At some point in the last few years, the internet quietly decided that every human being must have an aesthetic. Not a personality, not hobbies, not a slightly unhinged collection of interests — no, no. An aesthetic. A cohesive visual identity that can be summarised through a series of carefully curated Pinterest boards and mood lighting.
And this would be fine if aesthetics were broad, forgiving categories. But they are not. They have names like coquette, cottagecore, clean girl, dark academia, soft girl, coastal granddaughter, and several other phrases that sound less like lifestyle choices and more like indie band names.
Which leads to a deeply stressful social interaction that has become increasingly common:
Someone asks you, very casually,
“So what’s your aesthetic?”
And suddenly you feel like someone has asked you to identify your Hogwarts house, zodiac chart, and Myers-Briggs personality type simultaneously.
Because what do you mean aesthetic?
Are you supposed to have one?
Is it assigned at birth?
Does it arrive in the mail?
Some people answer instantly. They say things like “I’m very cottagecore” or “I’m more of a coquette vibe” with the confidence of someone who has clearly done the reading. Meanwhile you’re standing there mentally reviewing your bedroom decor, which currently consists of fairy lights, three different blankets, a plant that may or may not still be alive, and a chair that functions primarily as a clothing storage system.
And that is when you realise the truth.
You might not have an aesthetic.
You might have chaoscore.
The coquette girlies: bows, blush, and emotionally devastating playlists.
Let us begin with the coquette aesthetic, which is essentially the internet’s way of saying romantic but slightly dangerous. If coquette were a person, she would wear ribbons in her hair, own multiple shades of lip gloss, and listen to sad music while staring dramatically out of café windows.
Coquette is soft, but it is not innocent. It is lace, satin, and the quiet knowledge that you could ruin someone emotionally if necessary.
A coquette room often looks like someone opened a jewellery box and turned it into interior design. There are candles, vintage mirrors, delicate fabrics, flowers arranged in glass jars like they were plucked from a nineteenth-century garden. Everything feels feminine in a slightly theatrical way, like the room itself might whisper secrets if you sit quietly long enough.
The coquette girl does not simply drink coffee. She sips coffee. She journals. She writes messages in lowercase. She probably owns a perfume that smells vaguely like rose petals and emotional damage.
If someone asks her aesthetic, she does not panic.
She already has a Pinterest board titled something like soft pink romantic life with melancholy undertones.
The cottagecore dreamers: bread, plants, and suspicious amounts of linen.
Cottagecore, on the other hand, is what happens when someone looks at modern society and says, “What if we simply left.”
This aesthetic is built on the romantic fantasy of living in a small cottage somewhere far away from capitalism, alarm clocks, and emails that begin with “just circling back.”
The cottagecore aesthetic involves soft sunlight, wooden furniture, plants that look like they have been thriving for generations, and the kind of cosy atmosphere that makes you believe baking bread might actually solve your problems.
Cottagecore rooms feel warm. There are blankets draped over chairs, books stacked on wooden shelves, mugs that look handmade even if they came from a very modern store. The overall energy suggests someone who wakes up early, waters plants, and definitely knows how to make soup from scratch.
Of course, the modern cottagecore girl often lives in a city apartment with questionable ventilation and a houseplant that she desperately hopes will survive the week.
But the vibe is what matters.
Cottagecore is not just decor. It is a spiritual commitment to softness, quiet mornings, and pretending that life could be simpler if we all just started knitting again.
Chaoscore: the aesthetic of people who refuse to be visually consistent.
Now we arrive at the final category. Of course, aesthetics are endless (like we talked about in the beginning), but let’s just keep it limited to the ones in the title, else the article will need too many updates.
Chaoscore.
Chaoscore is not an aesthetic you choose. It is an aesthetic that quietly emerges when your life refuses to be organised into neat little visual themes.
Your room contains fairy lights, but also a random lava lamp you bought impulsively three years ago. Your bookshelf has poetry, textbooks, and a cookbook you have never opened. Your wardrobe includes soft cottagecore dresses, oversized hoodies, and at least one outfit that suggests you briefly considered becoming a mysterious art student.
Nothing matches.
Everything somehow works.
Chaoscore is the aesthetic of people who collect things because they like them, not because they belong to the same colour palette. It is the visual equivalent of having fifteen different Spotify playlists with titles like sad but vibing, romantic chaos, and songs that make me feel like I’m the main character walking through a city at night.
If coquette is carefully curated and cottagecore is softly intentional, chaoscore is simply… living.
It is messy desks, mismatched decor, impulsive purchases, and the quiet realisation that maybe you are not meant to fit into one aesthetic category.
Maybe you are just several aesthetics stacked on top of each other like emotional layers.
Why the internet loves aesthetics so much.
The internet’s obsession with aesthetics makes sense when you think about it for more than five minutes. In a world where life often feels chaotic, overwhelming, and slightly unpredictable, aesthetics offer the comforting illusion of control. If you can design your room, your clothes, and your morning routine to match a certain vibe, it starts to feel like you have also designed the person you are becoming.
It is identity-building through visuals.
People do not just want their lives to function; they want them to feel cinematic. They want their coffee to look like a Pinterest photo, their desk to resemble a productivity video, their room to feel like a carefully composed scene from a movie where the main character has their life together.
The problem, of course, is that real life rarely follows a single aesthetic theme. People are complicated. One day you feel like a cottagecore girl baking banana bread and listening to folk music. The next day you are wearing all black, listening to sad indie songs, and contemplating the emotional complexity of your situationship.
Which means most people are not actually one aesthetic.
They are several moods.
Embrace the chaoscore lifestyle (and stop apologising for it).
So if someone ever asks you what your aesthetic is and your brain immediately short-circuits like a laptop with seventeen tabs open, please do not panic and start lying. Do not suddenly claim you are “very cottagecore” when the last plant you owned died under mysterious circumstances and your idea of baking is aggressively microwaving leftover pizza. Do not say “coquette” just because you own one ribbon and once listened to Lana Del Rey during a mildly emotional bus ride.
Instead, look them directly in the eye and say, with the calm confidence of someone who has accepted their fate:
“My aesthetic is chaoscore.”
Because chaoscore is not the absence of taste. Chaoscore is taste without a centralised government. It is what happens when a human being accumulates things they genuinely enjoy without stopping every five minutes to ask whether those things belong to the same visual Pinterest ecosystem. Your room might contain fairy lights, a stack of books that range from existential philosophy to terrible romance novels, a mug you bought because it made you laugh, and a blanket that looks like it belongs in a cottage somewhere in the English countryside. None of it matches. All of it makes sense to you.
Chaoscore wardrobes are equally confusing and therefore deeply honest. One day you are wearing something soft and romantic that makes you look like you wandered out of a countryside painting with a basket of apples. The next day you are in an oversized hoodie, headphones on, walking through campus like the mysterious side character in an indie coming-of-age film. Both are correct. Both are real. Both belong to you.
Because the truth is that human beings are not built like neatly labelled aesthetic categories. We are emotionally inconsistent creatures with multiple moods, evolving interests, and occasional impulses to buy things that make absolutely no sense but bring us a small amount of joy. Trying to compress that complexity into one tidy label is like trying to describe the entire ocean using the word “blue.” Technically accurate. Completely inadequate.
So embrace the chaos. Let your room look like the physical manifestation of your brain. Let your wardrobe be a rotating cast of different personalities. Let your Pinterest boards remain slightly contradictory. A little coquette here, a little cottagecore there, a little late-night existentialism sprinkled on top like emotional seasoning.
Because the most interesting people are rarely the ones who perfectly match an aesthetic. The most interesting people are the ones who feel like entire mood boards, constantly evolving, slightly unpredictable, and absolutely uninterested in behaving according to a single theme.
And honestly? Chaoscore was always the main character aesthetic anyway.
For more such articles, visit Her Campus at MUJ. And if you also identify with a hundred different aesthetics, find me at Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ.