The Eternal Cinch

Not my usual fare here at Frankly Speaking, but a morning of doomscrolling left me restless — and compelled.

Sitting down over a homemade cappuccino gone cold -Penneys racks thinning out like my patience - I scroll past K-pop idols with waists like forgotten pencils, shrinkflation outrage (grocery prices at their highest since 2023, half of Irish adults cutting spending), Dubai’s chocolate pistachio fever (72 bars sold a minute, beauty butters next?) and serene bamboo-floored spa interiors promising calm.

Then comes Wicked: For Good - Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, brilliant as ever. Yet what floods my feed? …Posts dissecting their frames like rare insects under glass. Not a whisper against the women themselves, but the scrutiny? Same old pressure cooker.

Meanwhile, elaborate scalp scrubs and head spas surge 77% in searches, promising poreless perfection - quiet proof that beauty “necessities” bubble back up just as women, now 36.5% of senior management, climb boardrooms and ballots.

Every scroll feels like déjà vu -women rising in power, yet shrinking in frame, finance, and freedom.It hits me: heroin chic reborn. Glossier this time - K-beauty filters, off-label Ozempic hype, pistachio-glow virality - cinching us smaller.

Physically. Financially. Figuratively.

I’m watching it happen in real time.

The same loop, the same two-step: female progress forward, aesthetics snapping back.

I’m thirty-six, married, with a kid wedged between remote meetings and the school run. The old pattern hits like a bad Zoom filter. K-pop’s dewy, diminutive male-gaze blueprint now wafts everywhere - Y2K crops flaunting hipbones, oversized hoodies hiding frames, all framed in bamboo zen backdrops whispering minimalist virtue. Idols sell us the new dream: poreless, Pilates-carved perfection.

Sabrina Carpenter’s feather-light Espresso coquette era - baby-doll dresses, bow-trimmed thinness, 1.2 billion TikTok views -another verse in the siren song.

Shrinkflation twists the knife. Plus-size clothing down 15% in Arnotts. Nationally, sales dip 3.1%. Irish households lose €500m+ a year to the pink tax - razors, haircuts, “feminine extras.” We shell out for dwindling chocolate portions, premium scalp elixirs, vanishing choices. Everything priced higher, served smaller - even our confidence.

Wicked and the Body Audit Brigade

The Wicked tour is a peak exhibit. Memes on cheekbones sharp as rhetoric. Health gossip drowning out the showtunes. Thinness traded like cultural currency. Therapists warn of reignited body wars, while even icons navigate the squeeze privately - head-spa rituals of oils, steam, and acupressure to “skinify” the scalp.

My pre-teen goddaughter scrolls through it all. Her feed blends Sabrina’s airy coquette, K-pop’s polished tininess, Dubai chocolate “glow-ups,” Wicked’s dissected silhouettes. Exposure scale? Alarming.

Irish girls aged 10–14 report 25% higher body dissatisfaction since TikTok’s surge, with triple the usage since 2020. Primed for poreless scalps by age twelve, chasing €200 facials and bamboo serenity while plus-sizes vanish and pink taxes bite. A worldview where worth shrinks to the visible, the waifish, the wallet-draining.

History, looping again. Corsets choking suffragettes to keep them decorative. Bustles tripping those bound for the workforce. Sixties freedoms met by heroin-waif surveillance. Each liberation swiftly paired with beauty’s new leash - from girdles to €200 serums.

The Rebel Snip

We’ve snipped threads before: bloomers on suffragettes, girdles in bonfires. Now, in this K-pop–shrinkflation, Dubai-chocolate–wellness snarl, that itch persists.

Fashion binds like a bad subscription.

Time to cancel.

Maybe 2026 won’t bring bigger miracles - just bigger jeans, fuller lives, freer laughs.

That’d be rebellion enough.