5 things I learned thanks to being Gyaru for many years | The Name I Love

Hi, gals! ♡ The last months have been pretty overwhelming in social media, the gal community (j-fashion comm in general let me say), me organizing the Gyaru 109 Month and personal / work life don’t help at all, so I decided to have a moment of reflexion to rest my mind and take a break before keep going on. That’s why today I want to share with you:

I’ve been Gyaru since 8 years ago, however I discovered the style 13 years ago and since then I decided that’s what I wanted for me. However at that moment I wasn’t in the ideal moment of my life to start in the style, so the firsts years I did my best researching, practicing my makeup and learning more about j-fashion communities, so I could start 100% once I could afford it and I was independent enough to freely take my own decisions. And looking back, waiting for the right moment to actually be gal was a great decision I made.

Since then I’ve been learning and growing a lot. Specially having now Gyaru as my lifestyle. That’s why I want to share with you a few things I’ve learned during this journey so maybe you can have a smoother one.

1. Your mental health should always go first.

I know this is SUPER obvious, yet one of the most difficult things to achieve and I still work on that every day of my life.
Do not compare yourself to other gals.
We all have different journeys and starting points. We have cultures, countries and by default, economies. I’ve seen gals with hard feelings (mostly towards their own selves) because they want to be like the gals they admire the most or because they don’t understand why if they’re putting so much effort, they haven’t achieved “as much as” other gals. So in those cases I remind myself, no nobody is going to live my Gyaru life the way I do and I have no reason to compare myself to others.

You don’t need to have all SNS.
This goes to gals like me who are also content creators. We don’t have to be everywhere. Creating content actively takes a lot of time and there’s a point where there’s so many things we want to do that our hobby becomes a whole responsibility. This gets worse when we see gals on all platforms and we want to be there! But we don’t need to. We only need platforms that makes us truly happy.

Blogging can help you to channel your feelings.
And that’s why I’m writing this blog post. I think I write better than how I speak because I can take the time to think, organize my ideas and do it the best way possible. And that also helps me to think deeper about what I feel and what I want to exteriorize. I really hope I can keep writing more personal blog posts in the future.

Numbers don’t define your value (and the opinion from others either).
I really wish this was more talked about in the community. I’ve seen so many gals overwhelmed and down because of their numbers and the opinions of others. Gyaru is all about being unapologetically ourselves, don’t giving a f*ck about what others have to say about us. So we need to remind ourselves that social media is there for us to use it and have fun, otherwise social media will end up playing games in our heads.

I can definitely say after working on all those things above, my anxiety has gone considerably down and I’m happier and more positive in the gal comm. I honestly don’t like to point at others saying all the bad things they do on Twitter, but learning from that. Don’t take it personal, but take it as an opportunity to learn and share those learnings with others.

This is something I didn’t notice until not so long ago. I started Gyaru as a way to connect better with myself. As a way to love myself and feel confident in my skin. For me Gyaru was a process of acceptance but it’s also a process of deconstruction and breaking with all those social constructs I never noticed I got and lived with. However, recently I understood it could be the complete opposite for other gals. Gal is also a escape for people who can’t handle their lives and/or themselves.Today I was talking with a friend about how lucky I’ve been to have the freedom to be myself everywhere I go. I can just be Gyaru 24/7 because everything in my life is related to it. But there are gals who need to separate things. So saying “live the Gyaru life” is not as easy for everyone. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I truly believe this. I constantly see gal vets mad a baby gals for not trying hard enough, for having an slow progress, for simply not being good enough. But honestly, I don’t understand why someone would take that personally and get mad. They’re not there trying to be Gyaru to please us.

Same the way around, we do our best to share relevant and reliable information to help, because we love the style and we love to share all the things we learned. But it’s not our responsibility to educate them. And if we’re going to share all that should be with kindness because nobody asked us to do that. We create educational content because we want to. And that ‘s it.

This is another thing we all need to humble down. There’s not one specific correct way to live a Gyaru life. Gyaru includes a lot of different things that can impact in different aspects of our lives, and we all decide which ones we enjoy the most, which ones match our lifestyles or which ones we are good at. Some gals don’t dance Para Para because that’s not their cup of tea, just like I don’t like Gyaru music. Ok, I said it. I don’t like Gyaru music. Aaaah. I love dancing Para Para but I don’t enjoy listening to Eurobeat. It gives me headaches. Lol. And the last point, which is really important to me is educating ourselves and being empathetic is basic to have a healthy community and connect with others. I made a video about things that can fall into classism in Gyaru (and any other subculture or alternative style) because it’s important to help others understand other people’s struggles instead of doing it from our privilege. Just like it’s really important to not idealize Gyaru as if that was perfect and every single gal in Japan was an idol. No. Japan just like any other country has tons of flaws and we can see many of them in Gyaru, so we should be conscious enough to not replicate those behaviours.And also understand that now we have way more education and knowledge than gals in the 90s – 00s, so if we have the opportunity to do it better, that’s what we should be doing. (And this goes especially with the heavy tans discussion).

Same with the fact that Gyaru goes against traditional standards for women, but I’m not sure if most gals have made the exercise of thinking if they’re actually breaking the standards of their own cultures or in fact they’re just following their current trends and beauty standards. Because we don’t live in Japan, the fights of Japanese gals are not ours to fight, but to support.

What do you think?

I know this blog post has been more intense than others, but I really wanted to talk about these topics and I plan to go deeper on them little by little, now and then. I had all this on my chest, stuck here so I wanted to organize my ideas. I’m also educating myself a lot and I have the blessing of talking to many gals so I’m learning a lot about them.

See you on the next blog post! (´｡• ω •｡`)