Stumbled over nothing? Lose 5,000 aura points. Made your crush laugh? Gain 10,000 aura points. You’ve probably seen “aura points” on TikTok’s For You page or in the comments section over the past few weeks. But what does it actually mean? And where did the trend come from?
The word “aura” dates back centuries. It is a term commonly used in ancient medicine and spirituality, and typically refers to the atmosphere of positive or negative energy that surrounds a person.
However, the aura point trend is born out of a more recent use of the term, which originated in the soccer world, starting in 2020. The New York Times The article is about football, specifically about Van Dijk, a centre-back for the Premier League club Liverpool. The comment that caused a big stir among football fans was: “Van Dijk’s mistakes can be ignored because he basically has an aura.” This comment led to a number of jokes and memes about Dijk and his “aura” within the football community.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and the trend has finally made its way out of the sports world and into mainstream pop culture, where it’s become a way to describe how cool you are. On April 16, @jonybrony posted a video titled “Guy obsessed with having an aura,” which garnered over 2.6 million views and 400,000 likes on TikTok and seemed to spark interest in this weird aura.
A few weeks later, @securethabag.mel posted a TikTok depicting her aura points increasing and decreasing throughout the day, and it went viral (like, “13.8 million views and 1.4 million likes”).
but, teeth What are aura points actually? To be honest, aura points are whatever you want them to be! Lately, a lot of people have been making videos about how to gain aura points (basically by doing things that look cool) and how to lose them (usually by highlighting embarrassing scenarios). This isn’t just happening inside the videos either; people have also picked up on this trend in the comments sections of other videos, sharing whether they think the video (or the video’s creator) is cool or not by adding or subtracting aura points from their total score.
The great thing about this trend is that it’s completely arbitrary, so feel free to have fun with it and give yourself all the aura points you feel you deserve (spoiler alert: there are no limits!).