The Aesthetics Wiki is a fandom wiki intended to categorize various ‘aesthetics’, mostly piggy-backing off of CARI and presenting itself in a faux-academic style.

The Aesthetics Wiki is laughably biased and most likely run by really dumb Zoomers.

What do I mean by biased? Politically biased. This becomes obvious after a casual browse, but I can point it out explicitly.

A long time ago (though I don’t remember exactly when), they previously had an article on Fashwave. This article no longer exists, having been relegated to a mere section on this one. But when it was a thing, it had a warning card at the top of the page explaining that the wiki doesn’t support fascism and it’s simply for the sake of documentation.
I have no issues with that, since the aesthetic not only sucked, but promoted a bad ideology.
However, the bias is notable because, in the same time period, they had a few aesthetics related to communism. Those didn’t have any such warning cards.
This pro-communist bent seems to have been amended as both Communist Chic and Nazi Chic feature the warning. Though, notably, the warnings are different between the two of them.

Now, at this point I was gonna go out and say “they fixed this, but here’s this other bias that is present” until I noticed that the bias I had noticed was gone. I’ll note it here anyway.
This past week I was randomly browsing the wiki when I noticed that the Slutcore article didn’t have a warning about sexuality, while Farmer's Daughter did. But now that I’ve checked the page history, I noticed that I must have been hallucinating.
However, then I remembered where I was actually confused, so I’ll lay out the actual instance of bias. I must be building an awful case, but hear me out: Baddie doesn’t have a sexualization disclaimer.
I’ll actually reverse my point regarding the bias here. The wiki seems to be actively identifying and dealing with this, so that’s a point in its favor.

It’s time to move on to the more subtle and actually big problem of bias. The editors clearly subscribe to the SocJus ideology. This is obvious because many of the articles have a criticism section.
See for example Vanilla Girl. Here’s the criticism section copied completely (copied 2025-10-22):

The “Vanilla Girl” aesthetic has faced criticism for enforcing both traditional gender norms and stereotypes, lacking diversity, promoting a narrow beauty standard, along with having unattainable beauty standards, being materialistic and consumerist and lacking authenticity for encouraging a very filtered, curated version of reality.

Granted, this section has a “Citation Needed”, but I have seen similar things written all over the wiki sometimes with citations.
It’s a bit bizarre too, because the aesthetic is completely normal.
This is just pure SocJus language. The reference to ‘traditional gender norms and stereotypes’ and ‘lacking authenticity’ especially. This particular case is strange because it’s exceptionally normal looking. It might be expensive and (in my opinion at least) a bit annoying-looking, but it’s also girls just being girls. The aesthetic was created by (and is primarily driven by) girls. Guys don’t give a damn about it at all. So it’s a bit weird to talk about it reinforcing traditional gender norms.
Though that would get into a whole thing about how SocJus actually hates women and femininity, which is why it desperately and pathetically attacks everything that is even vaguely feminine.
I’m getting distracted.
Another example of such is on the Gyaru article. I like Gyaru, so what criticism is leveled? The following one:

Ganguro and its subcategories are known for their heavy tan, sometimes to the point where outsiders to the subculture claim they are trying to look like a different race, specifically targeting Black people. However, with Ganguro being long past its heyday and almost extinct, having an overly unnatural tan is rarely seen nowadays. There also has been controversy about Gyaru wearing B-Kei fashion as the tanned skin in combination with hip-hop style fashion could be interpreted as cultural appropriation, even though the fashion style is now extremely rare.

I don’t particularly like ganguro personally, but here we see cultural appropriation mentioned. Cultural appropriation is mentioned several times across the wiki. At this point it should probably be considered a ‘dogwhistle’, eh?

There’s always an emphasis on criticizing anything that “reinforces traditional gender roles and stereotypes” and then absolutely no problem with encouraging things like casual sex (labelled as ‘sex-positive’ of course).

Actually, I realized/remembered what it was that initially motivated me to write this: Cottagecore, which is probably one of the most unhinged articles I’ve seen.
You can read it yourself of course, but the gist of it is that it started as an ‘aesthetic’ that was popular among the LGBT,^A;B) but it has since been co-opted by groups like the Tradwives. I don’t really care for either group, but it’s obviously super biased yet again.
The criticism section also mentions ‘Lesbian Desexualization’ which is something I wasn’t even aware of as a concept prior to this.
And, obviously, colonialism and eurocentrism.

This is basically all that I really wanted to mention. Though keep in mind that I dislike the aesthetics wiki for a few more reasons besides bias. Such as them defining aesthetics at all, possible over-categorization (and anachronistic categorization) and an under-categorization (there are waaaay more types of gyaru than just one).
Another thing is…I guess they’re best described as ‘phantom movements’? A lot of what’s on the aesthetics wiki doesn’t really seem to actually exist in real-life as a distinct aesthetic movement. Instead, it’s more like they’re documenting internet trends that appear like aesthetic movements.
Basically…how can we be sure that these aesthetic movements actually exist outside of the confines of obsessed bloggers and terminally-online people who simply stitch together random images and videos that look vaguely related?
I’m implying they need to touch grass because it’s difficult to judge whether a movement exists or not based on social media posts.
Though I’m not saying that none of the ‘aesthetics’ they describe don’t exist as movements or subcultures or whatever (gyaru undeniably exist), just that I get the impression a lot of them don’t.

• Aesthetics Wiki
• A good source of reference images but that’s about it.