The “effortless cool girl,” the term used to describe the perfect, straight out of a pinterest board, mysterious girl who somehow looks like she’s straight out of Paris fashion week when she throws a random outfit together or somehow doesn’t look awkward whenever she’s alone. A mysterious vibe combined with a perfect-shade of green matcha has become the ultimate trend all over social media apps such as Pinterest and TikTok. The internet has essentially told us the coolest thing you could do is to not show yourself—to be nonchalant. But is being nonchalant just a new, cool term for being lost?
Throughout our lives, specifically primary school, we’re told that if we want people to like us, we should be ourselves, be confident, and be kind. However this new “cool girl” trend has popularized the direct opposite idea; to not show yourself; be mysterious, don’t talk to others; attract, and there’s no need to be kind when you’re just a walking Pinterest board; be loud and rude when you want.
The ultimate Cool Girl monologue of the past decade has been an excerpt from the movie adaptation based on the book Gone Girl, what used to be a mockery of expectations laid out by a system has now snowballed into whatever the self-love girlies are parroting. The OG Cool Girl is effortlessly hot, she listens to underground bands, annotates philosophical books and will never notice how much people really admire her. See, I get the hype—to a certain extent I do, the constant objectification turned itself into a romanticised personification that gives us confidence, the power to reclaim the cool girl status. Great philosophy indeed, but is that what we are really doing?
We have a ground to build something—an embodiment of our deepest desires that could come alive, but why are we all building the same person?
Where did our essence to create something new go? It is ironic, the desire to express an effortless personality—one that exhibits nonchalance, a sort of indifference and subtle rudeness that others find hot, has turned us into slops with no creativity. We jump onto the next trend that the influencers deem worthy and turn into shopaholics with no restraint. We need guides to teach us what is cool, ‘thought daughters read this now’, ‘zebra prints are so in’, ‘hot siren office wear’, ‘how to be disgustingly over educated’ you’ve seen these before–the epidemic of being perceived as boring makes us latch onto the loudest portrayal of what is deemed good.
In our lives, we may face something a lot of us fear; rejection. Whether it’s being made fun of for a shirt you wore to being rejected by your crush, we all have felt some form of rejection in our lives. Some of us may face rejection more than others, making us turn to other means of wanting to be accepted. We may desire quietly, drown your desires so even our biggest dreams aren’t rejected. We may try to say that we “don’t care” about our former interests, about school/work, about our entire lives. We learn to be nonchalant about everything because of our fear of being rejected. Our justification for this type of thinking is “If we never admit to wanting something, we can never lose it,” or “If you don’t care, you can’t fail.” But, if you also can’t lose, you can’t win. You’re stuck in the safe zone where you haven’t yet lost but you feel that if you leave you’ll immediately be out.
We want to latch on to the one thing that people haven’t judged yet, and in doing so we lose it.
What has nonchalance really done for us besides telling us to bury away ourselves? Sure, maybe you have gotten an Instagram dm or two from posting a mysterious cafe picture, but is this attention really worth yourself?
However Pinterest hasn’t exactly caught onto this idea, and instead of backing off, it romanticized it. It told us that pairing chunky sunglasses with an iced latte to drown your personality is what will get people to absolutely love you! There’s all kinds of names for it; “chic new york fashion,” “swag london girl chic,” heck anything with the name chic in it, Pinterest will eat right up. Pinterest and Tiktok’s algorithms are essentially telling you to get rid of your identity and replace it with a persona made online. We’re literally being told to disconnect from ourselves to fit in with the platform—to give up self expression in favor of trend following.
All the creators call this insane Cool Girl epidemic just a trend—a hype that people will forget about in the next 6 months. They call this soul-ridding virus an aesthetic. But can you really be nonchalant about your own life? The job you want? The person you actually really like?
Maybe the cool girl on our feeds was never effortless like she seems; she was just afraid of expressing her true self in favor of a false persona.