Gyaru

ギャル(Gal) are a Japanese subculture that I have taken an unusual interest in. It all started with one thing, then another and the next thing I know, I’m looking at makeup tutorials.

My first experience with gyaru was, how most Westerners encounter them, through anime and…the other one. My reaction to them was mostly neutral though…as in, it didn’t really lead anywhere.
I thought it was weird, but kinda interesting. But I’d gradually learn more…not through anime, but through Wikipedia of all things.
Since I didn’t know what gyaru were, I looked it up. From there, I found out ‘wow, there’s more to this than expected’…but then I found Gyaru-Moji, and that’s where my brain went ‘wait, what’.
But then I got into ParaPara. I think it started through Eurobeat. I kept looking for more and then started hearing weird references. Then I got recommended ParaPara…and that’s where it all went downhill.
From ParaPara, I started looking into the rest of the subculture and, well, here we are, today.

• Galture (ギャルチャー)
  • I found this by chance one day and I’ll be using it as my semi-primary source. I do, surprisingly, have some papers and books saved somewhere about Gyaru, but this seems relatively trustworthy.
  • Something I’ll say is that I was planning to make this article earlier, relying on this…but, well, it was in Japanese-only. My Japanese is not good enough to read this stuff. However, after checking it recently, I found that…it’s now also available in English. Nice.
• There is an English Fandom wiki on Gyaru, but I haven’t really considered looking at it too deeply…I’m just assuming it’s not reliable.