“Girl dinner.”
“Girl math.”
“Hot girl walks.”
With every scroll junior Cayenne Bagnol took on her TikTok feed, a new video appeared featuring the concept of these new trends.
Throughout the fall and winter of 2023, Bagnol recalls the majority of her For You Page being filled with these similar videos.
“I remember seeing some video about ‘girl dinner,’ and after I liked that video all I saw were videos like those on my feed,” she said.
Bagnol said she found the TikToks to be relatable and funny, although she didn’t initially expect its popularity.
All of these trends created and targeted for women cumulate to what many TikTok users call girlhood, with the hashtag, #girlhood, listing almost 315,000 posts on the platform. From girl math to girl dinner to hot girl walks, these posts have created a community for young ladies on TikTok and in everyday life but has also prompted reactions ranging from both laughter to criticism.
GIRL MATH
“Anything under $5 feels like it’s pretty much free.”
TikToker Samantha Jane (@samjamessssss) expressed this statement after buying a Starbucks drink for $4.90.
In the TikTok video posted on Wednesday, Aug. 2, that has now accumulated 3.6 million views, Jane formulated the idea of girl math: a way to justify spending money that supposedly makes sense only to her gender.
Jane continued to give examples of this phenomenon, saying if she returned something at Zara for $50 and then bought something for the same price, she got it for free, or if she purchased concert tickets a long time before the actual date of the event, she is going for free.
The #girlmath on TikTok has totaled nearly 124,000 posts with one video showing two women talking about their recent reasoning in a car reaching up to 13.1 million views with the hashtag in the caption. Their logic included rounding prices of items down not up, explaining how a $38 bag was worth $30.
Another video of a woman explaining girl math to her husband drew 1.8 million views even with no girl math hashtag. The woman explained some situations like how paying with cash makes an item free; her husband debunks this logic and is evidently confused.
Freshman Roxana Sonboli said she began to implement girl math subconsciously into her daily life after discovering the trend through TikTok around January.
“I find myself using girl math mostly when I’m shopping to justify the amount of money I spent,” Sonboli said.
Advanced Placement [AP] Statistics teacher Kari Morita said she first learned about this trend in the fall through Instagra; she also shared some videos with her colleagues, a majority of whom are women.
“It definitely made me laugh, but also some of it is kind of dissing girls, and I don’t appreciate that,” Morita said. “We’re better at budgeting than people say, so I don’t like that stereotype that girls are not good at math; but I did laugh, and they were funny.”
GIRL DINNER
The camera panned to a cutting board with miscellaneous food: two slices of cheese, four grapes, butter, wine, pickles and two slices of ciabatta.
TikToker Olivia Maher (@liviemaher) displayed this assortment in her video, now having accumulated 1.6 million views, and coined it a “girl dinner.”
“I call this girl dinner or medieval peasant,” said Maher, while responding to another TikTok that said medieval peasants only ate bread and cheese.
According to CNN Reporter Casey Barber, girl dinner is a meal that requires no cooking, no planning and almost no prep time.
After Maher’s video, countless creators began to show their girl dinners consisting of leftovers or snacks. The #girldinner holds about 243,000 posts on TikTok.
“I never made an actual TikTok about it, but I started to put ‘girl’ in front of every word like ‘girl drink’ or ‘girl dinner’ after seeing the trend,’” said senior Lara Martinez, who learned about the trends through TikTok in the end 2023. “I like saying it because it’s funny, and it’s fun to be girly; it perfectly sums up the reason for my thinking.”
With the increasing popularity, other content inspired by girl dinners emerged on the platform. Last year on July 5, TikToker Karma Carr (@karmapilled) posted a video holding up a chocolate-covered ice cream bar and an original song of her repeatedly singing “girl dinner.”
The sound on TikTok itself has around 417,000 posts made with it, furthering the original popularity of the video; Carr’s video has 21.1 million views.
This also spurred TikToker Juliet Siegel (@julietsiegel) to make a filter showing a plate of some kind of food and another plate for a drink.
The filter then randomizes a food and drink for the person using the filter.
Now, 209,900 videos were made using Siegel’s filter.
Sophomore David Lee remembers finding out about the trend through TikTok in January and seeing its relevance among his female friends.
“I think it’s funny, and it’s cool that girls have their own trends,” sophomore David Lee said. “I don’t participate in them myself, but I’ll get texts from my friends showing their ‘girl dinner,’ so I definitely see it a lot.”
HOT GIRL WALKS
After the 2020 pandemic and a period of isolation, TikToker Mia Lind (@exactlyliketheothergirls) said she began going on four-mile walks and focusing on positive thoughts, ultimately creating the ‘hot girl walk,” according to the Hot Girl Walk organization’s website
Lind brought up the walk in a TikTok posted in January 2021, stating how it helped her grow healthier and stronger.
According to her post, the idea of a hot girl walk is simple. It’s a standard trek done while the person thinks of three essential thoughts: things they’re grateful for, their goals and how they’re going to achieve them and how hot they are.
“You may not think about any boys or any boy drama,” Lind says in her video. “The most important part of the hot girl walk is that it doesn’t end at the end of your walk. You take that energy and you take that with you the whole day.”
The hot girl walk Instagram @hotgirlwalk has around 69,600 followers, showing highlights from organized walks in L.A., Australia, New York and Miami.
“I think it’s really cool that there are large organized walks in different areas to gather people together and support each other,” Bagnol said. “If I had the time, I would definitely want to check that out.”
Loving to have a routine and keep her health in check, the junior said she finds herself going on a lot of consistent steps; now, she said she has switched over to hot girl walks.
“I started to do hot girl walks because my younger cousin and I love walking, so we both decided to do it,” she said, who first found out about the trend last winter. “Our first real hot girl walk was on the last day of finals in the first semester.”
Bagnol said she tries to do this activity once a week with her 12-year-old cousin Mikayla. Their typical route starts from Bagnol’s home near Sunset Lane Elementary School, then they pass the Fullerton Loop Trail, up to Robert C. Fisler Elementary School, down to Sunny Hills’ ag farm and to Parks Middle School.
“Hot girl walks bring you up emotionally, and you’re not as slumped during the walk,” she said. “Instead of just wanting to sleep in bed all day, now we’re more excited and hyped up for the day. Focusing on the three things really helps me be more confident in myself, too.”
And it looks like for some male Sunny Hills students, this activity is not limited to just young ladies.
“If my friends asked me to, I definitely would [go],” said junior David Tapia, who has seen videos on his For You Page about hot girl walks. “My friends in Dance 3 always text in our group chat when we should do a certain thing, so if hot girl walks were brought up, I would try them out.”
The junior said besides this activity, he appreciates the growth of social media movements geared toward the opposite gender.
“I like how there are more trends for girls now because it gives them a bigger presence in social media,” he said.
And shouldn’t guys band together and start doing something for themselves and start up something on Tiktok like a cool boys walk or boy talk?
“I’ve seen a lot of guys making jokes geared toward the male audience on TikTok, too, but I think sometimes guys just take jokes too far and alternate into something different; so, I don’t really think guys should try making their own separate trend to be honest,” Tapia said.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Although girl trends have inarguably exploded from TikTok, Vox senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings wrote in an online column that this movement is a marketing trend. She argues that soon #girlhood will die out and another social media movement will eventually rise with a similar concept because girls “sell.”
“Women on TikTok know what they’re doing when they dub their meals ‘girl dinners’ or coin terms like ‘hot girl walk,’” Jennings said. “They know that people will always care about what girls do because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise. Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.”
Morita said she recognizes the negative aspects of all this.
“I can see people trying to take advantage of [girl trends] and make money,” the AP Statistics teacher said. “But I do like some trends like hot girl walks and the positive confidence boost that comes with that one.”
Despite referencing girl trends herself, Sonboli said she sees positive and negative effects on this movement.
“I think these trends can be a light-hearted joke on social media, but it does glorify bad habits that most teenage girls have,” the freshman said. “For example, ‘girl dinner’ justifies bad eating habits and under-eating, but at the same time it can be comforting for girls to know they are not alone in their eating habits.”
Bagnol said she still sees the trends from a more positive light.
“I get why some people might think girl trends are kind of making stereotypes about women worse, but I don’t think that’s the intention,” she said. “It’s really just all good fun, and I think it made a tighter community for girls more than anything.”
