In second place you had “how to be more attractive” (after “how to be eligible for stimulus check”) and in fourth place, “how to be a baddie.” (For context, 2020’s top “how to” inquiries were followed by words like “donate,” “make,” and “help.”) Today, our looks are responsible for helping us make up for lost time.īy the end of 2021, Google’s Year in Search trend report found that not one, but two of the five top-searched questions beginning with “how to” were about looks. Then vaccines ushered in the post-pandemic beauty boom, in which months of quiet self-beautification journeys culminated in a deluge of overbooked salons and aestheticians. We online shopped for skin-care products. We picked at ourselves more than ever, a symptom of our growing self-scrutiny. And the results weren’t all that surprising. Our faces, as moving images on a Zoom call or static pictures in an online profile, were tasked with representing us in spaces we couldn’t physically access - offices, schools, birthday parties, and dates. Two thousand? Five? Ten? In the mirror, sure, but I’m also talking about the mirrored screens of our video calls. Imagine tallying the hours that, over the last two years and change, you’ve spent staring at your own face.
