If you’ve recently been on TikTok, there is a high chance you’ve seen people post a quick video talking about their partner’s “beige flags” with elevator music in the background. This trend has amassed over 570 million cumulative views for the hashtag #beigeflag.
If manifestation was an early 2023 trend, categorizing people based on flag colors seems to be the new phenomenon.
Now you might be quite familiar with the red or green flag expression (representing if something is amiss or good with someone); what even is a beige flag? Well, our good friend Urban Dictionary defines it as something that’s neither good nor bad but makes you pause for a minute when you notice it and then you just continue on.
An example would be a TikToker sharing that his girlfriend’s beige flag is “that she is never at 100% health. It’s always “I’ve got a headache” or “my stomach hurts” or “my left pinky toe is aching.” Never is there not a health issue of some sort.” And the comment section is where things get interesting as viewers actively share how the beige flag is actually a ‘green flag’ or even a ‘red flag’ to them.
What we are seeing with this new trend is actually an extension of the new social phenomenon of more people discussing their love lives online. With the rise of dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge, as well as COVID-19, many of our communications relating to dating to marriage had to be shifted from being in-person to being online. Instead of meeting up with the girls at a cafe and ranting about a bad date, nowadays, people are posting their experiences and stories on TikTok and gaining comfort from the viewers and comments.
With this trend going viral, the definition of a beige flag has significantly expanded. And how people connect with a character can be incredibly random. So we must interpret it with caution and take it as light-hearted content and at the end of the day, trust that our intuition will let us know if the need to run or trust the other party. However, we won’t be seeing any scarcity of content relating to love life on social media platforms anytime soon. What do you think will be the next flag color that will be associated with the people we date? Purple flag?