Years ago, my girlfriend and I went to Woodstock for Valentine’s Day.

We Airbnb’d a room in the house of a former Waldorf teacher who had a cat named Missy Elliot. Next to the house there was a fire station, and outside the fire station there was a sign advertising a Valentine’s Day pancake breakfast fundraiser.

On Valentine’s Day morning, we made our way across the yard and entered the firehouse’s main room. Round, collapsible tables were set with plastic tablecloths and red carnations. Square collapsible tables held silver trays of pancakes, hash browns, sausages, and the kind of scrambled eggs with hard edges where the spatula cut them out from the pan. We helped ourselves to tea and coffee from pitchers labeled with sharpie on masking tape. “I love stuff like this,” I said. “This is like, my favorite vibe.” But what is the “vibe” of a firehouse pancake breakfast? I didn’t know it then, but I was trying to describe a rare aesthetic.

What Are Rare Aesthetics?

The first rare aesthetic TikTok I saw was from user @badgergirlie. (Rare aesthetics are not exclusive to TikTok, but that is where I encountered them.) In the video, badgergirlie blinks in bed, under the words “EXTREMELY RARE AESTHETIC,” then, “middle school basketball practice at local elementary school on a winter night.”

It’s mostly flashing images: cars on a road at night as seen through an icy windshield; accumulations of dirty snow on a curb, also at night; the facade of a low, long building with yellow light inside, hallways with murals and drinking fountains in two different heights; a gym with primary colored padding on the walls. Immediately, I sent the video to my brother, who responded, “I can feel, hear, and smell that TikTok.”

Rare aesthetic TikToks have evolved over time, but in the last few months, this is what they’ve become: series of images meant to elicit certain feelings or memories. They tend to speak to white, suburban, upper-middle class experiences, but not always. Many use the same audio, from the song “Crimewave” by Crystal Castles—a few vibey, trancey measures that, unlike many TikTok anthems, are impossible to sing because the chords don’t reveal a clear melodic line. The music feels like it could loop forever, and, having listened to the whole song, that is pretty much true.

Often, rare aesthetics are nostalgic. Many of the most popular videos evoke experiences of being a child, like showering at your cousin’s house or being the last kid to get picked up from daycare. Here, rare aesthetics overlap with the “deep memories” trend, which presents you with images of things you probably don’t remember—until you see them. I’m sure that nostalgia plays into my own rare aesthetic, which I’ll go ahead and call firehouse pancake breakfast-core, too. I grew up in a small town and, when my dad was traveling for work, my mom would take my brother and me to church spaghetti dinners to spare herself a night of cooking.

My brother’s reaction to the basketball practice TikTok—that he could feel, hear, and smell it—is a refrain in the comment sections of these videos. And TikTok users have gotten good at choosing images that trigger powerful sensory memories. Many rare aesthetics include pictures of wet hair or goosebumps. One user I spoke with, Sophie, had the idea for her first rare aesthetic when she put on perfume and her brother said she smelled like a Spanish teacher.

“I was like, I know exactly what you mean,” she said. She and her brother brainstormed other things they associated with Spanish teachers: They “dressed very similarly but like really nice and smelled really good and had, like, really nice hair.” It turns out, a lot of other people had those associations too.

On TikTok, the phrase “rare aesthetic” was initially used to describe stylistic camps, like e-girl and e-boy, dark academia, and everyone’s favorite 2020 breakout star, cottagecore. In early 2020, users posted collections of images meant to introduce their followers to new, “rare” aesthetics: the tiered dresses and Thomas Kinkade lighting of cottagecore, the Crayola palette and old-school smiley face motifs of kidcore.

This expression of rare aesthetics is what prompted things like this Buzzfeed quiz, where I was faced with the dizzying question, “Which Macaulay speaks to your inner Culkincore?” It’s more of a classic teenage classification system—greasers, freaks, jocks, preps, emo kids, VSCO girls—and on and on.

As the trend morphed, it became both more specific (According to Know Your Meme, one of the earliest examples of this hyper-specific usage was Rare Aesthetic: Redneck Karencore) and broader in its definition of aesthetic. These new, less literal rare aesthetics feature observational humor in the tradition of starter pack memes and SNL under Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider. They have layers of irony, but they also skew personal, even confessional. You may be a VSCO girl now, but you were once the last kid to be picked up from daycare.

While I interpreted these new rare aesthetics as ironic, Peyton, a prolific rare aesthetic poster, saw them differently.

“If you look at any fashion trend or music trend, there’s always going to be subgenres,” she said. “Let’s say there’s like ten genres of aesthetics, you know, a lot of people might not feel like they fit into one of those and maybe they feel more comfortable with something that’s a little more specific.”

Rare Aesthetics in Quarantine

I love the idea that within cottagecore is honeycore (this one’s real) and within honeycore is bisexual hydroponic gardencore (that one I made up, but I’m also sure it exists), and if you keep going, eventually you get to middle school basketball practice at local elementary school on a winter night. In the end, the aesthetic is so specific, it’s just your experience. It’s just you.

Every rare aesthetic TikTok user I spoke with said that the key to a great rare aesthetic is to make it super-specific, but still relatable. My favorite of Peyton’s is “Quiet girl in orchestra who shared their notes & would ask if she can draw you.”

How is it that we all knew one of these girls and they all had the same glasses? When I asked Peyton why she thinks people love rare aesthetics, she said it’s because they’re creepy. There’s something disconcerting about realizing a memory you thought was yours alone is shared by hundreds of thousands of TikTok users. It reminds me of this comic (rare aesthetic: me in middle school checking xkcd every day).

For Peyton, though, that experience can also be comforting. She said that she is often inspired to make a rare aesthetic when she has a feeling that she can’t express in words. Then, thousands of people comment that they’ve felt the same thing.

Sophie said that even if she hasn’t experienced a rare aesthetic herself, the videos are so visceral that they make her feel as though she has.

“I saw this one that was like, visiting your dad at prison…which I personally can’t relate to, but I thought it was so funny. And like I understood it. I was like…I feel like I’ve done it now.”

The thing about rare aesthetics is that they aren’t rare at all. Eating at a hotel buffet. The last day of school before summer break. But when was the last time you stayed at a hotel? When was the last time you ate at a buffet? Did you clean out your locker at the end of the last school year or did you close a Zoom window?

In quarantine, anything normal is a rare aesthetic: hugging a friend, going to a movie, sharing a dessert. I even find myself lusting after the textures in these videos—the carpet swatches and linoleum and chain-link fences. When was the last time I felt a new kind of surface?

There are already early quarantine rare aesthetics, and there will be rare aesthetics of this whole awful time, whether in TikTok video form or not. I try to guess what the headlines will be when it’s over—the takes, the tell-alls; the plays and novels and movies made in ten years or twenty.

There will be a collective memory of the pandemic, but each person’s experience is also painfully singular. Those who are lucky enough to survive will remember singularities: Our roommates screeching at the TV every time a COVID-themed ad interrupted our desperate Drag Race distraction watch. Carrying a towel up to the roof each day of April for some fresh air, spreading it out, waiting for the sun to heat it up. The way grief brought back old anxieties and made us hate our teeth.

In On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin wrote, “A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” Then, “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

My girlfriend and I moved in together a few months ago. We’re both working from home and we see other people only masked and outside. Here is what I dream about: We’re at work, at our separate jobs. We text throughout the day: something funny my coworker said, a picture of her lunch. We both have evening plans; it’s her coworkers birthday and I’m meeting friends at a comedy show. My thing goes later than expected. On the long subway ride home, I blink at my phone, trying to stay awake. She’s been back for a few hours and is waiting for me. I missed her. Rare aesthetic.