The students’ obsessive focus on their hair, makeup, and clothing becomes a supporting detail of the Societal Pressures on Adolescent Girls in Ireland. The girls in Joanne’s group focus intensely on their appearance, ensuring that their style matches prevailing trends, and their primary motivation for this level of conformity comes from their collective fear of ostracization in a traditional society that expects women and girls to project conventional images of femininity. However, they are also caught between clashing social norms; Catholicism demands modesty, but the adolescent society of St. Kilda’s and Colm’s compels them to project an air of sexual desirability. This dynamic becomes clear when Stephen and Antoinette notice the uniformity of Joanne’s group: their heavy-handed makeup; their long, straightened blonde hair; and the school-issued skirts with rolled-up waistbands in order to show more leg. The girls are trying to conform to two arbitrary sets of standards: their own, societally constructed idea of what it means to be a teenage girl and their male peers’ idea of what a “desirable” girl should look like. Joanne viciously mocks girls who do not sport the group’s accepted styles, and she also polices their expressions of sexual desirability, poking fun at girls whose image projects an inaccessible demeanor. One of the primary causes of antipathy between Joanne’s group and Holly’s is that Holly’s group rejects the societal expectations and dominant styles of the day. Joanne and her friends resent Holly’s clique for their relative social freedom, given that the same rules that Joanne enforces also become a social straitjacket preventing her and her friends from engaging in authentic forms of self-expression.