Admittedly, I can’t speak about the “mean girl” issue being presented in this thread, but I have thought about this in my spare time.
If we’re talking about the issue as a whole then, yeah, I think it has mostly to do with beauty trends. If you go back 20 years to the early 2000s, you’ll see a lot of pale, thin-lipped, flat-backed white women because that’s what was considered beautiful at the time. Which isn’t to say white people couldn’t (or didn’t, moreso) have full lips, just that that wasn’t what was being idealized. And even at that, their natural full lips looked nothing like the image pictured.
Today, there’s been an obvious shift. Afrocentric features such as curly-coily hair, big lips, and fuller figures have become desirable to masses. But but but—there’s still lingering threads of white supremacy in the mix. That causes people to want to attain some sort of ambiguous mix. People want the thick lips but not the noses, the curly hair but not the dark skin. That’s kinda where I think we are today, masking the commodification of black features as acceptance of them.
But also, lolololol, I don’t really care because at the end of the day I’m not reading a high school drama so I’m not even these author’s target demographic 