You’re seated at a restaurant with a friend, and behind them is a mirror. Your own reflection taunts you throughout the meal (you’re dressed up, you look nice), and you give in to it occasionally: to straighten your collar, fix your hair, check your teeth. You don’t really need to do these things—usually, you wouldn’t have the chance—but they allow you to admire yourself under the cover of utility. Better to be caught tending to your hygiene, even compulsively, than reveling in our own image.
This is second-order vanity. The term was coined by David Foster Wallace, in his 1987 novel The Broom of the System. “A vain person is concerned that people not perceive him as stupid, or dull, or ugly, et cetera et cetera,” his character explains—that’s first-order vain (the classic). “Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain.”
The aims of the second-order vain are ambitious: to both impress and skirt the appearance of trying to impress. The successful second-order vain person wins twice. The sloppy second-order vain person comes off pretentious, controlling, or dense. They’re humble bragging, they’re not-so-subtly begging for compliments, they’re calling themselves nerds in their stunning Architectural Digest tours. The quintessential second-order vain person, to me, is Woody Allen. A man who is, of course, vain at his core, but defined more so by his neurotic relationship with said vanity, and the performed modesty it’s produced.
I will confess right away to at times being both vain and second-order vain. For millennials, developing second-order vanity was basically a teenage rite of passage. The quintessential love song or romcom of the aughts was about a girl who was beautiful, smart, and funny but didn’t know it. This was the birth of the manic pixie dream girl (and honestly, boy), whom you might call the icon of the second-order vain. I’m not sure the MPDG will ever truly die, but she’s been overshadowed by a new figure—one more suited to the social-media era. One who is not first- or second-order vain, but, per my own theory, third.
I define third-order vanity not by performed modesty but by performed confidence. Think of the influencer who pouts casually for 30 versions of the same photo, edits every pixel of the chosen image, then tortures a caption about feeling hot before posting it. Now, this distinction could just be a matter of taste—some prefer to come off bashful, others unbothered—I’m open to that possibility. But I suspect the rise of self-conscious confidence is actually a reaction to the fall of self-conscious modesty, which became corny and over-exposed over time. It’s the arc of Kylie Jenner denying she had her lips done to becoming a billionaire off selling lip kits; or denying she’s had plastic surgery to sharing the exact details of her boob job. False modesty could only work for so long on social media, where it’s hard to avoid the appearance of “trying.” After all, you’re always the one who tapped Post.
Third-order vanity attempts to own this inescapable fact, albeit self-consciously. There are of course genuinely confident people—these are the ones the third-order vain are imitating, successfully or not. What’s important to the third-order vain is that they’re avoiding the pitfalls of the second-order vain, who refuse to admit just how hard they’re trying. The irony is that the third-order vain are trying too, just to achieve different ends. Think of the insecure straight guy who’s publicly homophobic to project masculinity (second-order) versus the insecure straight guy who publicly queerbaits because he knows it will make him seem even more confident in his sexuality than the homophobic guy (third-order). It would make sense to say that, despite appearances, third-order vanity ratchets up the neuroticism, rather than quiets it down. But what I find most interesting about third-order vanity is that often its most prolific purveyors seem so lost in their role that they’re almost unaware they’re performing at all.
Here is where I must confess that this theory was inspired by someone specific. Her name is Huda. She was a contestant on the latest season of Love Island USA (that is, season seven). And yes, I did read this 700-word breakdown of her by a woman named Tiffany Sullivan on a Facebook Group titled “LORT! Love of Reality TV,” which has over 300k members—for research.1 But Tiffany didn’t really get into Huda’s third-order brand of vanity, eloquent as she was, so I must plunge ahead on my own.
I’ll spare non-Love Island viewers by keeping this high-level: Huda rose to viral fame by displaying erratic and manipulative behavior on the show while also sometimes appearing totally sweet and friendly. It goes without saying that she is beautiful. What I found most intriguing about Huda is how immediately clockable she was as a certain sort of person, but how counter-intuitively difficult it was to describe that person in words. The idea of third-order vanity sprung from my attempt to diagnose her mannerisms specifically: the casual insistence that she couldn’t care less when the opposite is clearly true; the dead-eyed stare with so much life behind it she’s basically levitating. There is a moment in the reunion when the (craven) producers show a supercut of her flying off the handle at a guy, and the way she sits back and watches with the most ebullient laughter, as if she were watching a video of herself eating cake as a baby, is such an exaggerated performance it almost comes back around to resemble a bare display of pain.
Her style of clunky social maneuvering isn’t that unusual for a person of her age, and it certainly isn’t a crime2; Huda deserves to sally forth and learn life’s lessons like any other 25-year-old. But something about watching it unfold within the format of reality TV—where the spectre of audience judgement isn’t just imagined but foundational—helped me see it for the layered performance it really was. What made Huda amusing to watch (and what made her my muse) was the extent to which her attempts at manipulation, while transparent to many viewers, appeared to operate below even her own awareness. This aspect of Huda, and the way it irritated the public, stayed with me. (Long live Huda.) It felt like proof of something I’ve often sensed but have been unable to express, which is that trying too hard to control people’s impression of you is an insult to both your humanity and theirs.
I should establish that I think of vanity primarily as a tool of the insecure. This is somewhat counter to the way it’s used in shorthand, as a synonym for self-obsession, which leaves out all the yearning. People who like themselves in a way that requires no reassurance or validation are not usually described as vain. Self-assured, maybe, but not vain. I say that to clarify that first-order vanity, despite its comparative simplicity, is not the same as confidence, but rather an imitation of it. To admire oneself in the mirror is to still be looking for answers.
As the vanity orders increase (second, third), this imitation becomes increasingly layered until the original aim is lost. Is someone feigning confidence in a TikTok video actually concerned with being confident, or is it more important that they appear confident? What if the appearance itself makes them confident? If a prominent figure is transparent about their cosmetic procedures, is this a sign that they feel no shame about said procedures, or does this display of shamelessness directly contradict the value system they’re endorsing? This ideological maze recalls Baudrillard's “hyperreality,” where imitations become so endlessly referential that the original is rendered irrelevant, or forgotten. To appear to know the self becomes more important than knowing the self.
Third-order vanity is still a theory (I’m open to alternative interpretations), but I came up with it because I wanted a better way of understanding the backwards social dynamics borne by modern media, from Instagram to reality TV, addicting and tiresome as they both are. Fair enough to call it all fake and vapid and getting worse, but being specific feels like a more tender way. On some level, I relate to all the most egregious third-order offenders, and I think the public does, too. It’s why they’re so potently annoying: We understand what they’re trying—and failing—to do, likely based on our own experiences doing the same.
We’re all vain sometimes, of every order. We all summon love from the wrong places. But it’s worth remembering that while vanity may earn us the hallmarks of a well-loved person—Huda is now the most followed and most famous cast member of her season—it won’t actually grant us what we seek.
Last Wednesday Avi and I discussed a few parenting questions on the podcast. Thanks for all your comments!
My favorite article I read last week was “The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department,” by Zach Helfand for The New Yorker. I loved this piece so much I could have read it forever. Friday’s 15 things also included my new favorite song, favorite t-shirt, favorite iPhone feature, and more.
The rec of the week was best literary sci-fi reads, which now has over 200 comments!!! I’m so excited.
Have a nice Sunday,
Haley
This is reminding me that my dad emailed me like a month ago with an idea for Maybe Baby, which was to explain why so many people watch so much reality TV when it appears to be depraved garbage (fair), and I think I need to send him Tiffany Sullivan's breakdown to help him see what’s going on with us....
The producers are always the criminals.
I hope this doesn't sound too aggrandising or sycophantic, but I truly think you're one of the most impactful (at least for me) writers of our time. You have such a knack for coining pithy and well-contextualised terms for phenomena we all observe but previously couldn't put a name to. And I love that your cultural critique is always laced with empathy. I'm still digesting the cringe matrix and trying to place people onto it mentally. I look forward to similarly synthesising this term. It's so helpful for both understanding myself and others.
I wonder if 2nd order and 3rd order vanity are also about how vanity meets the zeitgeist? I don’t think being self-conscious/fake-humble is “in” right now at ALL whereas to your point, it’s how we millennials were raised. A few examples of how I remember and participated in 2nd order vanity because it was the thing to do:
- dressing in sweats/sports clothes and light makeup in high school but still very much trying to look pretty/hot. All the (objectively) gorgeous women on my high school soccer team did this and it was sort of a “see? I’m naturally beautiful even schlubbing it, which makes my beauty more pure than yours.”
- we wanted to be tagged in photos on Facebook but it was NOT ALLOWED to tag yourself because it was vain!! My friends literally made a fake person to tag their pictures lmao but that was hilarious.
Remember when it was the height of cringe to post a selfie? And you’d look at other peoples pictures for an errant arm or shoulder crease as proof it was a selfie?
When did we switch from selfies being so cringe to being 100% normal, fine, and healthy?
Asking and thinking about this mostly from a place of interest, and (mostly) not a place of judgement.
Also snaps for this line: “To admire oneself in the mirror is to still be looking for answers.”