Cool-Kid Masks and Mystery Boxes

My week in links

Hello and welcome back to the paid edition of After School, which goes out every Friday most weekends.

Today, I’ll be digging into everything I bookmarked in my brain about youth culture this week. Some insights, some links, some tangents. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• TikTok: femcels, vision boards, the ick

• Economy: rich kids are trending, college is not

• Trends: masks, makeup, and vintage mini dresses

• Funding: fintech, delivery, mystery boxes

• Dating: speed dating, oystering, therapy

It’s a peek into my brain, of sorts. (Which means it’s a little messy, like me.) Hope you enjoy!

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TikTok

• [New] Gawker has started a column called the “TikTok Trends Forecast Forecast,” “an occasional series in which we prematurely predict how internet trend culture writers will cover trending TikToks.” It’s brilliant.

• Did you know Femcels were a thing? I did not until now, thanks to Mel.

  • “TikTok has zeroed in on a specific type of woman. She’s on SSRIs. Her car interior is a minefield of empty Dunkin’ iced coffee cups and McDonald’s bags. She hasn’t done laundry in three weeks. She intersects with another archetypal woman, one who listens to Lana del Rey, reads Ottessa Moshfegh and wears a rosary, but she likely hasn’t showered enough recently to fit that category to a T. TikTok has labeled this woman a ‘femcel’ — an involuntarily celibate woman.”

    • Speaking of pretentious authors — and admittedly unrelated to TikTok — I’ve really enjoyed every bit of the Hanya Yanagihara discourse. (FWIW, I loved A Little Life, an opinion I now realize is unpopular, or at least unpopular among the popular people on Twitter.)

• Synonymous with crypto bros and hustle culture, the sigma male is the latest socio-sexual identity to take over the memescape.

• Recipes, outfits, home hacks, now vision boards? TikTok is slowly morphing into Pinterest. Well, except for all the femcel stuff.