#overconsumption is not normal

[mintconditioned]

overconsumption isn’t cute. you don’t need 47 foundations to feel beautiful. late-stage capitalism just wants you to think you do.

[mintconditioned]

"CLEAN GIRL IS OVER" apparently.

So I really don’t know what exactly I did, but I was on Instagram and yo. Look, I wasn’t ever a fan of the "clean girl" trend, but I just found it fascinating how everyone’s ditching it for 2016 Zara Larsson coded makeup and outfits. Like good on you, but I was just thinking about what would happen to all the stuff from the clean girl era. I wanted to see whether certain aesthetics actually "die" or if we just stop talking about them. So I pulled Google Trends data. Then I checked resale markets. Then I made a spreadsheet.

I became slightly obsessed and turned it into a research question: How long does an aesthetic trend retains economic value after peak attention

If trends are accelerating, are they also collapsing faster? And if they are, what happens to all the stuff produced for them?

The Method

I picked three aesthetics:

Clean girl

E-girl

Cottagecore

For each one, I:

1. Mapped lifecycle phases using Google Trends

2. Identified peak attention

3. Took cross-sectional resale snapshots (30 items each, clothing only, no bundles, no joke prices)

4. Measured:

Median resale price

% under $15

Total listing volume

I treated resale value collapse as a proxy for economic devaluation.

Because once an item can't retain resale value, it's economically near-discard.

The Concept I Ended Up With

Economic Half-Life =

Months after peak attention until median resale price falls below $15.

Basically: how fast does a trend lose market survivability?

What I Found:

Cottagecore

Massive listing volume

73% under $15

Still huge resale presence years after peak

Long decay tail

E-girl

Peaked early (2021)

Lower listing volume

53% under $15

Slow bleed into low-value persistence

Smaller volume, but long persistence.

Clean girl

Slower rise (2022–2026)

Hit peak January 2026

83% under $15 almost immediately

Extremely tight price clustering (~$11)

This one collapsed economically almost instantly after peak attention.

Which suggests something new: Supply elasticity is now extremely high.

Production reacts so fast that by the time attention peaks, the market is already saturated.

I combined three proxies:

Share under $15 (value collapse)

Normalized listing volume (scale of material committed)

Post-peak persistence (how long low value lingers)

Cottagecore had the highest waste intensity

E-girl was persistent but smaller-scale waste

Clean girl had rapid short-term waste spike

The bigger pattern is that trend cycles are shortening.

Older trends take 12-18 months to collapse and ~1-3 years before resale value really died, but recent ones take 1-3 months to resale collapse and have under 6 months of survivability

Now because my entire page is about who profits and who holds risk, let’s analyze that real quick.

1. Platforms & influencers

Profit from attention velocity

Hold no inventory

2. Producers

Profit from volume

Offload surplus

3. Consumers

Absorb depreciation

Internalize resale failure

4. Secondary markets

Attempt to clear oversupply

Normalize ultra-low prices

Environmental systems absorb what markets can't, and economic devaluation precedes physical waste.

So what supreme is that trends behave like speculative assets. Early adopters extract symbolic and sometimes economic value, late adopters absorb depreciation, and platforms profit from volatility itself. As cycles shorten, the gap between profit extraction and waste generation widens. Costs move downward when move upward.

So what exactly I'm gonna do with this, I'm not sure. But I definitely want to expand because this is interesting, so here’s my very rough plan:

Expand to 10+ aesthetics

Build an Aesthetic Volatility Index

Stress-test the Economic Half-Life model

See whether post-2023 trends collapse nonlinearly faster

Anyway.

I’m hooked.

If you guys want, I'd really appreciate if you could recommend different aesthetics for me to do next, or tell me if you want a more in depth guide on how to do this yourself.

But anyway.

Expect more soon!

[mintconditioned]

let's talk about rage bait

some images are not neutral, nor are they accidents. they're designed to provoke a reaction--shock, jealously, disgust, even defensiveness--because emotion drives engagement, and engagement drives profit.

when you see a room full of makeup, a 30-step skincare routine, a even just a "quick haul", the goal isn't to inform you, but to make you feel something. that feeling is usually insecurity or outrage, mainly because both keep you scrolling.

some people feel inferior and ask "why don't i have this? am i behind?" others feel morally superior and declare "this is disgusting. people are so wasteful." both reactions still boost the post. both still feed to algorithm. the key point is that neither reaction threatens the system that produced the image in the first place.

that's usually why context is always missing. you never really hear whether products were gifted, returned, written off, expired, unused, etc. or whether the person is a professional, sponsored, or staging excess for attention. ambiguity is the point; confusion keeps you arguing in the comments instead of questioning why your questioning in the first place.

and i understand! professionals may need an excess of items to get their jobs done, but the system doesn't target professionals. it targets everyday people like you and me.

late stage capitalism doesn't need you to want these things, but it just needs you to be emotionally activated by them. outrage is just as profitable as aspiration.

so when people say "this is just meant to make you upset," they're right. But not in the way that they think. The issue isn't that you felt something, but more so that you're trained to emotionally respond to excess instead of critically interrogating it.

calling it out doesn't make you a buzz-kill (and believe me, people may call you that.) it's recognizing that when a system benefits from your insecurity, anger, or self-doubt, those feelings didn't come from nowhere.

[mintconditioned]

clean girl has actually not declined yet my last post was wrong but that's besides the point

So if you saw my last post, I posted “clean girl is over” and thought I was just spiteful because I look terrible in a slickback.

But I did a lot of research since then.

A lot.

So I just wanted to share what I found since I promised to update you guys.

You guys gave me more trends to test, so I expanded to these aesthetics:

Balletcore

Office siren

Indie kid

Tumblr grunge

Dark academia 

Y2K 

Coquette

Shoujo girl

VSCO girl

Downtown girl

Acubi

Goblincore

I basically tried to measure waste from aesthetic trends without directly tracking landfill data (which is almost impossible to get in real time).

So I used three proxies:

1. Value collapse

I measured this as % of listings under $15

Because in resale, under $15 = near-discard tier

2. Listing surplus

This is just total resale listings

More listings = more material committed to the trend

Cottagecore is insane here btw (356K listings)

3. Supply-demand mismatch timing

Basically a trend peaks, demand falls, but supply doesn’t

The longer prices stay low after the peak, the more likely that stuff never gets used again

Then I combined all three into one number:

Trend Waste Index (TWI)

It weights:

– cheapness (0.4)

– volume (0.4)

– how long the oversupply lingers (0.2)

And the ranking is kind of brutal:

Which leads into the second thing I measured:

Trend Half-Life

This is just:

How long until a trend loses half its attention?

Average across everything: ~2 years

But here’s a pattern I’m noticing:

Older trends (2020-2021):

~2-3 year EHL

Mid trends (2022–2023):

~1-2 EHL

New trends (2024-2026):

sometimes under 1 year

This shows trend decay is accelerating.

And when you line that up with resale data, you get this pattern:

Fast spike

Instant overproduction

Price collapse

Resale flood

Which explains why prices all cluster around like $11-$13

Everyone is undercutting each other because there’s too much supply

Different types of trends behave differently though:

Microtrends (office siren, acubi)

explode

die

create the most waste

Slower cultural trends (cottagecore, tumblr grunge)

decline gradually

still wasteful, but less abrupt

Revival trends (Y2K, dark academia)

never fully die

actually less waste because demand keeps coming back

This is basically a market failure. platforms and influencers generate demand while holding zero risk, brands produce fast and sell volume while offloading excess, and consumers and resellers are the ones stuck with depreciation, while the environment absorbs whatever is left.

The system overproduces by design because the decision-makers don’t bear the downside, which is what creates a negative externality. And it’s getting worse as everything speeds up. Trends move faster, production reacts instantly, economic life gets shorter, and waste per trend increases.

Resale markets don’t actually solve this; they just delay disposal while prices collapse. So trends aren’t just cultural cycles anymore; they’re compressed economic cycles, where value is extracted quickly at the top and waste is pushed downstream just as fast.

So I tested some other trends from Italy and South Korea. So far, they show me similar patterns, but I need more South Korean trends to really test my study. Five South Korean trends in total were used:

발레코어

하이틴

고프코어

Y2K

우아한

if you know of any more, please tell me bc i really am invested in this project.

also, sorry if any of this was unclear or anything; i’m writing this kinda late and my brain is fried. if you have any further questions feel free to message me and ask! if you want you guys can look more at my notes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DS2rFtq7b8t9jRk-l74gw8Ozb8qbaW34?usp=sharing they’re not finished but they give you more of an explanation than this post probably will lol.

anyway i hope you guys have a great day.