Gen Z’s latest woo-woo trend deals in bizarre ‘aura points’ — here’s how it works

Aura you kidding me?

Once reserved only for the woo-woo, the aura can be described as a luminous, colorful radiation emitted by the body in colors that reveal one’s spiritual state. But for Gen Z, the concept as been transposed into a quantifiable point system to determine someone’s cool factor.

“Oh, you stumbled a little bit, negative aura,” Philip Lindsay, a 30-year-old middle school math teacher in Arizona, explained to the Wall Street Journal. “Or, like, you got the answer right in math class, oh, max aura.”

Lindsay started to hear his students mentioning “max aura” or “max APs” in the hallways during the final week of school in May, and that people were awarding their peers with aura points for mundane things.

In this context, the term aura also transforms into an adjective: you wouldn’t say someone has an aura, you would say that someone “has aura” or is “giving aura.” You can also just say “aura” in response to someone doing something that would gain them points.

“When you have a really, really, really good aura, I feel like that really translates from online to the other side of the phone,” Hina Sabatine, a 27-year-old influencer based in Los Angeles, told WSJ. “Some people just have it.”

According to the outlet, posts on TikTok with the hashtag #aurapoints increased by 378% from May to June — and even brands are taking part in the conversation.

Last month, Crocs posted a video of black Crocs with toe-shaped charms (called “jibbutz”) as a person painted them as if they were toenails and adding accessories. The caption read, “DIY aura points” — and according to Crocs chief marketing officer Heidi Cooley, they are worth “infinite positive aura points.”

Netflix chimed in as well as they marketed their hit show “Bridgerton,” showing a clip from the latest season and asking, “how many aura points did Cressida lose for pretending to be Lady Whistledown just so that she didn’t have to marry an old man?”

Users on TikTok have also been using the trend to share extremely personal, intimate and sometimes traumatic stories on the platform — such as questioning how many aura points they’ve lost for sticky romantic situations people have found themselves in, which is somehow on the lighter side of the trend.

Lindsay is looking forward to seeing his students again in the fall to see whether the aura points trend is something that sticks and overtakes the likes of “rizz” and “the ick,” or if it’s just another fad.

“Is aura points going to be, like, a summer trend and I don’t hear about it again?” Lindsay questioned.