Stainless Steal

I'm a woman in my 20s with a friend who often copies my style. It feels like she's trying to one-up me, but I've tried to ignore it. Well, for years, I've rimmed my lower eye with thick black kohl. She commented on it several weeks ago and then started doing it herself. At lunch yesterday, she said (about my eyeliner): "You started doing that? I've done it forever." This is the third time she's pretended my style she copied was hers first, but I feel petty being upset about it.

--Unflattered

Apparently, there could be two snowflakes that are alike -- from very tiny snow crystals -- but they probably wouldn't show up at the same bar wearing the same dress and eyeliner. "Monkey see, monkey do" isn't limited to monkeys or stylejacking female friends. Even fruit flies are copycats, spotting an alpha ladyfly getting it on with a particular dudefly and, afterward, engaging in "mate-choice copying": the insect sex version of "I'll have what she's having!" Like fruit flies, we evolved to copy high-status peeps (friends and celebrities) to advance our evolutionary interests: survival, social survival, and our ability to mate and pass on our genes. Accordingly, evolutionary psychologist Abraham Buunk finds that envy is wrongly maligned as a toxic emotion. Sure, some envious people act in destructive ways ("malicious envy"), but simply noticing others outpacing us and feeling bad about it serves as an internal alarm system: "Hey, Slackerella...better catch up!" We're told "imitation" is some fabulous form of flattery, so it can feel petty to accuse somebody of stealing your look. However, evolutionary psychologist Vladas Griskevicius explains that we try to make ourselves attractive to potential partners by seeming unique and special, standing out from the crowd. So, this woman's ultimately cheating in competing for mates, which is probably why she's "gaslighting" you. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which somebody tries to destabilize your grasp on the facts by denying what you know is true, to the point where you might start questioning it yourself. In other words, what's creepy here isn't so much the crime as the cover-up. Probably the only way to stop this is dialing back her presence in your life. You can call the cops if somebody stabs you or steals your TV, but there are no actual fashion police to be dispatched, a la, "911, what is your emergency?" You: "Help! She plagiarized my eyeliner!" ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.