Is the Age of the Beige-fluencer Over Already?

There’s a specific genre of person on the internet — usually, though not always, a woman. You’ve seen her, you may know her, you might even be her.

She lives in a house that lacks pretty much all evidence of human habitation. The walls are that highly specific swatch of warm white that goes by the artfully vague name, Ethereal Mist. The living room diffuser aggressively emits the ambiguous aroma of Cashmere Woods. And her kitchen counter sports a solitary Stanley Cup in the equally abstract colorway of Polar Swirl. 

It’s a house designed to put Pantone’s Cloud Dancer to shame. Every surface squeaky clean, creamy throw-blankets folded into thirds and draped over the arm of a bouclé sofa (also cream) that’s clearly never felt the heaviness of a human backside. There’s a ceramic fruit bowl containing exactly one lemon.

You’ve likely seen the ur-version of this house in Calabasas, California. The $60 million mansion, co-opted by one Miss Kim Kardashian, is her self-anointed “minimal monastery,” a compound of such aggressive neutrality even her children’s Christmas stockings are beige. She has described the experience of being in it as “calm.” The rest of us might use a different word.

Today, a bootlegged dupe of this abode has sprung up all across America. Just on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, is the homestead of Ms. Alyssa Sheil, “Everything around me — the rugs, the art, the books on the shelves — are shades of white, black, or cream,” wrote The Verge in a 2024 piece.

Outside of Minneapolis, similarly, is the residence of a certain Sidney Nicole Gifford. “Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight,” continues the article. 

“In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.”

And in the midst of it all, clad in a cream ribbed-knit, hair tucked into the collar, voice set permanently to the frequency of a guided meditation, stands tall the woman herself. Welcome to the world of the beige-fluencer.

The Vibes are Beige

On April 22, 2024, Sydney Nicole Gifford filed a lawsuit alleging that her former acquaintance, fellow Amazon affiliate, and similarly devoted devotee at the altar of the neutral palette, Ms. Alyssa Sheil, had “stolen her vibe.”

Aside from the house – that same, magnificent, load-bearing expanse of carefully curated nothingness – the stolen vibes also ostensibly included the 24-year-old lifestyle influencer’s aesthetic, her manner of speaking, frame-by-frame reproductions of her videos, the poses in her pictures, the products on her Amazon storefront, and even her tattoos. 

For her lawsuit, though, Gifford graciously skipped the tattoos and focused instead on her “promotion of products only falling within the monochrome cream, grey, and neutral-beige color scheme; styling of products in modern, minimal backdrops; and her distinct, relatable way of speaking to followers.”

Sheil’s defense, however, was deceptively simple in its blow: “There are hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic.” 

And hundreds might just be an understatement. 

The court agreed, ruling that an “aesthetic” is an unprotectable idea under US copyright law. Sheil’s lawyer opened with a quote from Kim Kardashian herself: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleged, “She is not the Thomas Edison of ‘a vibe,’ let alone a beige aesthetic.” 

It’s The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Ingrid Goes West meets real-life… only real-life is almost always stranger. Gifford ultimately dropped the suit in May 2025, admitting that she couldn’t afford to bring the case to trial.

But was there ever anything original in it to warrant theft in the first place? 

The Color of Taste

Now, with the internet’s clean-girls embroiled in a very dirty fight, perhaps it’s worth exploring a few other notable entrants of the clean-girl canon.

First up is Mrs. Meghan Markle, whose hit Netflix show, With Love, Meghan is essentially a fifty-minute moodboard, rendered in the ambient TV format. In it, the (former?) The Duchess of Sussex uses honey from her own personal apiary to bake cakes. Beeswax from the honey harvest gets molded into little candle jars. The closest thing to conflict is Markle’s creamy beige Jenni Kayne sweater sleeves hovering perilously over the gravy boat of peach nectar.”

Vulture dubbed it “an utterly deranged bizarro world-voyage into the center of nothing.” The Guardian affectionately called it “toe-curdlingly unlovable.” It also raked in 2.6 million views in its first week. Aggressively beige and entirely aspirational, it has “the spa-like vibe of a brochure for a wellness retreat,” noted Amy Odell, “while being a vacuum of problems, mistakes, and reality.”

Then there’s Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the patient zero of the clean-girl syndrome, posthumously re-canonized via Netflix’s Love Story, a show so effective at laundering 90s minimalism back into the cultural conversation, it produced a 217% spike in searches for black turtlenecks on episode one alone.

These days, it’s almost impossible to escape the CBK and JFK Jr. starter-packs and “get the look” affiliate slop (much of it, unsurprisingly, linking to Amazon) floating around Instagram. One TikToker (dressed as CBK) posted a video, “Transforming my husband into JFK Jr from Love Story!!!” Heck, this is my sixteenth article where I namecheck this woman. Yes, I counted.

And yet, somewhere between Carolyn’s beige Prada coat and Sheil’s beige bouclé sofa, beige stopped being the color of people who didn’t care, and instead became the color of people who cared enormously about appearing not to care. Mark Zuckerberg showed up with his wife to the Prada show in Milan in old money browns – trousers, a knit polo, and a loafer. “It looked borrowed,” snarked Odell, “and I mean that in the least-nice possible way.”

“Taste is a new core skill,” posted Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI. Lauren Sánchez Bezos rolled up to the steps of the Met earlier this month in – surprise, surprise – a *tasteful* navy blue gown. The theorists at trend forecasting collective K-HOLE have a name for this: tasteslop. 

“Tasteslop,” writes Emily Segal, “is cultural capital after extraction, after it’s been through the blender.” It’s the visible signals of taste, prized out of the very context that gave them meaning, and then redeployed ad hominem – and at scale, algorithmically – until they signify nothing at all. 

Or at least, something that looks like nothing. Like beige.

Aesthetic Anhedonia

In 2004, grayscale cars (white, black, silver, and grey) accounted for 60% of vehicles sold in the USA. By 2023, that figure had climbed to 80%. “If drivers think they’re seeing less colour on the roads these days,” noted an iSeeCars report, “they are.” The rationale here is essentially identical to the beige-fluencer’s: safer resale value, broader appeal, maximum inoffensiveness. 

Nobody’s going to be upset by white, nobody’s confused by grey, they’re chosen specifically because they mean nothing to anybody; they’ll always sell.

Then there are the screens. The visual language of streamers has produced what’s now called “that signature Netflix flatness”: 4K compression, surfaces that are difficult to differentiate, gothic horror that feels like a video game, and action sequences that feel like screensavers. Everything, everywhere, optimized for the widest possible audience, and the least possible friction.

When it comes to lifestyle, Allison P. Davis argues in The Cut, “You can gauge someone’s baseline relationship to pleasure by how they approach a meal.” Voracious eaters, she writes, experience life more fully. The reverse, presumably, also holds. 

Davis then went on a GLP-1 medication and found out exactly this: that her entire inner life had turned beige. “My brain felt swaddled in a beige blanket,” she wrote. She bought a beige sectional. She had no motivation to go on dates. She published a story… and felt nothing. Anhedonia is the medical literature of what happens when you remove desire from a human being. 

It’s also how it feels to be a young person on the internet in 2026.

Horrible things keep happening in our world, but our collective response to them feels disproportionately sanitized. Tasteful. Considered. Outrage has a color palette now, and it is – you guessed it – largely inoffensive. Ethereal Mist. Cashmere Woods. Cloud Dancer. And beige. Lots and lots of beige.

Perhaps the age of the beige-fluencer is ending. Or perhaps we are all, by now, beige-fluenced.