Beige Flags. Or Whatever.

By Sonia Rebecca Menezes

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Backstory

So I’m not here to brag but I’m also definitely one hundred percent kinda here to brag. When I started working on this piece, The New York Times, The Cut, and for some reason Time friggin Magazine hadn’t yet published their take on it.

But as I was writing about beige flags, I started finding the topic so pointless and meandering that I abandoned it in my drafts. NOWWW that the big girlies are talking about it, I’m gonna pretend that I care deeply and get back to writing this essay. And you know how when you pretend to care about something and then you accidentally find yourself caring in real life? That’s gonna be me by the end of this exercise I promise.

Disclaimer, as I write this, I haven’t yet read what The New York Times, The Cut, and Time Magazine have said about the beige flag trend. Maybe it’s super interesting. Or more likely, this is one of those bad-carpenter-blaming-their-tools situations.

If I haven’t been able to draw out an interesting take, maybe it’s me. I’m gonna stop writing, and go read those three articles. Please wait here. Don’t move don’t breathe don’t do anything. I read really fast I promise.

Okay I’m back.

I did stop to check Instagram in between so that took longer than expected. If you held your breath and are now dead, I’m devastated. There are like seven people, at best, that read this blog. pls don’t be dead.

Here’s the order that I read the articles in – first was The New York Times. It was a brief article, not very different from the early ones that I read when learning about the weird beige flag movement. The second article I read was Time friggin Magazine, at which point I had to laugh out loud because I could feel the writer’s pain in real-time as they tried to figure out whether the beige flag movement is really where their career as a journalist has taken them. Finally, I read The Cut’s take on it, which was by far MY favorite. Not your favorite though. Your favorite take is gonna be whatever I write here and now as we speak in this essay right here god I am procrastinating in real time with this chit chat.

SONIA’S TAKE STARTS BELOW THIS LINE

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Sometimes I imagine what 19-year-old me would think if every time I did something, a weird 30-year old was lurking around making notes on a page called ‘TRENDS.’

Does their obsession with vampires signify a depper loathing for humanity? Are selfies eroding away at our sense of self? Does this generation of soulja boys truly have what it takes to crank that?

That’s how I feel every time I write a thought-provoking essay on internet trends.

In all likelihood, I’d tell this note-taking adult the words I tell myself all the time as I write: It’s Not👏That👏Serious👏 Most of what we do on the internet is especially not that serious. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still write a few thousand words on the subject.

So, today’s topic of discussion: Beige flags.

This conversation has been doing the rounds on TikTok for a couple of weeks now – it has to do with dating apps (or at least, it had, but that’s changed as you’ll find out later). Let me preface this by saying I have never been on a dating app before. I was kicked off the market before dating apps became mainstream. 

However, I’ve always found the concept fascinating from a human behavior POV and since I didn’t have personal experience, I talked to about seventeen people that did. Unsurprisingly, they’d all encountered some form of beige flaggery.

What’s a beige flag?

Glad you asked. Let’s recap flags in general for a sec.

Red flags: Anything that raises an alarm. E.g. sexist comments, not respecting boundaries, too many shirtless selfies (or not enough shirtless selfies? idk) everything that would make you go ‘yeah, NO’ in a heartbeat.

Green flags: The badge of potential compatibility. E.g. great communicator, kind, respectful, common interests, ambition. Everything that would make you feel confident about the success of a real-life date.

Beige flags: Somewhere in between red and green flags? They’re non-descriptive. They’re the overused dating app cliches that tell you NOTHING about a person except that they didn’t take too much of an effort to create their profile. They’re generic descriptions that lack actual personality. They’re boring.

According to internet culture observer and self-proclaimed CEO of Beige Flags, Caitlin MacPhail, (I’m not making this up, this is actually in her bio), “Beige flags typically mean that the conversation and the potential date that might follow could also be dull and unsuccessful. If someone has a lot of beige flags on their profile, you’ll probably get to the end of it without having really learnt anything about them.”

It’s the declaration of universally accepted hobbies like going to the gym, or being a foodie, or being a coffee addict. References to mainstream sitcoms as a personality is a beige flag. Professing a love for puppies / travel / sleep is a beige flag.

Beige flags aren’t harmful, but they don’t offer any special information about a person and that in turn, makes their profile boring. “A lot of people struggle to get their personality across on dating apps because it’s become a bit cringe to be authentic or vulnerable,” Caitlin told Mashable (and then Mashable told me). “It’s easier to put what you think people will want to hear, especially when it feels almost competitive on dating apps — it makes sense that people want to play it safe with their profiles.”

I asked some of y’all on Instagram about beige flags that y’all encountered and here’s a condensed version of what I got:

• “Looking for someone to go on adventures with”
• “If travelling were free you’d never see me again” or some travel quote
• Dogs
• Sexual orientation listed as sapiosexual
• Grammar nazis
• “Will go out with you if my dog likes you”
• “Looking for the Pam to my Jim”
• Bookworms 
• Music-lovers

I’ll admit, compiling this list felt uncomfortable. I could be all these things. You could be all those things. I am most of these things yaa. THAT’S THE PROBLEM. It’s everyone you know, which says nothing about us as individuals.

By offering a generic answer to these random prompts and questions, you obviously widen your pool of options, but as Caitlin says, “It’s a pool of people you probably don’t have much in common with because you haven’t given an answer that’s unique to you.” Beige flags are perhaps the result of a design flaw with these dating apps and the stupid prompt-based questions that they ask.

They’re the crutch we lean on because it’s hard to be vulnerable online. Many of the prompts offered to you on dating apps encourage you to open up and be honest about yourself, like some of Hinge’s most popular prompts: “fact about me that surprises people…” or “I want someone who…”. They offer people a chance to be genuinely open about who they are and what they want but most people use them as an opportunity to try to be funny or more likely, they just respond with a socially-acceptable answer.

I come back to the same point I find myself making when I discuss internet culture: It’s very hard to be authentic online. It’s the silent crisis of our digital lives. It’s hard to be yourself. It requires phenomenal communication skills and buckets of guts. It means embracing a certain level of cringe as part of your daily life and while we may expect that from others, we don’t want to do it ourselves.

Beige flags are like a digital armour. They’re gentle reminders of what we’re up against in our pursuit of meaningful connections online. As we grapple with our vulnerability, we hide behind the safety of beige, and populate our profiles with rehearsed cliches. And why shouldn’t we? In a marketplace where authenticity might feel like a risk, you can’t blame anyone for choosing generic over genuine self-expression. Ironically, in our quest for connection, we may just be getting more disconnected.

I’m taking a break don’t hold your breath for this one cuz life’s too precious

The more I talk about how hard it is to be authentic online, the more I find myself wondering why I bother trying. Our online lives are fascinating because they’re real, but at the same time, they’re completely made up. We can be anything and anyone we want, and more importantly – we can be OURSELVES and that since terrifies most of us, we choose to be beige. 

As real as our online lives are, I think the hard part with presenting ourselves comes from the fact that there’s hardly any context. Context is super important online. If you were to go to a party and talk to two people that happen to be friends of the host, whom you know from college, you’d have some common ground to connect with each other.

But online, it’s like every time you say something, you’re talking to your school teacher, your aunt, your former colleague, your childhood bestfriend, AND the guy you met at dinner last week – all at once. That’s like context’s worst nightmare.

Thank God for IRL interactions

They give us room to be ourselves, however colorful and non-beige that may be. In fact, that’s where the beige flag trend took an interesting turn. The term ‘beige flag’ has evolved to mean something entirely different in the span of the last month or so. And THAT is what The New York Times, Time Mag and The Cut talked about.

The meaning of beige flags has changed, because it’s possible for things to mean two different things on the internet (see previous blog on aesthetics). I would try and define it myself but I love how The Cut put it:

“There comes a special moment in every relationship when the person you are with reveals something that makes you go, “Hmm … okay.” It could be the particular way they do their laundry or their deep fear of astronauts. This tidbit of information is neither a dealbreaker nor a dealmaker, neither alarming nor alluring; it simply is. This, according to TikTok, is a beige flag.”

Beige flags in a relationship can be needing to go to the airport three hours before a flight, or wearing compression socks for the journey. Beige flags can be drinking your hot coffee with a straw, or taking an entire day to finish a single cup coffee because you’re taking one sip an hour. With a straw.

The beige-ness of the flag lies in the eyes of the beholder. TikTok has run amock with people arguing over whether something like eating ants off the floor instead of killing them is a red flag or beige. Or whether remembering everyone’s birthday is a green flag or beige.

BUT SONIA – there is already a word for this. It’s called a quirk. A characteristic. Or an idiosyncrasy, if you went to St. Xavier’s College Mumbai.

TIkTok didn’t invent beige flags. This is so dumb.

To that I say, well if you’re so observant why don’t you come here and write the rest of this blog, we have at LEAST six hundred words to go. No? Thought so. You can rest easy in my capable jittery hands as we continue. (please don’t leave me when I’m unhinged like this okay? Just please don’t, this is all clearly a cry for help)

Here’s what I like about the internet

(sometimes)

There are many advantages to things being ‘not that serious.’ It gives us a low-pressure chamber to be our weirdest selves. And sometimes, we don’t need new vocabulary to define an old concept. I think we need new vocabulary to look at an old concept from a different perspective, or to make boring things interesting again. That’s what beige flags have done – they’ve turned quirks into shared stories.

The internet didn’t invent the beige flags as a concept, it just gave it a 2023 rebrand, turned it into a conversation, and drew attention to something that otherwise would have been dismissed as ‘not that serious.’

It’s not always about the reds and greens in relationships. Sometimes, the most interesting bits are hidden in the beige. And if The New York Times, The Cut, and Time friggin Magazine haven’t taught you that, then remember, you heard it here first!!!!!!!!

I am really grasping at straws with this honestly. There’s no way to end this essay. There’s no way to un-say everything that has been said. So forget I said anything, sorry I even started i’m gonna delete this ah crap it already–

If you wanna read your second, third, and fourth favorite takes on beige flags, here’s The New York Times, The Cut, and TIME FRIGGIN MAGAZINE.