A while ago, a video on Tiktok went viral of a mother spray painting her young daughter’s toy Christmas tree, so that instead of a bright, garish green, it was a much more calm and soft sage that, most importantly, matched the mother’s preferred neutral colour palette. This video sparked immense controversy and every single side of the internet was debating whether this was going too far just for the sake of maintaining an aesthetic; whether or not she was a ‘sad beige’ mum.

The past decade or so has seen a huge rise in minimalism, from the way Apple smoothed and flattened app icons when launching iOS 7, to invention of the makeup-free ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, to, perhaps most obviously, the simple and limited colour palettes seen in modern interior design. We’ve all seen pictures of these un-lived-in rooms with cream walls and sofas and carpets, and shelves that are adorned with a very small number of suspiciously colour-coordinated trinkets. There is a chance you will see a unique modernist floor lamp, but even despite that I can’t help but feel a peculiar lack of apparent personality. 

That, however, can be chalked up to personal taste. Is there actually anything wrong with such clean and simple home design? One major criticism people have for ‘sad beige’ parents is that such a colourless lifestyle will somehow harm the child, by impacting their eyesight or their psychology. Luckily for minimalism enjoyers, multiple experts, including paediatricians, have explained that a child’s development will not be stunted in any way if their home is all beige. Assuming the house has windows, and the child goes outside at all, they will experience plenty of bright colours, from green foliage to the bright red of the neighbour’s car. 

So if a parent wanted to get neutrally-coloured toys for their children that are also definitely safe and require no altering, what should they do? DIY is one option: it has the potential to be very cheap, however it will almost always be very time-consuming, and many parents, on top of having a job, will struggle to find the time to make their own toys. Another option is to buy already neutrally-coloured toys – but the problem here is buying these toys, often made from wood and other natural materials, get inordinately expensive very quickly. 

This ‘sad beige’ epidemic seems to me to be a symptom of a much larger problem within the world we live in, and that is aesthetic elitism. Much like the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, in order to maintain these supposedly simple lifestyles, you have to spend an inordinate amount of money on things like Stanley cups, 10-step skincare routines, and hand-made children’s toys. But aesthetics, like most things on the internet, have a very short lifespan, and it seems that every year that passes, trend cycles get even shorter. Stanley cups are high-quality, reusable bottles, and that’s great in theory, but only a few years ago, everyone was obsessed with Hydroflasks, another high-quality, reusable bottle. What happened to all the perfectly usable Hydroflasks that have just been replaced with the more trendy Stanley cups?

The same thing, I think, will happen to beige minimalism. Eventually, people will grow tired of such an unsustainably strict aesthetic: their house will get messy, different colours will become popular, and the child of ‘sad beige’ parents will grow up, and their favourite colour might not be beige. 

About a week ago I went to the antique store in the Norwich city centre that was converted from an old church. It was a mess, total chaos, with porcelain statues from the 18^th century sat in glass cabinet that was just across a shelf full of Converse shoes that can’t have been more than 10 years old. There was no aesthetic integrity anywhere; it was beautiful. It is true that I am not the biggest fan of minimalism, but what I am quite certain of is that the age of the internet has put a pressure on people to keep up-to-date with every single rapidly changing trend. Our society does not have just fast-fashion, but fast-everything. I hope that, eventually, we all are able to slow down.