The year 2023 has been one of contradictions. There’s an elaborate 11-step routine to achieve the perfect, popular no-make-up make-up look. It involves shaving off your natural eyebrows and pencilling in the right shape for trendy “foxlike” eyes. Use magnetic eyeliners and lashes to make the eyes pop. Then there’s the “baby skin” trend, achieved with a lot of care and products, that pre-teens are hyping. Meanwhile, brands, influencers and celebrities host TV debates, Insta Lives and Reels, highlighting the importance of embracing everything natural and being authentic.
The contradictions haven’t been restricted to the beauty world. There were loud conversations, especially among Gen Z around the importance of buying real (or should we say, authentic) luxury bags, clothes and accessories mid-year, while their peers promoted “superfakes” (imitations so close to the real thing that it’s hard to tell them apart), exhorting people to wear expensive, “real” knock-offs with pride. Then there was #thesimplelife, where content creators shared every minute of their slow life—romanticising mundane things like scooping an avocado or drinking from the same coffee cup daily—with thousands of followers every day.
As the real and the reel worlds became cosier than ever in 2023, fiction often became fact, and fake more fabulous. Small wonder then that Merriam-Webster picked something that once seemed easy to achieve as its word of the year: authentic. “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski told AP in an interview in November, referring to the growing presence of technology in our personal and professional lives, in the form of AI, deepfakes, chatbots, among others. “As a result, in social media and marketing, authentic has become the gold standard for building trust—and authenticity, ironically, has become a performance.” Is there a way, then, to be “authentic” at a time when “delulu is the solulu” (Gen Z speak for optimism and imagination is the only way), and one chases likes for #trueself?
It depends on who you ask and what your agenda is. “Authenticity has more to do with you and what you genuinely like doing,” says Ayush Shukla, founder of influencer marketing company Finnet Media. “Know your values, stay honest and transparent... these are the three simple golden rules of staying authentic. If you start trend-jacking (a way to optimise a post with trending topics or hashtags) and posting stuff that doesn’t align with your content or style, the audience will know you are trying too hard and doing things only for the sake of likes, shares.”
If the reel world is a source of endless entertainment but sometimes seems to take over your life, there is a “solulu”: Leave the phone behind and go for a #silent walk. And then, of course, grab your phone to talk all about the unplugged walk and its benefits on social media.
