What is a ‘beige flag’?

To get around the modern dating chaos, some taxonomically minded singles apply a color-coded system to potential matches. Red flags are behaviors to avoid (cheating, poor dental hygiene). Green flags are go-ahead signals (honesty, flossing).

So what is a beige flag?

According to TikTok users who have latched on to the term in the past month, a beige flag is a rare trait in a romantic prospect that isn’t a deal-breaker, but it’s not exactly a plus either.

Dipping Oreos in water instead of milk is a beige flag. So is turning on Caps Lock to type the first letter of every sentence, or maintaining a Lego obsession well into adulthood, or being afraid of astronauts.

Benign but disconcerting, these are the sorts of things that can come up in a light roast. As an user So to speak, a beige flag makes a potential partner or partner stop and say “Huh?” for a few seconds before continuing with the relationship.

“Everyone has their beige flags,” said Marisa Bertani, 29, an actress from Los Angeles. For example, her girlfriend of over a year moves her sofa to a different spot in her apartment about every two weeks. Ms. Bertani said she didn’t care about her habit, but she didn’t understand it either. “I’ve never met anyone in my life who can think of so many ways to rearrange a living room,” she said.

He posted a video about his partner’s quirks on TikTok, where the hashtag #attach It has over half a billion views. The videos, which are often set up in a schmaltzy saxophone soundtrackthey function as a kind of humble bragging: appearing modest while still serving as a flex on the cartel’s marital status.

Beige flags are just as subjective as the other ingredients in compatibility soup, said Kimberly Moffit, a therapist in Toronto who specializes in dating and relationships. What’s adorable to one person is bound to be repulsive to another, she added.

That beige flags are moot may have helped the term take off on TikTok, a platform that prioritize engagement. Many of the videos are accompanied by heated comment sections, some with tens of thousands of messages, in which viewers weigh in on how upset they would be about the trait in question.

Kallie Fockler, 19, a barista in eastern Ohio, watched a video in which a woman describes her boyfriend’s habit of eating live ants that he finds crawling around her house like a beige flag. “Me? Total red flag,” Ms Fockler said. (Many commenters agreed, although eating insects is common in a lot of cultures outside of the United States).

Ms. Fockler posted a similar video about her own boyfriend, who struggles to remember the plans but can retain a seemingly limitless amount of shark data. Ms Fockler is delighted with her encyclopedic knowledge of fin shapes, but some commenters on her video weren’t.

“I’ll take sharks,” he said, “as long as you’re not eating ants.”

The newest shade of the flag has entered a extensive lexicon of dating terms which is expanding as more people discuss their love lives online. Definitions Are in Change: In a Video posted on TikTok last year, Caitlin MacPhail described beige flags as things that look boring on a dating app profile, like somehow alluding to “The Office.” “If you’re looking for the Pam for your Jim, I’m going to assume you don’t have a deeper meaning,” she said.

But the term has become something stranger. “My husband’s beige flag is when she acts like she’s going to kiss me,” wrote one user on a video posted last month, “but he’s actually hiding a whole strawberry in his mouth and then proceeds to shove the strawberry into my mouth.”

Lamont White, a dating coach in Atlanta, said it was good for partners to spot each other’s beige flags. In the long run, we need to know if we can handle a person’s quirks, and vice versa. “Guess what?” he said. “You also have beige flags.”

ebony jasmine harris, 26, a content creator in Sarasota, Florida, believes that anyone who denies having a beige flag is lying. His is that he refuses to save the phone number of anyone he is dating. “It’s a bit confusing,” he admitted. “Sometimes I don’t know who is who until I text the conversation.”

When the conversation about red flags dominated TikTok, Harris said, she had begun to feel discouraged by the dating scene. The beige flags have slightly brightened up the prospect of it.

“Maybe there’s a little bit of hope,” he said, “that I end up with someone weird.”