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They come from different music, and that's the honest answer — the clothes came second every time. Goth grew out of post-punk at the very start of the 80s: Siouxsie, Bauhaus, The Cure. Emo came out of 80s hardcore and then got huge in the 2000s with the bands everyone means when they say emo. Scene was the mid-2000s myspace thing — bright colours, teased hair, way more upbeat, and it borrowed from both. So if you want to know which one someone is, ask what they listen to, not what they're wearing.

No, and people mix this up constantly. E-girl is an internet aesthetic that started around 2018 — it's a look built for a front-facing camera, with the blush across the nose, the hair clips, the split-dye. Goth is a subculture that's been going for forty years and is built on music. There's overlap in the eyeliner and not much else. Neither one is better; they're just not the same thing, and calling a goth an e-girl to her face will get you a look.

Red is the biggest dye molecule, which means it sits on the outside of the hair and washes out first — that's why it fades so fast, and it fades to orange because the warm tones are what's left underneath. What actually works: wash in cold water only, wash less often than feels normal, and use a colour-depositing conditioner in the same red every second or third wash instead of waiting for a full re-dye. Heat styling and sunlight both accelerate it. Sulphate-free shampoo helps but it's the least important part — the water temperature matters more than the bottle does.

Stop trying to draw the wing first. Everyone does this and it's why it goes wrong. Draw the line along your lash line first and get both eyes even, then go back and add the flick. For the flick itself, line the angle up with your lower lash line pointing toward the tail of your eyebrow — that angle is what makes it look intentional rather than droopy. Use a felt-tip pen while you're learning because it's more forgiving than gel, and fix mistakes with a cotton bud and micellar water instead of starting over. It takes about two weeks of doing it daily before it stops being a fight.

Pick the artist before you pick the design. Look at healed work in their portfolio, not fresh work — fresh tattoos all look good, healed ones tell you who can actually draw. Expect to wait for anyone decent, and expect a deposit. Eat properly beforehand and don't drink the night before, because both make you bleed more and bleeding pushes ink out. It hurts, but it's boring pain rather than sharp pain, and ribs and feet are genuinely worse than arms. And don't let anyone talk you out of a first placement you can cover if you want to — you can always go bigger later.

Longer than the piercer's minimum, always. Earlobes are the quick one at about two months. Most cartilage — helix, conch, industrial — is realistically six months to a year, and industrials are notorious. Navels can take a year. Nostrils are around four to six months. The mistake almost everyone makes is changing the jewellery at the earliest date they were given and then being confused when it gets angry. Leave it, clean it with sterile saline only, and stop touching it. If it's still irritated after a few weeks, go back to your piercer rather than to a forum.

Thrift the basics and spend the money on boots. Black tops, band tees, slips, and skirts are everywhere secondhand and cost nothing — you don't need those to be good quality because you'll wear them out anyway. What you should not cheap out on is footwear, because bad boots hurt and fall apart in a season. Also check the men's section, always: it's where the oversized band tees and the flannels are, and it's usually cheaper for the same thing. Get a couple of things altered rather than buying new — a taken-in thrifted piece looks better than most fast fashion.

Depends which direction you're going. For classic goth: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, The Cure's darker albums, Sisters of Mercy. For the heavier modern end: Deftones, Type O Negative, Chelsea Wolfe. For emo: start with the 2000s stuff you already half-know and work backwards into Sunny Day Real Estate and American Football. For something dreamier: Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. Don't try to do it chronologically like homework — find one song you love and follow it sideways.

If you want the aesthetic more than the scares: The Craft, Suspiria (either version), Interview with the Vampire, The Hunger. If you want to actually be disturbed: Hereditary, Martyrs, Audition. If you want fun rather than dread: Jennifer's Body, Fright Night, the first Scream. And if you've never seen it, watch the original Nosferatu once with the sound up — it's a hundred years old and still sets the entire look everyone's copying.

It's almost always the lighting, not the makeup. Direct flash flattens pale skin and kills every bit of contrast in your face — that's the main culprit. Use soft light from the side instead of straight on, so you get some shadow and your features have shape. Then in editing, bring the highlights down rather than pushing the shadows up. A bit of warmth in the grade stops it going grey. And if you're wearing a heavy dark lip, that alone will do most of the contrast work for you.

Yes, and it's the one thing I'll say that about. Cheap boots have glued soles that separate, and once that goes the boot is finished. Something resoleable costs more once and then lasts years — I have a pair older than most of my friendships. Break them in gradually with thick socks rather than wearing them out for a full day immediately, and get them resoled before the sole wears through to the welt, not after. If money's tight, buy one good pair secondhand instead of two new bad ones.

Start with one thing, not a whole outfit. Black nail polish, or the boots, or the liner — one piece you wear with clothes you already own. The jump people find hard isn't the clothes, it's being looked at, and doing it in one step means being looked at all at once. Do it in stages and you'll acclimatise without noticing. Also: nobody is watching as closely as it feels like on the first day. By the second week it's just what you wear.

A subscription site where a creator posts content and you pay monthly to see it. That's genuinely all it is. It's not a dating site, it's not a chat roulette, and you're not buying access to a person — you're subscribing to what someone makes, the same way you'd subscribe to anything else. Some pages are adult, plenty aren't. It just happens to be the platform that got famous for the adult ones.

Everything already posted on that creator's page, plus whatever they post while you're subscribed, plus the ability to message them. What it doesn't automatically include is anything sent as a paid message, and it doesn't include custom requests. Every page is different, so the honest advice is to read what the creator says on their profile before you subscribe rather than assuming — a good creator will tell you what's on there.

A free page costs nothing to subscribe to and makes its money from paid messages and tips instead. A paid page charges monthly and usually has more included up front. Neither is a scam and neither is automatically better value — a free page with everything locked behind paid messages can easily cost more than a paid page that includes a lot. Look at what's actually included before you judge the price.

Not the creator's name, and not anything describing what you bought. The billing descriptor is a company name, and it has changed more than once over the years, so I'm not going to quote you one that might be out of date — OnlyFans lists the current one in their own help pages and it's worth checking there if this genuinely matters to you. If you'd rather it not appear at all, a prepaid card is the usual answer.

Yes, subscriptions renew automatically by default — that's the part that catches people out. You turn it off yourself in your subscriptions settings, and turning it off doesn't cut you off immediately; you keep access until the period you already paid for runs out. Nobody gets notified that you did it, and the creator isn't told. If you're only subscribing for one month, just switch off the renewal the day you subscribe and then forget about it.

Pay-per-view: a message with content locked behind a one-off price, separate from your subscription. You see a preview and a price, and you choose whether to unlock it. It's the main way free pages make money. There's no obligation to buy any of them, and not buying doesn't get you removed or blocked by anyone worth subscribing to.

No. Tipping is a nice thing people do, not a toll. Anyone making you feel like you owe them a tip on top of a subscription you already paid for is doing it wrong. If someone's work has genuinely made your week and you want to say so with money, that's lovely — but a subscriber who never tips is still a subscriber and should be treated like one.

It varies, and you should assume it varies. Plenty of creators run their own messages. Plenty of bigger accounts have someone helping, and some agencies run chats entirely. Nobody's obliged to tell you which, but the honest ones will if you ask directly. A reasonable test: ask about something specific to a post rather than something generic, and see whether the answer actually engages with it.

No. There's no screenshot notification — that's a myth carried over from other apps. What is true is that content is still the creator's, and reposting it anywhere is both a copyright issue and a genuinely horrible thing to do to someone. Take your screenshots. Don't put them on the internet.

Use a separate email that isn't your main one, and don't reuse a username that's tied to anything else — those two cover the vast majority of it. Your display name is what creators see, so set it to whatever you're comfortable with. Consider a prepaid card if the billing line matters to you. And your subscriptions aren't public: nobody browsing a creator's page can see who's subscribed.

Mostly through the platforms they post publicly on, because search on the subscription sites themselves is genuinely bad. TikTok, Twitter and Reddit are where people actually find creators — you follow someone whose free content you like, and their link is in their bio. Which is exactly what this site is. Be careful with sites that aggregate creator lists; a lot of them are scraping and reposting without permission.

Genuinely a lot, and creators notice all of it. Watch their videos all the way to the end — completion is what the algorithm actually rewards. Like, comment something real rather than an emoji, and share one post with someone who'd like it. Don't repost their content as your own, and report the accounts that do. All of that costs nothing and moves more numbers than a tip does.