Generational Trends

[cimorene]

A couple of months ago, I don't know when exactly, I saw a link on Tumblr to an article about a "new summer trend" of not wearing mascara that the youths were (allegedly) referring to as "ghost eyelashes" (let's take the rant about the majority of people not wearing mascara as a given). Even though I find this kind of reporting (on beauty trends) mostly annoying, I frequently also find it... amusing, in an annoyed way, so I clicked to read it on the strength of my giggling bemusement at the headline.

The angle this beauty journalist chose to take was a Generational Divide one, pointing out how the trend was very young and positing that people older than their mid-20s would be uncomfortable with the shocking exposure of their natural eyelashes in full sun, and the article was peppered with links to other articles in the same website about generational trends that were so outrageous that I did what she wanted and clicked on them:

• This publication has alleged in the past that wearing tapered or straight-leg jeans is an embarrassingly Millennial trait (no mention given of older generations: possibly the youth in question have forgotten that there are plenty of members of Gen X just among their own generation's parents, and obviously nobody older than their own parents is relevant, lol).
  
  I went on an emotional journey of laughing, boggling, and remembering how in the mid-90s when the 70s-bellbottom revival was in full swing it became nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy tapered jeans or even straight ones for a brief time, and how my friends and I used to refer to extant surviving tapered jeans as "boa-constrictor-ankled". Of course since everyone my age was growing extremely rapidly throughout the period from 1995-2001, it was impossible for any of us to own old pairs of jeans that still fitted that we loved; in high school, you're lucky if you fit jeans for more than a calendar year at a time. Everyone who had jeans that were ten years old or older was an adult, and their clothes were a minority of the clothes we saw closely enough to pay attention to, which made them stand out, I guess. I remember being actively amused by tapered jeans in the late 90s. And I clearly remember the few years before 2010, in my 20s, owning lots of pairs of bootcut jeans that were in some cases 10 years old and still fit me, and finding it necessary to get out the sewing machine to make several of them into skinny jeans (but the earliest ones, say, pre-2000, were unsalvageable then, because I couldn't consider wearing mid-high-waisted jeans ca. 2007, when waistbands were super-low). So the end of this emotional journey was laughing again.



• Another article in this publication alleged that the crying laughing emoji is also an embarrassing Millennial trait. Apparently nobody who isn't a Millennial would use this emoji. The article didn't contain a lot of detail - I would've loved statistics about emoji use frequency, or a detailed look back at the pre-emoji days of emoticons. I was a heavy user of "XD" before the crying laughing emoji, which is supposed to be a cartoon of it (although IMO XD does not imply tears on its own; that's what X.D is for). But anyway, I have been remembering this stupid article every time I used that emoji for weeks now.

Comments

[f0rrest]

"cool beans" is one that always stuck out to me as a clear Gen-X tell, like only people in their 40s-50s say that, I've noticed, and as someone who doesn't like beans, it annoys me a little bit, frankly.

[cimorene]

I am definitely a millennial and have said this at various times in my life. It was a jokey or sarcastic reference to nostalgic media when I was a teen.

[troisoiseaux]

I'm a "zillennial" (millennial on the cusp of Gen Z) and I've used/heard "cool beans" as slang! I think I'd associate it with... middle school, so, late 2000s? Also generally in a sarcastic/dismissive way, so I wonder if the meaning has shifted.

[cimorene]

I think it was originally sincere, but anything that gets widely used sarcastically is always vulnerable (if it gets popular enough) to moving to just like... self-conscious/self-mocking/playful uses, and eventually to getting used basically sincerely but with an overtone of self-awareness (that then easily disappears if it keeps spreading to other speakers). I've seen this happen with various terms within fan spaces (sf fandom and fanfiction fandom)! But anyway, my point is, I'd say the use was pretty much always either sarcastic or just cheesy/silly when I was a teenager (ca. 2000), but you couldn't swear it for every instance. I probably used it both ways myself.

[wychwood]

All I can say is 😂😂😂

(I might be a millennial, though, they keep changing the years and I think I stopped being Gen X)

[cimorene]

I was born in 1982, and in some sources would be called "Xillennial". That's right around the border between them, 1980 to the early 80s. My wife was born in '76 and she's definitely Gen X.

[wychwood]

Yeah, same year as you!

[cimorene]

Funny, because my personal journey with generation names was sort of opposite yours - first I was like "guess I'm a millennial" and then later "or maybe I'm not? Or maybe I'm half-X I guess."

I grew up knowing about the existence of Gen X because people talked about it, but I never thought that I was old enough to be part of it. At some point after the year 2000 I guess I started hearing "millennial" because of the first pop culture idiot pieces about millennial trends and looked it up, and my first check told me I was a millennial. I just remember being like "Oh okay, I'm that" - I don't remember what the actual years were. Later as the amount of stupid verbiage about generation feud swelled I eventually came to doubt this conclusion because of the amount of generalizations I overheard that seemed to refer to younger people than me (my sister, born in 91, is also a millennial, and that's a huge difference, almost laughably so, to my mind. Especially in THAT decade. But then I have to admit these generation labels are usually more like 20 years so I allow it), and looked it up again, and found multiple sources, including the ones that put me on the border or said I was a "Xillennial" instead.

[wychwood]

Hah!

I don't remember "millennial" being a thing growing up, for sure, it was much later and then a "young people" kind of thing; I knew I was near the cusp, but at least initially it seemed like the boundary was about, like, being old enough to remember the Cold War and being an adult before 9/11, and I was the very end of that cohort, whereas my younger siblings don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know? I feel like since it's slid a bit more to the decade marker, as those time-points become less salient.

As you say, the categories were never going to be a great fit for us, or anyone close to either end of the selected period, so it's always a bit random-feeling. By the time you were getting regular thinkpieces about "millennials", they were clearly talking about people younger than me, you know? But that's just the consequence of bracketing "generations" like that! Twenty years as a range means that the oldest were adults before the youngest were born, that's inevitably a whole different experience.

[cimorene]

That's true. I clearly remember the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I was in first grade when that happened, so I know a lot of people my age - probably a plurality - won't really remember it; a lot of children in that age range don't pay attention to the news, or are deliberately kept from it. I remember my teacher saying something about the Berlin Wall at school actually, but I bet most of my classmates of the time don't remember it ... probably none of them who didn't already sort of know what she was talking about, or have a discussion later and get it explained more or less at their level, you know?

You're British though, right? So the percentages are possibly different. Depending how pop culture of the time treated Cold War and how the adults around you felt about it, I guess? I'm sure all the children my age in Finland remember, because the USSR was such a huge part of their lives. But in America it was all more distant.

Besides remembering those things, you and I probably clearly remember pre-Windows computing. When I was a kid, there was still a computer lab at my (public) school that was full of Apple IIe computers!

But on the other hand, if your family/region were relatively early computer adopters, a Xillennial will be more like a millennial: most Gen Xers didn't have access to computers as small children; my parents had one before I was born. Most members of Gen X who remember the first family Windows PC will be remembering something that happened when they were already teenagers (I was 7 or so). Whether you were old enough to clearly remember a time before personal computers is a significant difference.

But then on the other hand, I remember using computers before there was regular internet access - my parents got dial-up when I was a pre-teen, when it was still the World Wide Web and everything was text-based. The switch in the late 90s from that to the Internet, even with dial-up, was a huge watershed. Younger millennials like my sister don't really remember anything before that. Whether you were old enough to remember computing before the Internet is a significant difference.

(I guess this is all just an argument that technological progress is moving faster and really the generational cohorts are grouping people whose experiences are too dissimilar as a result.)

[wychwood]

I remember the head teacher of my primary school saying "I saw the Berlin Wall go up; I never thought I'd see it come down in my lifetime", it really stuck with me. It's really the earliest "world" memory I have - I remember more about the first Gulf War and the Soviet coup, by which time I was old enough to be paying some attention to the outside world. But things like the IRA were much more "present" in my life, bomb scares closing the station every year or so.

My parents wanted us to learn about computers early on, so they bought a BBC Micro for the family in 1989(!). And we learned how to use an RM Nimbus at school. At secondary they had more BBC Micros, and then Acorn Archimedes (fancy!) - no Windows machines until about 1995. We had a family Windows computer a couple of years earlier (Windows 3.1 on DOS where you still had to manually start Windows up after logging into DOS! And also DOS Shell, which was an alternative operating system type thing), but didn't get home internet until about 1998, I think? We used to go to the internet cafe in the library as a treat before that. Even after I went to university we were still on dialup for another two or three years; I nearly died when I came home after being on a (for the time) superfast broadband connection for two months and had to share a single dialup line with the other five members of my family...

Mobiles, too - I got my first phone when I was in sixth form (last two years of school), and I can remember how life-changing that was! By the time I left university, they were pretty much ubiquitous, and planning evenings out with friends was a completely different experience. On the other hand, I also find it hard to remember how we coped with life pre-smartphones, and I've had one of those for less than ten years.

(I guess this is all just an argument that technological progress is moving faster and really the generational cohorts are grouping people whose experiences are too dissimilar as a result.)

Could well be! But I've seen Boomers and Gen-X people talking about the diversity of experiences in their cohorts, too, I think there's always been some of that. And I think precise-age-during-COVID is going to make a big difference to members of whatever they're calling the post-millennial generation (Alpha?).

[cimorene]

When I was in the last two years of school, so 1999-2001, there were only a very few students that I knew of who had cell phones. Most teachers had them, but they weren't supposed to use them during classes (they did, sometimes). I knew a number of people who got them when they went to college, but my parents bought me my first one in 2003 to keep in touch when I was at home and my mom was with my dad at a spinal hospital 4 hours away. (It was a flip phone already - I guess an early one.)

But we had home dial-up internet much earlier than most people - my parents were active on GEnie, which was a sort of text-based set of bulletin boards like AOL, and you could use it to access the text-only www. (I understand that universities mostly had this access then and I knew some other kids whose parents were professors who used it too.) I didn't really use the internet myself until 1994ish? perhaps, something like that, when there started being Angelfire and Geocities webpages.

I remember booting Windows from DOS with the first Windows computer too. And it was pretty much the same kind of commands you used to load programs on a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe, or at least they were recognizable. I had a Computer class at school when I was 12 that actually taught us basic programming in ...Basic I think? I had fun with it, but I think it was already kind of obsolete by then.

[princessofgeeks]

Younger bloggers who do not bother to look into the history of the stuff they are opining about are really cringy. I mean, they probably have relatives they could ask.

I graduated from HS in 1979 and there was a large contingent of us who did not wear makeup. There was a large contingent who did! But there were a lot of us who definitely did not wear mascara or want to.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I mean... when I was a teenager in Alabama, almost every girl I knew wore SOME makeup SOME times, and the majority wore at least a little bit MOST of the time. (And this was not true in the same sort of socioeconomic grouping all over the country - the South has a much higher makeup use than the coasts and bigger cities, or it did anyway.) But the majority did not wear mascara most of the time - a lot of people wore it only for dressing up occasions (so not daytime, school-going wear) or even more rarely, or never (because of eye irritation etc).

I would say young women in their twenties, at least when I was in mine, seemed to wear it more often, although not constantly. It got more common in the 2000s within my generation, I think, along with the popularity of winged eyeliner, and it stayed when winged eyeliner started to fade for a lot of people. But even at the height of winged liner (idk, maybe 2010-2016?) mascara was only universal for makeup hobbyists. There have always been people wearing no makeup - even in professional urban environments - and there have always been people wearing makeup who weren't wearing mascara.

ETA: sorry if this is way more info than you can deal with lol. I have dabbled in eyemakeup as a hobby (like specifically eyeshadow and eyeliner really because I've always disliked mascara), so I had a lot of interactions with the "beauty blogosphere" and beauty hobbyists (most of whom were way more expert and into it than me of course, because the ones who create lots of reviews and explainers and how-tos are the experts and they tend to be wearing like stage makeup levels of makeup at all times just because they love makeup). But I also grew up highly makeup-critical thanks to my intensely 2nd-wave-feminist mother: I wasn't allowed to wear makeup out of the house until I was 15, and I basically agreed with her about that because I had learned about feminism from the time I was 3... also I have a sensory ick about foundation/powder/etc and am allergic to lipstick. I do love eyeliner though. So I have always paid a lot of attention to what eyemakeup people are wearing around me and in media.

[princessofgeeks]

Not too much; it's fascinating.

I was neutral about makeup growing up (my mother was not a feminist but did not enjoy makeup and also favored a very invisible style -- your makeup was supposed to look like you weren't wearing any!) but I had to learn about stage makeup in HS, and then I had to learn to wear daily makeup when I went to work as a TV reporter and I had a very generous lesson from a colleague when I got my first TV job. She was great!

So learned to wear it for work but really did not enjoy it ever, partly because I have kind of coarse skin that has oily patches and foundation just didn't stay on my face. I had to try all kinds of base layers and nothing really worked very well if I wanted the makeup to last all day. Frustrating.

But trends in makeup are fascinating. When I watch episodes of Star Trek TNG it's fascinating to see the Peak Makeup and Peak Hair of that era. Right now the styles are toned down a lot compared to that.

[cimorene]

Oh that's interesting! LOL. I suppose TV makeup and stage makeup have something in common... but I would've thought the main thing would be makeup for on camera. I didn't think about it just belonging to the whole uniform in that environment.

Star Trek is a great barometer because they didn't really try to make their hair and makeup non-contemporary at any point in their history. I suppose actually the beehives in TOS are about equally funny as the TNG makeup/outfits, but perhaps because the 80s are more recent the extreme examples seem funnier.