The Conformity Cut

 "You want to cut off my eyelashes?"

"Absolutely sir, it's very much the fashion... Did you not read in Thursday's Times about a Turkish barber called Ferhat Ceylan... who trimmed a customer's lashes, posted it on social media, went viral, and now there are tens of millions of people watching him at work every day. He still does the short back and sides, it says in The Times, but, and I quote, sir "shaving eyelashes is all the rage.".."

"Eyelashes are a strong binary," our reporter is told by Meredith Jones, honorary  professor of gender studies at Brunel University, the blue-haired Isaiah Berlin of modern identity woo-woo. "There is currently a fashion for one sex to have eyelashes that are outrageously long, thick and black. These are seen as an indicator of high femininity and therefore the opposite has to be true for the opposite gender."

Madame de Pompadour
Francois Boucher (1703-1770)
Photo Credit: The Wallace Collection [ CC  BY-NC-ND]

Now, it's true that a lot of young women do wear these giant falsies. I had a routine blood test taken recently by a young nurse with eyelashes so long that every time she blinked it was like Tower Bridge being raised. And I did briefly wonder if I should trust someone so demonstrably vain, thick and shallow to put a needle in my arm. But I didn't think, "I had better shave my own eyelashes off so that nobody thinks I'm a woman."...

Do people want to look different, or do they all want to look the same?

Are the girls with the stupid shop awnings hanging from their eyelids doing it because nobody else does or because everybody else does? Because they are strong, independent women or because they fear rejection from their illiterate, narcissistic, sex-obsessed friendship group.

Same with tattoos. The insane dimness of the fashion. Millions of young people desecrating their bodies  to try and look different when it just makes them look all the same. They think they are rebelling when all they are doing is conforming... They go through all that pain, making themselves ugly and unemployable, believing it to be an act of individual creativity without grasping, until it is much too late, that it is just society bending them to its iron will...

Same goes for piercings. Like tattoos, they are just a sort of idle fiddle. An ADHD tantrum carved into the body...

Why can't people just leave themselves alone? It's the same with plastic surgery. Above a certain income and leisure level, especially in Hollywood, New York and Notting Hill, old ladies just keep getting their faces cut to bits and glued together in new shapes simply because it's what all their friends do. That's the only reason. They can't possibly think it makes them look younger. Because it doesn't, it just makes them look like old ladies from outer space...

(Giles Coren, The Times, 2025)

Sheep-like behaviour and the herd mentality. Fashion, trends, tattoos, piercings and plastic surgery  Are the girls with the stupid shop awnings hanging from their eyelids doing it because nobody else does or because everybody else does? Because they are strong, independent women or because they fear rejection from their illiterate, narcissistic, sex-obsessed friendship group. Isn't the answer obvious?