by Ruby Tugeau ’28
From Buzzfeed quizzes to Pinterest boards, the internet has always offered us ways to categorize ourselves. But if personality tests once told us who we were, today it’s our Instagram feeds and Tiktok “For You” pages doing talking. If you were once a Virgo or a Rachel Green, you’re now a flouncy coquette or a cottage-core dreamer. Aesthetics have become modern-day horoscopes in that they offer an easy vernacular for self-understanding. They are guides for how to dress, decorate, and move through the world. Moreover, aesthetics are shorthand identities that promise to explain who we are and where we belong. But, like horoscopes, aesthetics sometimes restrict the people who subscribe to them. Are aesthetics simply fun ways to describe ourselves, or are we letting them decide too much about who we get to be?
Why We Crave aesthetics
College is a time when everyone is quietly—or loudly—asking: “Who am I!?’ Between classes, clubs, internships, and that one boy in your Spanish class with the swoopy bangs you’re secretly hoping to say more than “hello” to, there is enormous pressure to figure yourself out— immediately. Aesthetics offer a shortcut— a placeholder until a more secure identity develops. If you can’t find the words to describe your personality, you can at least find the right clothes, the right decor, the right affect. In a world that moves too fast for lengthy explanations, presentation has become a kind of social currency: appearance functions as an introduction, a defense, and a brand all at once.
Aesthetics are ready-made mini identities that translate the messiness of selfhood into something easier to consume. With an aesthetic, you can control how the world sees you, even when the rest of your life feels unpredictable. There’s comfort in curation. But when the aestheticized self seeps inward, we risk losing our complexity.
WHat’s the Catch?
As we’ve seen, aesthetics can become cages. What happens when the clean girl leaves her dishes in the sink? Or when the coquette feels bound to perform hyperfeminity and fragility? Aesthetics can provide a pretty package for hierarchy and conformity. The “clean girl” may look effortless, but that easy glow is born of Eurocentric beauty standards and bought with wealth and access. Her skin is clear, her hair sleek, because she can afford the right products. Her clothes look casual, but only because she’s spent a small fortune trying to look laid-back. Even the more whimsical aesthetics, coquette and cottagecore, tend to romanticize a similar brand of femininity: delicate, probably soft-spoken, thin, and white. What masquerades as creative freedom can easily become a new set of expectations— rules that tell you not just how to dress, but how to exist, until “taste” and “beauty” start to look indistinguishable from privilege.
In this way, aesthetics can turn identity into performance and authenticity into commerce. The line between “being” and “branding” blurs until every choice—what mug you drink from, what bedsheets you sleep on—becomes fodder for content. To belong in a space online, you’re not just invited to express yourself; you’re expected to curate yourself. Your bedroom must look like an Urban Outfitters ad, your coffee like it came from a Scandinavian café, your body like it’s been filtered through golden light. It’s not enough to feel beautiful, fulfilled, or creative—you have to display it, preferably in digestible squares and soft beige tones. And so the pursuit of aesthetic identity, once an alternative to rigid societal categories, becomes its own kind of confinement. Aesthetics teach us to live beautifully but fail to ask whether we’re living honestly.
This is not to say that aesthetics are meaningless, or that caring about how we present ourselves is shallow. There is something deeply human about wanting to be seen; to arrange the outer world until it reflects the inner one. Having an aesthetic can be a vital part of self-making. A candle lit just so, a thrifted dress that feels like poetry, a playlist that makes a bedroom feel like a film set—these are small, sincere gestures toward identity. The danger comes with mistaking the gesture for the thing itself. When the moodboard becomes the goal instead of the inspiration, we stop creating and start curating, trading the slow, uncertain work of becoming for the quicker satisfaction of belonging.
So…Do Aesthetics define Us?
Well, yes. Aesthetics do define us—but only as much as we allow them to. They are, at their best, a language of intention, a way to translate the ineffable into color, texture, and form. To dress yourself is to speak—to say, “This is what I love, this is how I want to move through the world, and this is who I’m becoming.” A bow tied in your hair can be a quiet nod to tenderness. Slick hair and gold hoops can gleam like armor. The dirt under your nails whispers that you’ve been busy tending something that grows. If aesthetics are unspoken stories, then these choices, however small, are acts of authorship. When thinness, whiteness, or wealth become prerequisites for belonging—we surrender the pen. The power of aesthetics lies precisely in their capacity to be reclaimed, rewritten, and made personal again: we get to decide what beauty looks like. We get to write that story for ourselves.
Identity, like style, like story, is a living thing. Aesthetics are not meant to stay still. The all-pink outfits little Ruby once wore to school were just the first draft— declarations of joy that would eventually give way to streetwear and slick-back buns, and that will someday evolve into something else entirely. Whether softer, quieter, harder, louder, that self will still be Ruby. We will don many hats over the course of this life, outgrowing some aesthetics and returning to others. I would argue that real beauty lies in that evolution.Â
And I hope you, dear reader, continue to evolve beyond any label.