🧴🇸🇪 Cultural Laundering, Nordic Edition. Now in Shade 10N
🔥 RSO™ Entry 003 - Cosmetic cosplay, loyalty-card nationalism, and the myth of effortless whiteness.
This piece adopts a polemical essay with satirical edges in an academic(ish) voice, to expose the aesthetic absurdities through which ideology sustains itself. The format echoes the structure of a scholarly essay: scene, history, turn, conclusion. But the tone? That’s intentionally deviant. This is not peer-reviewed politeness. I’m not seeking approval. It is cultural critique by incision.
Not politeness. Not ‘just an opinion’. Not feedback to file and forget.
None of that shit ever dismantled a myth. It just preserves it with better manners.If you want neutrality, try IKEA.
If you want truth in packaging, check your toner bottle.
Journal prompt: One tiny ritual that gave away a bigger lie.
Phenotype Cosplay in Practice.
Sweden is not a land of golden genes. It’s peroxide cosplay: national branding by bottle, myth by maintenance.
Today in Stockholm.
Well, technically, I jotted the foundations months ago, live in the café. But today stays. Because that’s how the entry arrived: immediate, unfiltered. I can knock out the skeleton of an essay in a day; the longer part is sharpening the blade. Refinement is later. Integrity is now.
Anyway, I overheard a café conversation that deserves a goddamn medal for mental gymnastics. Ideally, it belongs on BBC Four as tragicomedy, slipped in after the shipping forecast.
Three women: one American, one Swedish, and one mystery who kept schtum the entire time. All sitting at the same table, laptops out, notepads flicked, brittle ping of awkward small talk. They didn’t seem like mates. Not colleagues either. It gave very first-year seminar; one of those cursed projects no one asked for.
We got lumped together on a group project and now we are stuck with each other until the deadline finishes us off.
I always sit with headphones in; usually not on. Perfect camouflage. Look zoned out, zero situational awareness, harmless furniture in the corner — people drop their guard. They talk like no one’s listening. Which, of course, I am.
And itʼs always the ones in their: ‘Iʼm the only one who exists’ bubbles that spill the goods.
At one point, the American, polite as anything, ask’s: ‘Why do so many people dye their hair blond?’
Totally fair. There’s hardly any true blonds here. Plenty of peroxide Wish-Barbie cosplay passed off as heritage. Just rows of lookalikes; copy-pasted from some state-approved aesthetic prototype rolled out for mass consumption.
The Swede kinda froze, like she was buffering, scrolling for the right line in her Kool-Aid-approved internal script. The same lag-face you see in call centres when the system freezes. Her face twitched into stinkface, like the American had farted directly into her latte and asked if she liked the flavour.
And in the most earnest tone imaginable, she replied: ‘Because Swedish people are blond’.
My eyes betrayed me. I had to look. I have heard some pathetic shit in my time, but this was gold-medal tier.
That’s not just embarrassing. That’s ritual maintenance of an aesthetic doctrine. A quiet, collective lie that should’ve been buried with 20th-century racial science, but now? It’s dyed, dried, and deep-conditioned every six weeks.
The myth? That Swedes are blond by nature. That phenotype is essence, not artifice.