Though body image issues have been a problem for men and especially woman for years and years, the increase of body comparison through social media has led to a potential increase in insecurity and eating disorders. According to nbci.nlm.nih.gov, “Many researchers have hypothesized that the media may play a central role in creating and intensifying the phenomenon of body dissatisfaction and consequently, may be partly responsible for the increase in the prevalence of eating disorders.” 

People find new ways to degrade specific features or to add reasons to hate themselves. The new phrase “legging legs” has been rising on TikTok as a way to label the quality of your legs. Legging legs is essentially having and obvious thigh gap in leggings and it is implied that leggings are only for those legs. “I do not like [the trend]. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s just like forcing body standards on people and like everybody is beautiful but it’s making them feel like they’re not. I don’t really see any positives; it’s just forcing body standards on everyone that aren’t always possible for people and it’s making them not feel comfortable with themselves. It’s a trend, trends kind of go in and out, but I would like to see someone enforcing more positive body standards,” said Kiersten Oldham. 

Terms such as “legging legs” are attempting to label and create new insecurities and the use of social media to spread them makes a much larger audience be affected. “I feel like it’s a really bad thing that people have created on TikTok, how they just make up insecurities out of nowhere and I feel like it’s really bad for the younger generation. A lot of people who are younger are joining TikTok and there’s a lot of teenagers on there, It’s just bad. There’s a lot of microtrends that are really bad and like with legging legs specifically, it’s hurtful because leggings are an article of clothing, and your legs are part of your body. The leggings should fit onto your body, your body shouldn’t fit into the leggings and I feel like that’s a really important distinction that your body doesn’t have to look a certain way to look good in an article of clothing. I think everyone has their own personal style and if someone really likes wearing leggings but then they see there’s this ‘leggings legs’ thing, then they could get insecure that they like leggings or how they look in them. I think that’s bad because then people aren’t wearing what they want to wear because of something that’s online and I feel like social media isn’t really life,” said Sabine Kenney.