Pop Culture Princess // Lauren Conrad's magical melting mascara
and the phrase that fueled a thousand friendly fires
Welcome to Pop Culture Princess, the version of this newsletter that appears at the Last Quarter of each moon cycle, where Addison tugs at a piece of her brain lint and makes you look at it too.
FEEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN!!! Can you feel it? That rush of emotional catharsis Miss Bedingfield unleashes after building anticipation for 48 sunshiney seconds!? That FREEDOM that comes with knowing you’re young, you’re wild, and you have literally never heard of a W-4? Oh my god I miss the early aughts.
Hard to say which tanned 2000s blonde had more of an impact on this song’s ubiquity among millennial teens — Blake Lively as Bridget in “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”, flirtily racing down a Mexican beach with her probably-too-old-to-take-a-17-year-old’s-virginity soccer coach, or Lauren Conrad, reality TV’s darling and damsel, so often in distress.
For those whose time was before or after “The Hills”’s 15 minutes atop the Hollywood sign, the cultural significance of this show and its cast can hardly be overstated. Even if you didn’t spend your Wednesday nights painstakingly watching new episodes clip by clip on MTV’s hilariously shitty online video player, you had to hear about these people constantly — in the tabloids, on the news (“E! News” counts as news in this household), and in every glossy magazine that was giving weird fashion tips and weirder sex advice, unaware that they were about to be utterly decimated by the combined power of a global recession and a photo-sharing app called Instagram.
“The Hills” was one of the first BIG big reality shows that broke through to mainstream America, and its young beautiful stars paid TMZ’s bills long after the devastating reveal of the series finale. Does the name ‘Justin Bobby’ make you feel like your hair needs a wash? Does ‘Les Deux’ trigger wartime flashbacks because YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID? Does the word *looks around nervously* ‘Speidi’ *whispered* send shivers down your spine? You might be entitled to financial compensation in the form of whatever the fuck Spencer Pratt is selling now.
Lauren Conrad was THE It girl in what was arguably the ‘it girl’s most powerful era, and she was probably the one your parents actually approved of. She wasn’t a hard-partying former child star, she wasn’t famous for asking if Walmart sells walls, and she already had a lot of sympathy on her side after the whole Stephen and Kristin debacle from senior year, documented by MTV on “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County”. She was pretty in the way that homecoming queens are pretty, which felt way more real, admirable, and attainable to Middle America than any of the cocaine-chic models stomping downstage at Dior. Lauren was the mid-2000s embodiment of the Americana girl next door ideal — just as long as next door was a coastal mansion in Orange County.
16 years and truly 16 zillion reality shows later, LC maintains a pretty squeaky clean image in the cultural hive mind. Her trouble with boys was certainly part of her hashtag relatable appeal (Jason I will NEVER forgive you for Paris), but the most iconic scenes from the show that have stuck around in the collective consciousness revolve around her friendships, and the specifically painful way that they break.
One of Lauren’s most famous quotes came by way of season 3, at the hands of one of its most notorious villains. And boy did she give us a banger.
Following another public fight with ex-roommate Heidi, the girls get together to sit weirdly far apart on an oversized couch and hurl accusations at each other while managing their bangs. Heidi’s boyfriend, Spencer, is of course The Problem, as he has been for the last three seasons of the show, and will be for three more. After getting absolutely nowhere conversationally, aGAIN, Lauren accepts Heidi’s half-apology and settles the matter once and for all. Well, once and until season five when Heidi crashes Lauren’s boat birthday party in a move critics are still calling, “?????”.
“The only thing really that there is to do is to forgive and forget,” Lauren says matter-of-opinionly. “So I really do; I wanna forgive you,” BA BUM. BA BUM. BA BUM. “…and I wanna forget you.”
OUCH.
On par with J. Biebs's “my mama don’t like you and she likes everyone,” this is undoubtedly a devastating blow. Twisting the age-old adage ‘forgive and forget’ to apply to a whole person instead of a temporary situation, oh man, Miss Montag couldn’t have seen the hit coming! And she wasn’t left with many good moves in response.
“It was great seeing you. The apartment looks great, and, have a *great* life”. I mean. Those were definitely words, too.
At this point, Heidi had more than earned herself a searing burn. But the dissolution of a friendship, no matter how long coming, tends to leave a residue of ash on everyone. And Lauren had more painful encounters with friendly fire coming down the pipe, I’m afraid. And so was everyone else besides Lo >:(
When it comes to the performance of tragedy, is there anything more satisfying than the blackened trail of a mascara tear? Something about a makeup-stained face really makes you hurt for the girlies, whether they’re in the middle of a heartbreaking roommate fight, or fighting for their life because they literally can’t stop lying, even about their hair color.
New York’s most-booed living mayor aside (tbf a highly competitive category), Lauren’s knitted brows and perfectly pretty, sweetly sad face grew into a meme that has survived generations of internet recycling. This iconic moment was plucked from a scene we all know, love, and fucking dread: the roommate fight. You know, the one that starts out tense, high-pitched, and falsely chill, then quickly descends into over-dramatic allegations and shaky voices.
One year and 19 episodes after forgetting Heidi, Lauren and her roommate, Audrina Patridge, are fighting about not enjoying living together with Lo, Lauren’s friend from home, in a literal mansion plus guest house because gosh darnit, they were all too crowded in there! After several failed attempts at a comfortable group hang, Audrina and Lauren sit really far away from each other, as is custom, and discuss how this situation has made them feel perhaps the most painful emotion of all: lame.
“I feel pathetic!” Lauren whimpers about always being the one to extend an invite. “It’s like everyone doesn’t want us to be friends,” Audrina declares, subtweeting Lo into absolute hell. In the middle of the melee, Lauren lets loose a single, blackened, apparently-eyeliner-and-not-mascara tear. The world stops. Adolescent girls across the globe delight in this perfect expression of young female agony. Pinterest sad girl boards are never the same.
After a lot of eyelash fluttering and feeling left out Left Out LEFT OUT, the girls agree to forgive, forget, and move on together. The fighting-with-your-friends knot in everyone’s stomachs loosens, and this one ends in ‘let’s try again’. But the next one ends with Audrina moving out. Because growing apart comes with growing pains.
I think this friendship death hurts a lot more than Heidi’s; at least with Heidi there was someone to hate, a righteousness to cling to, and a vicious rumor to stand on. The fight with Audrina hinges on the agony of neglect, the mutual sensation that neither of them cares about being friends anymore, or that they don’t care enough to fix it. That specific kind of ‘we’re adults now and have to maintain our own relationships and this one isn’t convenient enough for my otherwise very convenient life’ rejection suh-tings! The agony of growing apart, and not noticing until it’s too late, is such an achingly adult issue, mostly because you’ve finally lived long enough to let it happen.
We have so much turn-of-the-millennium culture to thank these LA lounge-abouts for. Hervé Legér bandage dresses. The modern advent of impeccable winged eyeliner. A headband plague that was more contagious than COVID. Fur vests in Southern California. A not-so-subtle Emily Weiss villain cameo. An extremely subtle Emily Schuman cameo, eventual IRL villain. ….fedoras…. The fucking barrel curls, which were actually an act of government-funded relief from straightening our hair to the edge of physical and psychological suffering. Wearing psychotically high heels with every single outfit, like swimsuits, and even (especially, almost) as an intern assisting on a photoshoot or runway show, where agility is actually of some concern. Gigantic sunglasses, ideally paired with brimmed beanies and aforementioned gravity-defying straightened locks.
And of course, some truly insane spiky hair moments from the men. Maybe we can just blame this one on Ryan Cabrera.
Praise be to LC for giving straight girls everywhere an innocuous celebrity to defend in their high school newspaper OpEd, as well as a fashion icon to religiously imitate when getting dressed for a Friday night football game, long before anyone had ever uttered the words #forthegram. We don’t need to forgive her, and we could literally never forget.
I’ll leave you now with A Good Tweet that directly contradicts one of my previous statements.
Because honey, 🎵 Drench yourself in words unspoken, live your life with arms wide open. Today is where your book begins — the rest is still unwritten 🎵
xoxo and a really strong makeup wipe,
Addison