Over the past few months, a trend known as “whimsy-maxxing” has been circulating the internet. This is a social media trend focused on making little everyday moments exciting, emulating how we felt as children when everything was new and interesting.
Sounds great, right? Romanticizing your life can be very beneficial!
Originally, adding whimsy was about adding little moments to your day to make it feel special—for example, journaling by a candlelight with your morning coffee or wearing a fun outfit to go for a walk. These are great ways to add joy and excitement to everyday life.
However, like many trends on social media, I believe it turned into a wasteful nightmare.
As it’s gained popularity, whimsy-maxxing has been associated with using single-use plastics to bedazzle items. All over social media users have been adding rhinestones to their water bottles, phones, lip-glosses, clothes, skin, and even worse, single-use coffee cups and facemasks. As cute as it may look, adding plastic rhinestones to objects can be dangerous for the environment.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing isn’t new.
Micro-trends are short-lived trends that die as quickly as they arise. Because information spreads so easily around the world through the internet, trends come and go much quicker than they have in earlier decades. Additionally, due to the nature of social media, many online trends turn into consumerism and overconsumption. They encourage spending when they appear and turn into waste when they disappear.
In my opinion, the excessive nature of social media trends is very concerning. Brands use social media and trends as a way to promote their products and make more sales, turning our entertainment into advertisement. While this is great for brands and the influencers they pay, this is not great for regular users.
As ads and sponsored content increases, I believe that being online turns into a marketplace for your attention and behavior. Additionally, with the addictive nature of social media, this pushes viewers into scrolling even more, ultimately further influencing them.
As brands convince users to buy more products, users begin to purchase excess and overconsume. This leads to more waste as trends quickly come in and out of style. The fashion industry is one of the biggest culprits of this.
According to a 2019 study, the average person is buying 60% more than they did 15 years ago, but they are only keeping these items half as long as they used to. The United Nations reports that “every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.”
In the case of whimsy-maxxing, plastic never fully dissolves. It breaks down into microplastics, which then pollutes our soil and water. Microplastics are then consumed by any humans or animals using these resources, causing many health effects. Some of these include impaired immune systems, deteriorated tissues, abnormal organ development, cell damage, altered metabolic function, and inflammation.
As micro-trends increase virality, they become increasingly wasteful, and I believe the whimsy-maxxing trend is a sign that this issue is only getting worse.
We’ve gone from fashion and beauty products that can be used for longer periods of time to single-use plastic rhinestones that fall off the second you walk outside your home. Both are harmful, but one doesn’t benefit us besides getting a few likes on a post.
Fun trends and whimsy are not bad, but when they encourage users to engage in wasteful behavior, then I feel that they become problematic.