Demure, Sanewashing, ‘Staches: Trends to Move on From in 2025

A passenger princess, according to Urban Dictionary, is “a pretty girl that has no other job but to look pretty in the passenger seat while her sneaky link/boyfriend/significant other drives.” What’s a sneaky link, you might ask? It’s a secret hookup. For sex.

Passenger princesses decorate their sides of front seats with little baubles in the air vent. They pack in snacks on little trays that fit on their Stanley cups. They bring cozy blankies, replace visor mirrors with fancy lit ones and generally reign while demanding their men place one hand on their nearest leg.

@jordan.natae 💕ultimate passenger princess💕 #passengerprincess #grwm #fyp ♬ GOOD LUCK BABE by CHAPPELL ROAN – Chappell’s Fandom 👑

Well, some of y’all are still putting up sourdough videos, naming your starters, selling dehydrated bits of your starters, spending hours on rises and pull-and-folds and waxing wise on which tools and baskets are the best.

The world has re-started. Keep your bread videos to yourselves. Your starters bubble. They multiply. Your dough rises and rises again. Your little razor cuts are epic. Sourdough bread is lovely and it’s healthy and, now, we all know how to make it.

Sourdough videos? No need. Thank you for your service.

Rawdogging: Dump it both ways

Depending on who you are, rawdogging has different meanings. There’s having sex without a condom. And there’s the male-driven travel trend of eschewing all distractions and movement and sustenance while long-haul flying. The latter raw dogging spiked in 2024.

You’ve got your hyper-male enthusiasts looking to, well, be hyper-male. And you’ve got your travelers seeking to lock in some sort of mindfulness or uber-focus or, what? Who knows.

Listen: You paid for that ticket. Enjoy the food and music and movies. Also, not drinking is just dehydration silly. So is blood clot-worthy not moving around.

@sspencerevans Just raw dogged this entire flight. 24 hours. #flight #sigmagrindset #fyp #trend #flying #fory #pov ♬ sonido original – 𝑪𝑶𝑴𝑨𝑵𝑫𝑨𝑵𝑻𝑬_𝑯𝑵💀🎶

Finding your center by simply staring at the in-flight map seems, simply, pointless. Here’s to a rawdog-free new year. The same goes for that plane seat belt thing where people find it somehow useful (not) to buckle up at the ankles, their knees hiked to their chins. C’mon. That can’t be all that comfortable, let alone safe. Happy turbulence to you all.

Speaking of travel trends, shove off people curating the contents of your TSA trays. As for those among you who bought TSA trays to conveniently produce content at home. Not cutesy.

Social media hype talk, take a breath!

These potatoes. I mean, come ON! Are you kidding me? Wow, just wow. Don’t sleep on these! Potatoes!

Where there are content creators, there’s hype talk. There’s a superlative mountain. There’s fake amazement, surprise, excitement over the mundanest of mundaney things as the race for likes, shares and comments carries on.

And there’s a plague of weird verbalisms that make various tasks sound like battlegrounds: I’m “going in” with the ranch dressing. I’m “going in” with this concealer. I’m “frying off” the garlic. I’m gonna “hit it” with the salt!

Much has been made of social media speak for decades. This species is just so dumbly an attempt to make something truly boring sound viral worthy. It spread faster than a runaway money train.

Take a breath. We’ll look at you making potatoes. We promise.

Standalone ‘staches, wiggle away

The chevron. The Dali. The pencil. The walrus.

Since virus lockdowns offered men the time and space to curate their faces, mustaches all by their lonesome have been on the rise. Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Pedro Pascal, The Weeknd and Jacob Elordi rocked their ‘staches sans beards on red carpets and social media, upping the nowness of it all.

As of September 2022, Gillette estimated that 12.5 million men in the U.S. had mustaches. That’s a 1.5% increase from March 2020. The shaving company launched a facial hair-grooming brand, King C. Gillette, to ride the wave.

Mustaches, with beards. Fine. Freestanding mustaches. Polarizing. Do we thank a contingent of ironical millennials looking to revisit the past for this, uh, trend? What about the unironical? Do we point to Miles Teller’s character in the 2022 film, Top Gun: Maverick?

Teller’s ‘stache was a nod to Anthony Edwards’ similar one in the original 1986 Top Gun. This is not 1986.

Have a nice day.

Dorm rooms on steroids

Fancy headboards. Custom-made cabinetry. An interior designer. Dorm room decor for some is way, WAY off the rails, leaving students who can’t afford to spend thousands in the dirt.

The cost of college — tuition, fees, room and board — nearly doubled between 1992 and 2022, rising from an inflation-adjusted average of $14,441 per year to $26,903 across all types of schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Dorm costs saw a similar increase in the same time span, $3,824 to $7,097.

Hello haves and have-nots. We see you. And thank you TikTok for fueling the frenzy.

@hello.itskatie Comment your college! #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #college #dormroom #WelcomeBack #ChiliDogYumPlz #LiveFlowSweatDuet #TheSuicideSquadMovie #viral ♬ Psycho (feat. Rubi Rose) – Dixie