We need to talk about Beauty 03/08/20

Describe what you tried to do

So my usual outfit is a crop top with either skinny jeans or shorts and I always bring a jacket in case it gets cold. For jewelry, I usually pair my outfit with some type of stud earring. On the occasion I would pair my outfit with a drop or threaded earring if it looks better. My hair would be let loose to the left side. Today for the counterfactual Identity project, since I had to wear something out of the ordinary, I wore a cute frilled pastel dress with a floral, blue and white pastel, dropped earring. I also did a simple looped ponytail with a moon crescent pin in the middle of the hair tie. Afterwards I went to a plaza nearby my house, Bella Terra, and asked people at Starbucks and around the center of the plaza 3 questions about me. “Can you guess what my Age is? Can you guess what my major is? And lastly, can you guess what my name is?” Of course, I decided to walk up to people that didn’t look busy, nor were in the middle of discussion so I successfully got a bunch of people to answer my questions. To also do a comparison, I took a picture of what I usually wear and asked my friend from UCR to also ask her VSA family the same 3 questions.

What were their reactions to you? 

They were all slightly surprised to be interviewed, however they were all nice and agreed. It seemed like everyone I interviewed had fun guessing, and I mainly think it’s because I would ask groups of people (1-3 people) so they would enjoy seeing who guessed the closest to my actual age, major, or name, within their group of friends. However I also wanted to point out everyone’s large surprise when I asked them to guess my name. It was also the question that everyone took the longest time to decide an answer to because of how broad their range of answers could be. On my friend’s side, she got straight answers within minutes all in the same formats, “NAME,MAJOR,AGE” or “NAME AGE MAJOR”, which I found to be funny.

What did they think your name was? 

The most guessed name was Vivian (3 I got and 1 from my friend side). No one guessed my name correctly. And this was the list of names that was guessed:

• Rachael
• Veronica
• Kathy
• Lisa
• Palani
• Tiffany
• Michelle (this is my little sister’s name so I found it a bit entertaining that someone guessed this as my name)

These were the guesses from my friend’s side in my regular outfit:

• Hillary
• Anna Tran
• Kaitlyn
• Sophie
• Alice

What did they think your major was?

My major is computer science and the guesses I got was: 

• 2 guessed for English
• 2 for Psychology
• 1 for Communication
• 1 for Business
• 1 for Liberal Arts
• 1 for Bio.
• 1 for Science
• 1 for Humanities

From my friend’s side, using the photo of my regular outfit, she got:

• 2 guess for Bio
• 1 for Psychology
• 1 for Business.
• 1 for Policy major
• 1 for Global Studies

The most guesses being 3 for Psyc. and 3 for Bio.

What did they guess for your age?

My age is 19 and I’m turning 20 this March 25! For everyone guesses, I got:

• Age 18 – 1 guess
• Age 19 – 2 guesses
• Age 20 – 6 guesses
• Age 21 – 1 guess

From my friend’s side, she got:

• Age 19 – 5 guesses
• Age 20 – 1 guess

I think the reason why my friend’s answers was so small ranged, was because she introduced me as her friend when she asked the interviewees the questions so the interviewees guessed that I was the same age as my friend or older.

Did you find them responding to you differently than people ordinarily do? Your conclusions about the experience.

I had a similar experience during my freshman year of college, when people would walk up to me to either talk or ask questions for their homework and back then, everyone thought I was either a sophomore or junior because of the way I presented myself when we talked. So I think that regardless of how I dressed up, just by talking to me people would usually guess that my age is older than I actually am. I also had experience of my relative friends coming over to visit and guessing that my age was relatively lower than my actual age from just seeing me, since my relatives are the one introducing me so I wouldn’t have talked. From the way I talk, a lot of people usually guess that I would major in something that had to do with communications so I was not very surprised that the most guessed major is psychology. I am surprised that the other most guessed major was bio., because I don’t do well in science but for some reason a lot of people would like to guess that I am. My conclusion from past experience and experience from this project is that I may look younger than my age however when I speak, I would present myself to be older than my actual age. Names are impossible to guess. And it seems that people would rarely (or never) assume that I am in computer science, however no one is (greatly) surprised when I do tell them that I am.