The first sip of your almond flat white. That I-can’t-breathe feeling when you get a text from a major crush (if you haven’t had one lately, you surely remember the feeling). An Aperol spritz in the sun. Your favorite song. What do all of these occurrences have in common? Dopamine. All things extremely pleasurable that make the brain zing, involve it.
But what is dopamine exactly, and how does it relate to fashion? With ‘dopamine dressing’ being touted as a ‘trend’ lately, one that supposedly involves wearing lots of loud colors, we’d like to break down some of the misconceptions. But first, a little neuroscience that will go a long way in understanding yourself…
Dopamine is the chief feel-good neurotransmitter
Along with serotonin, dopamine is one of the “happy hormones”, an important chemical made in the brain. It acts as a messenger between neurons, the working units that your brain is made of, and strongly affects your mood, attention, and motivation. When you have low levels of dopamine, you feel low. When you have high levels of dopamine going back and forth between the neurons, you feel pretty amazing.
This is basically what happens in your brain when you feel “good”. The red bits are dopamine, firing away. (Photo credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki)
Dopamine is especially strongly released when your brain is expecting a reward, creating feelings of pleasure which motivate you to repeat a specific behavior. Of course, that’s why things that can easily become addictive, such as sex, alcohol, and cocaine, which all involve the dopamine system. Addiction means that the brain has become over-reliant on these large boosts.
Thankfully, there are natural ways to keep dopamine levels optimal. It’s important to be aware of how to increase your own dopamine, because low levels of it are linked to reduced motivation and decreased enthusiasm. It is common for people with depression to have low levels of dopamine. If you are depressed, it’s difficult to be motivate yourself to do routine tasks like going to work or even to speak to friends.
Getting more sunlight is one way to naturally get a dopamine boost. It’s one of the reasons we love beach holidays. (Photo: Jared Rice on Unsplash)
Some of the ways that you can boost dopamine are to get enough sleep, exercise often, listen to music, meditate, get enough sunlight, get human contact, and eat plenty of protein (tyrosine and phenylalanine are the building block of dopamine, so make sure that you have enough of these proteins in you).
And yet, there is the oft-forgotten sartorial route.
How can clothes boost dopamine?
We all know that right up there with that morning coffee and message from the crush, is the package that just arrived. Especially when you unbox and try it on, it makes you feel electric, and you don’t want to take it off.
Simply put, the rich sensory input (color, shape, texture) of clothes also grant it the power to make your brain zing and boost dopamine, much like other things that make you feel good.
But let’s make one thing clear: dopamine dressing is not necessarily about swathing yourself in certain bright colors and prints. While within color psychology, there are certainly strong known associations between hues and moods, what feels good to one individual won’t feel good for another, because we all have different symbolic associations with colors based on our own experiences and unique psychological make-up). This is why we have personal style – because of our different inner needs. And that’s where a deeper facet of fashion psychology comes in: dressing by personality.
For example, color psychology tells us that yellow, orange, and citrus hues imbue us with optimism, but these shades may feel jarring to someone with a more introverted personality. Pastel shades are supposed to make us happy, but they feel way too saccharine to a bolder, more authoritative personality – such as someone who scores lower on Agreeableness. Like many fashion lovers - who according to our data tend to score higher on the traits of Openness and Neuroticism - I feel best in monochrome.
As such, dopamine dressing is nothing new (we know from this 2012 study that clothing can have an effect on our behavior if that clothing has a symbolic meaning), and it’s not a trend. It’s simply what good fashion is: a natural by-product of having a strong sense of style self and dressing in alignment with yourself.
Dopamine dressing isn’t about a prescriptive colorful look, especially if you feel better in monochrome.
Find your sartorial dopamine toolkit
How do you know what the optimal dopamine-boosting outfit for you is? Try these 3 steps.
Memory lane: think back or scroll through your IG feed and take note of the outfits you felt your absolute best in. What did they have in common? Was it a certain silhouette such as a bold A-line shape or a sleek body-con fit? Was it a certain color palette? Materials? Brands? Find the common denominators among your best looks.
Take the Big 5 personality test on PSYKHE. Discovering where you sit on the core five traits will lead to a greater understanding of why you wear what you wear, fashion psychology, and your personal style. More on how the Big 5 links to style here.
Continued trial-and-error. Now that you have a better understanding of why you wear what you wear, and the links between fashion and psychology, it’s important to stay vigilant so you can easily notice more patterns. Did you feel icky in that checked blazer for some reason? Not like yourself in that square-toed shoe? Did that oversized hoodie surprisingly spark joy? Write down what you notice to get a better sense of what clothes you find most in-sync, most rewarding, most you, for that elusive, hallowed, jolt of dopamine.
In the world of post-pandemic dressing, one word has taken social media by storm: cheugy (pronounced: chew-gee). In the worlds of fashion and lifestyle, cheugy describes a look, a thing or a person that’s considered out of date.