WTHelly and Holy Airball
after school tuesday edition
Welcome back to After School Tuesday Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. A monthly subscription costs less than a Coco Americana (recently called the “drink of the summer” by Food & Wine) from Rhythm Zero, so please consider upgrading. 🫶
In today’s issue:
The rise and rise of dupes
Why Gen Z men are calling their friends to tell them “good night”
TikTok’s intimacy-industrial complex
India’s spiritual tourism boom
The “date with me” trend
Gen Z is falling for stealth TikTok ads
The lipstick index is dead
But beauty sales among U.S. teens are (still!) surging
The Y2K lip gloss comeback
Topanga hair
Speedo summer
And so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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Two years ago, The Cut ran a series titled “Peak Dupe.”
“All sense of what makes a good [dupe] seems to have been lost,” Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz wrote at the time, noting how people were obsessively chasing slightly cheaper versions of already mid-priced items, like $12 faux Uggs or a warped mirror that “looked like I was in a fun house.” Dupes, she argued, had become self-parody: knockoffs of knockoffs, aesthetic stand-ins that often cost nearly as much as the original while delivering less.
She’s certainly not wrong, but in hindsight, we weren’t remotely close to “peak dupe” in 2023.
Since the beginning of the year, dupe culture has exploded across TikTok and Instagram, with conversation around fake and replica bags surging tenfold between February and April 2025, according to Plot’s latest report.
