Sad Beige Children

About

Sad Beige Children refers to a series of humorous TikToks that ridicule the parenting trend of restricting children to living in the home environment of beige and other pastel colors that appeal to the child's parents rather than the child themselves. Spawned and propagated by comedian Hayley DeRoche, the parody trend achieved virality on TikTok in 2022.

Origin

On September 25th, 2021, TikToker^[1] Hayley DeRoche (@sadbeige) uploaded a video in which she reviewed a set of stacking cups of dull pastel colors. The video, in which DeRoche reviewed the cups in the voice of German filmmaker William Herzog, known for his bleak aesthetic, received over 1.4 million views and 163,000 likes on TikTok in two years (shown below).

This is a new line of toys by Werner Herzog.

Spread

In the following year, DeRoche posted multiple sequel videos to her TikTok and Instagram. In the videos, she reviewed various toys and clothing of the same aesthetic, which she referred to as "sad beige children" and "sad beige babies" (examples shown below).^[2][3]

Following the virality of DeRoche's "sad beige children" videos, other users on TikTok joined in on the joke, also posting videos critical of the beige aesthetic. For example, on June 19th, 2022, TikToker^[4] makenzieathome posted a video that received over 88,200 likes in one year (shown below, left). On September 17th, TikToker^[5] lillianotero posted a video that garnered over 365,000 likes in a similar timeframe (shown below, right).

In 2022 and 2023, articles about the "sad beige children" TikTok trend were published in HuffPost,^[6] The Guardian^[7] and Cheezburger.^[8] As of July 17th, 2023, @sadbeige had over 295,100 followers on TikTok and over 348,000 followers on Instagram.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References