantly new items that circulate the internet and become the center of many people’s screen time. While they seem like a hot, rare commodity at first glance, they are just another example of the prevalence of microtrends’ rapid popularity gain via social media, and how society cycles through consumerism extremely quickly.Â
Microtrends are incredibly short lived shifts in consumer behaviors that lose popularity just as fast as they gained it. Not only can they be observed in clothing and fashion, but they can even impact people’s food choices, lifestyles, and their environment. The scope of the impacts of these trends can be seen across various areas, which makes them important to understand beyond just viewing them as something fun and new to purchase.Â
That being said, microtrends are nothing new. Even though they seem to be gaining more popularity and attention nowadays, due to social media, they have been around for many decades. For example, some trends of the early 2000s include visors, wearing jeans under dresses, and embellished jeans, according to Jeremy Hayes for Buzzfeed. During this time period, microtrends spread through celebrity paparazzi images, magazines and tabloids, and word of mouth, which greatly contrasts the ways that these trends spread today.Â
The rise of social media and influencers has been synonymous with the increase of speed by which microtrends become popular, making them the perfect pair for companies to advertise and market their new products, with the hopes of becoming the next trendy item. That is why today, microtrends feel less likely to actually stick through time, and are much quicker with their arrival and departure in the digital world.Â
Social media algorithms, and specifically short form content, encourage the rapid consumption of both media and physical commodities. Due to this, objects are placed within posts online with the intention of gaining more traction, turning every video or post into an advertisement. As content creators post videos and posts involving certain items, their popularity and the trend itself grow as a result. According to Gianna Cassino for Daily Campus, “It’s as simple as buying a shirt off of TikTok shop, wearing it in a ten second lip-sync video and adding a link so viewers can easily find it.” The system is simple: companies reach out to influencers, influencers create a video including the item the company wants to turn into a trend, and thousands of users online become interested. When millions of companies are orchestrating these advertisements for millions of different products, the result is an ever-changing cycle of microtrends and consumer habits.Â
As mass consumerism continues to speed up, companies begin producing products at a much larger level. This means that more materials are needed to be used at a fast pace, which has an incredibly large impact on the environment. As Rashmila Maiti says for Earth.org, “The fashion industry is the second-largest consumer of water among industries, requiring about 700 gallons of water to produce one cotton shirt and 2,000 gallons to produce a pair of jeans.” Between the amount of water needed to make clothes in combination with other resources, such as dyes, yarns, and different types of fabric, the environment has taken an extremely heavy hit as a result of the rise of fast fashion through microtrends. Maiti continues that “…dyeing and finishing, yarn preparation and fiber production stages have the highest impacts on resource depletion, due to the energy-intensive processes based on fossil fuel energy.” Every element that goes into creating these pieces of clothing has an impact on our Earth, and the rapid demands of microtrends only increase the depletion of these resources.Â
Not only do microtrends impact the fashion industry, but they can also play a role in people’s food choices and lifestyle decisions. Over the summer of 2026, one microtrend that became very popular was the “whimsy” trend. This concept centered around bright colors, patterns, flowy clothing, and items that feel “silly” or “unique”. It promotes the idea of bringing more “whimsy” into your life through the material goods you own, and even with the foods you eat. As this trend became popular, food-related trends like dot cakes and adding sprinkles into your yogurt bowls rose up as well. This is because something like sprinkles, which are colorful and typically fun-shaped, became grouped in with the concept of making your meals appear more fun, and as the trend pushes, whimsical.Â
Microtrends can be incredibly appealing, especially when it seems as though everyone is in on them and owns whatever items are necessary to fit in with the trend. That being said, if you are feeling swayed to purchase something that you’re frequently seeing on the internet, I encourage you to pause and question why it seems so desirable. Even if it feels like going ahead and buying it may not be a big deal, the repercussions of the success behind these microtrends is much larger than we may understand as we scroll through the hundreds of hidden advertisements we see online every day.