Can we be honest? All trends and new ideas are not bullseyes. And that’s just fine. I’ve had 1000s of sh*t ideas in my life, hell – I’m still living the far-reaching consequences of one of them (putting my future and faith in the wrong person’s hands!!!). It’s perfectly normal to throw a new idea at the wall – some will stick, and some will slowly slink to the floor to die an ugly, unremarkable death.
And yet, we stubbornly cling to new ideas – not because they are good, but just because they are new. Maybe we think they make us look hip because we’re aware of them and others aren’t – when in actuality, some of them just make people look like bandwagoners.
With this in mind, here are a few trends that are exhausting me, and I’m just here to ask if they can please take the first bus out of town??
Bleached eyebrows
You wanna bleach the hair atop your head? Go for it. You want to bleach the black upper lip stubble you inherited from your Aunt Mildred? Please, do. But there are places on the human body that bleach was never intended for – here is a small but comprehensive list:
- Your anus. That area is hidden by the two largest muscles on your body FOR A REASON. It’s not meant to be put on display – it is intended to be covered in eternal darkness because its primary purpose is to eliminate WASTE from your person, so you don’t DIE. It’s not meant to be pretty, OK? You don’t see designer trash cans on the sidewalk, do you? No, you don’t. Why? Because trash cans are FOR WASTE. If someone wants to go snooping around that area, they must do so at their own risk and be OK with what they find.
- Your eyebrows. Naturally blonde eyebrows on someone who has naturally blonde hair is pretty. That said, I’m not really sure where this “alien chic” bleached eyebrow look originated, but I am NOT here for it. I’m already creeped out by artificial intelligence and Madonna’s face (sorry, Madge, but C’MON!). I don’t need to look at people who appear to have burned their eyebrows off only to discover they have done it on purpose. It makes participants of this trend look like they weren’t bright enough to catch their flight back to outer space when the Mother Ship came for them.
Coffin nails
No offense to anyone in the crowd who might be donning coffin nails, but my acceptance of this trend has been super reluctant, and now I wish it would just go away. The aptly-named coffin nails look like something that comes free with the purchase of a witch wig. I always want to flip people’s hands over when I see nails like this to see if dirt is left behind from when they dug themselves out of their graves. It’s just…yuck. Coffin nails don’t make you look dangerous or edgy – they make you look like you should be standing over a cauldron, sorting through your bat-wing and dead-spider recipes.
Lightening fast text on reels
I REFUSE to get on Tik Tok because I’m a business owner, and I can’t be getting sucked into a video vortex on the daily. That said, I do indulge in Facebook reels. I’m obsessed with reels featuring hairstyles for long hair that always involve tiny invisible bands – even if my success rate with such hairstyles is currently about 1 in 5. I love videos where parents are making fun of their kids, and occasionally when kids are making fun of their parents (though the latter is a bit too close to real life to be overly entertaining).
What I am not a fan of, however, is text-heavy reels where the text disappears WAY too fast, so I’m stuck watching the stupid videos 11 times just so I can understand the message. I’m a reasonably fast reader. People, PROOF your reels before you publish them – you are making my head hurt, and trust me when I say I don’t need any additional help with that.
Crap parenting
Ugh. Now we have a whole branch of parenting called “woke parenting” that espouses the following pearls:
- Don’t tell your daughter (a child that identifies as a girl) that’s she pretty
- Throw a congratulatory party when she makes a mistake
- Eliminate words like “good” to describe her
There was a time when doing the aforementioned may have been loosely categorized as “abusive.” If you’re going to subscribe to parenting like this, you better start saving for college AND therapy.
Here’s the trick to asking for and taking parenting advice: Find kids in your circle that you don’t hate and ask THEIR mothers how to handle parenting challenges. Trust me when I say that the kids of the people who are making rules — like the ones listed above — are not the kind of kids you want in your house for more than two minutes.
Made up words for EVERYTHING
I swear, each week, I am clicking on an article that teases the definition of a new word. After all, no one wants to be left behind when it comes to cool lingo. Also, I have a couple of smart-ass adult kids that I have to keep up with, and God help me if I give them a blank stare when they throw down with a trendy word. But all these made-up words are enough already.
Last week alone, my vocab test included the words: almond mom (a mom who is constantly monitoring her daughter’s diet), “stealthing” (a dude who says he’s going to use a condom and then doesn’t!), and “school refusal” (teens who spent too much time at home during the pandemic and now refuse to go to school). Someday I’ll write a whole article about how teenagers don’t have the right to “refuse” much of anything if they are living under your roof, eating your food, and availing themselves of your cell phone plan. But I digress.
Celebrities not disclosing HRT or plastic surgery procedures
I’ve been annoyed with aging celebrities projecting their “natural” aging to the rest of us midlifers even before I WAS a midlifer. Let’s take Jennifer Lopez as a prime example. I’m thrilled that she looks like she’s only 30 when she’s actually 53. And I’m sure that she works out hard every day to have those abs. Congrats! But you can’t tell me – as someone who has several twin-bearing women in her circle – that she didn’t have a tummy tuck after birthing twins! Twin-skin is real, and no amount of crunches is going to eliminate that! I actually sat next to my sister in a plastic surgeon’s office when he told her that her twin-skin had to be surgically dealt with if she wanted it gone.
So why do celebs like J-Lo grind my gears when it comes to this? Because she’s setting an incredibly unrealistic standard – not just for women in their 50s, but for women who have had twins. I would have so much more respect for these celebrities if they would issue a statement like, “I exercise a ton with my trainer, I have an exceptionally healthy diet thanks to my kitchen staff, I have a cabinet full of lotions and potions worth more than the average annual income in America, and I had a tummy tuck after my twins were born.” There. Is that so hard?
Also, if I had $100 left to my name, I’d bet $99 of it that the ageless Jennifers (Lopez and Aniston) and their ilk are on hormone replacement therapy – a treatment that many midlife women are not eligible for due to various health conditions and family history. Not that HRT or plastic surgery is anyone’s business of course, but when a false narrative is projected to the public as a natural aging process, it can be extremely dangerous. When such a beauty standard is in the limelight, it sets an unnatural expectation that leads to body dysphoria, unhealthy eating, and depression in women of a similar age group. So, is a little transparency too much to ask?
Kat Hobza is the Founder of Seen Too Magazine,™ with over two decades of experience in professional writing and content marketing. At midlife, she quickly identified a seismic gap in the number of women going through menopause and the information available to them, at the same time she noticed society was attempting to push her and her friends into obscurity. This did not sit well with her, so she sought to build a community of women who believe, “Our ovaries’ viability should not define our visibility.” Kat resides in Western Montana. When she is not crafting copy for her marketing business or Seen Too Magazine, she’s either hanging with her hilarious adult kids or soaking up the sun somewhere — a riverbank, a golf course, or her deck.
