What is ‘whimsymaxxing’? Get to know the new internet trend about the joys of doing a little too much

SINGAPORE – From colourful make-up and bedazzled keepsakes to playful food and personalised bedrooms, young people are finding new ways to bring more colour and joy into the everyday.

For years, the prevailing idea of a well-curated life has been one of restraint: clean lines, neutral colours, polished routines and the appearance of effortless perfection.

Now, a growing number of young people are finding appeal in the opposite – in things that are colourful, nostalgic, deliberately excessive and, above all, fun.

Online, this desire to make daily life feel a little more playful has been given a name: “whimsymaxxing”.

At its simplest, whimsymaxxing is the deliberate pursuit of whimsy in everyday life – adding playful, colourful or unexpected touches to ordinary routines and surroundings simply because they bring joy. It is less about practicality or following a particular aesthetic than about making mundane experiences feel more personal and fun.

The viral internet trend has emerged alongside a wider return to maximalism, nostalgia and childlike play, particularly among youth looking for ways to inject personality into their everyday lives.

Pinterest’s 2026 trend report highlighted increasingly playful visual trends across fashion, beauty and interiors, reflecting an appetite for aesthetics that are less restrained and more individual.

Google Trends data suggests that the language around the trend is still nascent, although worldwide search interest for “whimsy” reached a peak Google interest score of 100 in July and September.

While “whimsymaxxing” remained a niche search term, “bedazzling” showed a steady rise in relative search interest through 2026, suggesting growing curiosity around one of the more visible behaviours associated with the trend.

New York-based youth culture research company YPulse linked the interest in whimsy to a broader Gen Z desire to romanticise ordinary moments and find small forms of joy within experiences they can control. In a series of 2026 articles, it described the movement as part of a wider shift towards finding delight in everyday life, rather than waiting for special occasions.

Samer Elhajjar, senior lecturer of marketing at the National University of Singapore, says the appeal comes partly from living in a time when young people are constantly encouraged to be productive, polished and efficient.

Economic anxiety, climate concerns, geopolitical uncertainty and the pressure to perform online can make adulthood feel increasingly serious, he says. Against that backdrop, doing something colourful or impractical can be a way of reclaiming play.

“Wearing something colourful, decorating your room like a childhood fantasy or carrying a silly accessory can almost become a small act of resistance,” he says. “Not everything has to be productive, sophisticated or even make sense.”

Elhajjar says whimsy can also be more than simple escapism. Everyday consumption can help people create moments of comfort, confidence, hope and connection, particularly when larger aspects of life feel difficult to control.

In such moments, people may instead focus on the things within reach – their clothes, bedroom, desk, phone or daily rituals – to change what he calls the “emotional texture” of an ordinary day.

“Whimsymaxxing allows people to build small pockets of joy within environments that can otherwise feel quite demanding. You may not be able to control the economy, the algorithm or what happens tomorrow, but you can control what your little corner of the world feels like today.”

Self-expression in front of an audience

Social media has helped accelerate this process by giving people a vocabulary for behaviours that may already have existed.

Elhajjar says: “Someone likes colourful charms, another person decorates his or her desk with toys, someone else wears cartoon-inspired clothes. Then TikTok gives all of that a name like ‘whimsymaxxing’.”

Once a behaviour is named, he adds, people can search for it, imitate it, remix it and find others who share the same interest.

The same platforms can also turn an individual preference into a recognisable trend, creating tension between self-expression and online conformity.

The boundary between “this is who I am” and “this is how I want to be seen” becomes difficult to separate, Elhajjar says. “The question is no longer whether an online identity is authentic or curated. It is whether people still feel that they are the authors of that identity or whether the algorithm, the audience and the trend cycle are increasingly co-authoring it with them.”

On the interest in nostalgic and childlike aesthetics as part of whimsy, he notes that there is a broader shift away from the idea that adulthood has to look serious.

“Previous generations often used consumption to signal that they had ‘grown up’: the right watch, suit, car or handbag.

“Some younger consumers are doing almost the opposite – reclaiming things associated with childhood and giving themselves permission to enjoy them as adults.”

The ways young people bring whimsy into their lives may differ, but the impulse is much the same: to make the everyday feel more colourful, playful and personal.

The Straits Times examines how this shows up in four ways: the things they own, the food they eat, the spaces they live in and the way they present themselves.

1. Belongings

This early-2000s fad is back. Bedazzling objects with rhinestones, gems or other sparkly embellishments is one of the more literal ways young people are embracing whimsymaxxing.

The appeal lies in taking something ordinary and adding a playful flourish: A plain phone case becomes covered in gems, a coffee cup gets a little sparkle or a keepsake is transformed into something more personal.

The object may serve the same purpose, but the extra effort changes how it looks and, for some, how they feel about using it.

The rhinestone revival had already been gathering momentum, drawing on the nostalgia of 2000s fashion and a broader appetite for colour and maximalism.

In August 2026, social media personality Kylie Jenner helped propel interest after posting images from her Princess Kitty-themed 29th birthday celebration, where even her birthday cake was covered in sparkling gems. The images circulated online and became fodder for content creators to put rhinestones on everything from cups to phone cases to beauty products.

Since then, the sparkle has spread beyond Jenner, with celebrities such as Dua Lipa, Zara Larsson and Sabrina Carpenter sporting bedazzled looks of their own.

For 19-year-old Nanyang Polytechnic student Zahira Jahan, who discovered bedazzling through TikTok in May, the appeal lay in a small act of personalisation.

She had always been drawn to sparkly things, but seeing people transform otherwise plain objects gave her an outlet to experiment with colour and texture.

Her first project was a clear notebook for keeping photo strips of her friends and family. The photographs already held memories, but covering the book in rhinestones made the keepsake feel even more personal, turning a simple album into something that reflected her taste and represented the people she cared about.

She has since decorated about 11 items, including her keys, a figurine, a jewellery box and a mini storage container. Her supplies – gems, rhinestones and tools – are purchased from Shopee, and she has spent about $17 on the hobby so far.

“I just love sparkles. They make something ordinary or simple feel so much more fun and personal,” she says. “It makes me happier because I enjoy the process of turning something plain into something more colourful and fun. I would not really say it makes me more confident, but I think it makes the things around me feel more personal and more like my own taste.”

She would still decorate her belongings even if nobody else saw them.

“I do it because it makes me happy, not because I need other people to like it,” she says. “I would probably say that it is unnecessary, but that is kind of the point. Not everything you do has to be practical or necessary.”

2. Food

Food has become another avenue for whimsy.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic student Kaiser Ali Mohammed Suhail enjoys adding sprinkles to drinks, arranging toppings into patterns and using shaped cutters to turn bread into hearts or stars.

The few extra minutes spent choosing colours, arranging decorations or deciding on a shape turns a routine snack into something more deliberate – and is part of the fun of eating, he says.

The 19-year-old enjoys seeing how the finished food looks, even when the decoration takes longer than the eating itself.

“It is unnecessary – that’s exactly why I like it,” he says.

For him, the extra effort is part of the experience. “It makes food more enjoyable because I put myself into it,” he says.

There is also a nostalgic element to his food play.

A shape cutter that he uses is about 100 years old and was used by his great-grandmother when she was a child.

That connection to childhood is part of why decorating food is meaningful to him. He grew up enjoying the idea of making ordinary food look different through colours and shapes, and the old cutter allows him to continue something that began generations before him.

“I’m not just decorating food. I’m also keeping a little part of my childhood alive,” he adds.

It is less about presenting an elaborate meal than it is about making the process of eating feel playful. “Sometimes people might wonder why I spend five minutes arranging sprinkles,” he says. “I learnt that something doesn’t have to be useful to be meaningful.”

3. Home decor

If millennials embraced minimalism and what has been dubbed “sad beige”, Gen Zs are going the other way. Maximalism and dopamine decor – a style of home decorating centred on colour, playful details and personal objects chosen for the pleasure they bring – have been on the rise, in a departure from more polished aesthetics.

For 14-year-old Dsaif Idris Djohan Arief, whimsy begins with the spaces around him.

His bedroom contains the things he likes most, particularly his collection of 1/64 die-cast cars. These miniature replicas fill empty spaces on his desk and pegboards, creating a shrine of cars in his compact bedroom.

He gets joy not from a particular palette or matching furniture, but from seeing the things that excite him around his room. Among them are cars with distinctive liveries and racing cars, including models inspired by cars that have won real-life races.

Dsaif likes that these make visitors look twice. Some of the pieces can also be expensive – for example, a DGK R34 which cost $60 – and the Secondary 2 student trawls Facebook Marketplace and Carousell for pre-loved models. His father Djohan Arief Cheani has spent more than $5,000 on the entire collection.

“I feel that all the empty spaces around us are like a canvas and you are the artist,” says Dsaif. “You can fill it with whatever you like. No one can judge you. At the end of the day, you want to retreat to your space – you might as well fill it according to your taste.”

The idea of the bedroom as a personal canvas captures another side of whimsymaxxing: The pleasure does not come from making a space conventionally beautiful so much as making it unmistakably one’s own. Dsaif’s cars reflect his interest in speed, engineering and adventure, and searching for new pieces is part of the hobby.

It is also somewhere to retreat to after school. He says looking at his collection helps him unwind from the stresses of being a student, and he enjoys looking for new models through online communities.

Although he does not have a social media account to showcase his collection, he browses YouTube Shorts and TikTok for inspiration on what to buy. Friends and relatives sometimes send him listings when they come across cars they think he might like.

He adds that he likes it when visitors become curious about the cars, because these are conversation starters and a way for people to get to know him.

“I feel like I’m in my element,” he says. “I believe all these items represent me as a person.”

Make-up

Clothing choices and make-up offer another way for young people to introduce whimsy into an otherwise ordinary day.

The temporary nature of make-up makes it particularly suited to experimentation. Bright eyeshadow, glitter, unconventional colour combinations and dramatic looks express personality and can be washed away at the end of the day.

For Republic Polytechnic student Hadhirah Insyirah Alfie Fadzil, her face is her canvas.

She once wore bright teal eyeshadow to a job interview and briefly considered wiping it off before going in. Instead, the interviewer complimented her eyeshadow. She did not get the job, but the moment did not discourage her from experimenting with colour.

“I felt really pretty that day, and I loved tying my outfits together with my make-up,” the 18-year-old says.

She regularly wears bright and unconventional eyeshadow combinations nowadays, including teal, hot pink, glitter and other colours and textures that might be considered too bold for an everyday look.

She has also experimented with face gems and other decorative elements, treating make-up less as a way to achieve a polished, conventional appearance and more as an opportunity to play with colour and texture.

“I do not know how to do a ‘clean girl’ look, but give me a rainbow palette and an hour, and I can give you a creative look in no time. I love a full beat,” she says.

The process itself is part of the appeal, says Hadhirah, who started experimenting with make-up during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The hours she spends experimenting are part of the enjoyment, whether or not the final look is seen in public. She wears her colourful looks to school and work, but has also accumulated hundreds of private videos of her make-up looks on TikTok.

While social media remains an important source of inspiration for Hadhirah, she does not want the internet to dictate what she enjoys.

“I genuinely do it for the love of the game,” she says. “I want to stay true to myself, even if what I like is no longer viral.”