As soon as March hits, juniors and seniors scour in search of their prom dresses. The rush of running through the store, so many colors, fabrics and styles to see. When all of a sudden, the most beautiful dress catches your eye and your heart rate sky-rockets. Your body starts tingling and you’re already imagining yourself, the heels and the jewelry all coming together.

With all of the commotion prom season brings, a great deal of stress also sets in. Seniors Clara Hart and Carly Kopelman explain their experience with prom dress shopping as stress inducing and time consuming whether shopping online or in store.

“My perfect prom dress would be something that makes me feel confident that is comfortable to dance in and accentuates my features,” Hart said. “Unfortunately it has been very difficult to find one.” 

Dress after dress, fail after fail: Hart was losing the idea of her perfect dress she had envisioned in her head. That’s when she changed her mentality and with that change came many more dresses that she turned out to love and ended up finding the one Hart desired.

Kopelman went dress shopping and likewise to Hart, has the key to finding the perfect prom dress: “I went to a random dress store with zero expectations and left an hour later with my prom dress.” 

Based on this, it seems a promising strategy would be to avoid focusing on a specific color, shape or style because you could miss out on something you wouldn’t have originally tried on.

Junior Ally Zamparelli is in the depths of finding a prom dress, but hasn’t had any luck yet. She wants a dress that makes her feel and look just like a princess, however it is harder than it may seem.

“Not only is it tough to find one single dress.” Zamparelli said. “But also having to worry about getting a similar one to another girl is a whole different level of anxiety.”

For school dances, a girl from each grade activates an instagram account to lessen the chance of a dress repeat. Picture this, you finally found your prom dress and are about to post it when BAM you see it pop up on the account. Just like that, you’re at square one again, with not a thing in the world that you could do except open those tabs back up and start looking anew.

85% of juniors and senior girls ranked prom dress shopping to be stressful to extremely stressful.

Instead of prom dress shopping being fun and effortless, it’s turned into an undesirable chore. 

It is officially safe to say that in reality most girls don’t find success when searching for a prom dress the first time. Quickly, the original rush you once had feels old and the whole experience is anticlimactic and rarely turns out to be a fairytale ending.