ImJustaGirl.exe
Data Visualization and scrollytelling based on "girl" trends of social media.
Duration: 3 Months • Solo Project
On-going
Social media trends shape how Teenagers & Young Adults understand empowerment
In 2025
86%
Use Internet
Use Social Media
Use for studies
72%
57%
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Rural Teenagers Use of Internet
Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)
Jan, 2025
Globally, 62% of Gen Z check social media more than 50 times a day (Deloitte Digital Media Trends 2022).
What teenagers watch, share, and laugh at online is no longer just entertainment, it’s culture. The trends they engage with form opinions, shape behaviors, and redefine ideas and individuality.
Social media has become a mirror for how young people see the world as well as themselves. Every trend or viral phrase carries subtle messages about identity, values, and what it means to belong.
62%
1 in 3 Indian teenagers report feeling anxious, insecure or depressed due to social media comparisons.
UNICEF 2021
Influencer Culture
Normalization of Performance
Validation through Engagement
#GirlMath
#GirlDinner
#ThatGirl
#CleanGirl
#Darkfeminine
#Imjustagirl
500k+ posts
2.1M posts
130k+ posts
300k+ posts
This same cycle applies to the “girl” trends
456k posts
450k+ posts
Pressure to keep up
Consumerism in order to fit in
Loop of insecurity and financial crisis
Expression and Unquestioned consumerism/conformity
The trends brought a number of images and memes and reels with hyper-feminine, pink aesthetic, mostly being used as satire, reclamation or for humor.
Which slowly have been evolving into promoting regressive ideas related to women, consumerism, body image issues and beauty standards in the name of ‘fun’ and ‘empowerment’.
In the past few years, social media has seen a wave of hyper-feminine micro-trends. Each of these movements claims to celebrate womanhood in some form, yet together they reveal a cultural pattern.
All these trends that began as light-hearted self-expression hav, in some aspects and values, evolved into a cycle of aesthetic replication, algorithmic validation, and performative empowerment.
The “Girl” Trends Renaissance
Let’s talk about “I’m just a girl”
Relatability
Builds solidarity, normalizes taboos, and validates shared girlhood experiences.
Escapism
Emergence
Popularity splurge
Dilution
Normalizing regressive ideas in the name of humor, framing incompetence as “girlhood”.
Consumerism
Linking girlhood with certain products, lifestyle or consumerist behaviors.
“I’m just a girl,” the viral trend, borrows its name from No Doubt’s 1995 song which is originally a feminist satire about how women are limited and dismissed.
Online, the phrase became a tongue-in-cheek expression of modern girlhood, a humorous, relatable way to share vulnerability and frustration.
What began as self-aware irony soon blurred into consumerism and escapism, turning “girlhood” into both an aesthetic and an excuse.
Problem Statement
To encourage young audiences to look beyond the surface of trends and evaluate what they truly promote rather than joining them blindly.
Ideation
Digital Storytelling
Easily accessible on social media
Audience presence on social media hastags
→
→
Webtoon-style narrative
Choice-Based Games/Visual Novel
Scrollytelling
Easier accessibility to the exact target audience
Can utilize trends and eye-catchy visuals and catchphrases
Not preaching but just informing
Textual & visual language popularly used among the audience
Why Scrollytelling?
Can be posted and linked under these “trend” hashtags
Scrolling: something the users are already used to doing
Language frequency
Consumer Spike
Temporal Semantics
Contradictory
statements
Value Decay
Tracking recurring words, hashtags, and tone used in trends.
How trends subtly push consumption disguised as empowerment or self-care.
Recording contradictory statements across the same trends
The data being used for the visualization in the scroll
The timeline of a trendy product from introduction, peak and disposal.
Studying how the meaning of trends shifts over time.
Content-based metrics
Market Behavior metrics
Datasets
Scroll sketch - first iteration
What is it to be “just a girl 🎀”
ImJustAGirl.exe
Contradictory statements
Keyword Association
Trend Evolution
How empowering or restrictive words cluster around each other
The filters of the trends change and appear with each swipe, along with the cost of the trend “lifestyle”
Trends simultaneously show different opinions and statements.
Semantic Overlap
Trend variation and similarity
doubt and irony: lines blurred
How a trend started, got popular, and what context is it being used in now
Rebranding into conformity
Production cost price vs. price at the peak of the trend vs. re-sale value
Price Comparison
Identity becomes a commodity
How long does a product/lifestyle trend last and what is the loss that comes with it
Value Decay
Conclusion
Instability of self
Hustle and grind, achieve your goals
but don’t forget to go to the gym and follow this food routine to get the perfect figure
2010
2015
timeline
Frequency
2020
2025
2019
big girl jobs are so exhausting, after all im just a 23 year old teenager
i accidentally bumped into the car behind me, but what can i do about it, im just a girl
channel your dark feminine energy through this clothing and skincare #girlboss
So what exactly does it mean when you are “girlbossing your way into debt”?
Over 4 million teenage girls and women actively participate in the “girl trend” wave on social media, including several trends like #girlmath, #girldinner, #imjustagirl, some of these big enough to make their way into the news and be used as casual conversational terms.
Or to be financially incompetent because you are “just a girl” afterall?
What does it mean to be called a “girl” as a grown woman in the first place?
How long does it take for a trend to die down and what are the effects of it?
The price tends to drop to lower than the initial value after the trends dies.
Whose words are they?
persona 1
persona 2
persona 3
(Scroll interaction)
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(Interactive chart)
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(Scroll/swipe interaction)
The words being used, are they just quirky or do they hold significance?
The “girl” trends aren’t new, but over the past 6 years have seen a spike.
All these trends started as lighthearted satirical jokes. But when does one know when to stop.
“I’m just a girl”, a jab at boys will be boys and a reclaimation of the stereotype of female helplessness for comedic effect became a genuine-sounding excuse for incompetence, consumerism and terrible spending habits, where do we draw the line is the question.
The hashtags that are so popular in female spaces online as a fun trend use similar words as may be used by people most of us will reject.
Through the casual nature of just following trends, we may unknowingly internalize the same value that we might’ve considered “regressive” if spoken by a conservative person.
And what about these projects that we surround ourselves with? What happens to them once the trend dies?
Once the trend is over the price drops dramatically, as the products become more or less useless, and people collecting them in bulk eventually throw them out.
We are growing up in a feed that equates aesthetics with identity, often absorb these cues unconsciously. The danger lies not in the trends themselves, but in how easily they are internalized.
#girlmath
reinforced the idea that women are frivolous and bad with money, incapable of financial literacy.
#girldinner
promotes low-calorie, snack-based meals, which normalized disordered eating behaviors under a "cutesy" name.
#thatgirl
i’m not a clean girl i’m a #mobwife
a woman’s worth isn’t about her looks
#ThatGirl
#CleanGirl
#Darkfeminine
#Imjustagirl
500k+ posts
2.1M posts
456k posts
450k+ posts
#thatgirl
#girldinner
#cleangirl
#imjustagirl
Routine
Health
Productivity
Attire
Appearance
Material possessions
Body shape
Diet habits
Brand items owned
Routine
#GirlMath
#GirlDinner
130k+ posts
300k+ posts
06/08
It becomes “cringe”.
Trends fade. But the values they leave behind might not.
Nature of the Trend
Aesthetic
Performance
Irony/meme
