In some places, a half-birthday allows you to learn to drive or join the army. But for others, it’s a way to embrace the midpoint of each year of life
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ix months after Lorraine C Ladish turned 59, she began to get emails – from fashion stores, the supermarket, the opticians – offering her a discount. Her half-birthday was coming up, the emails said. She used one of the offers to buy a magenta leather jacket and posted her celebration on TikTok. Ladish is a digital content creator who says she makes “a living out of sharing my age online”. But what really appealed to her about marking the midpoint between birthdays was the chance to “squeeze every second, every month, out of my late 50s”.
Ladish is not alone. Half-birthdays are having a moment. Or, at least, a fraction of a moment. On TikTok there are half-cake designs, half-birthday banners, half-birthday cards – sometimes, they are whole ones brutally sheared – and half-candles. One French brand even released a comma candle for cake decorators wishing to celebrate a half-birthday decimally.
Some people celebrate half-birthdays because their birthdays are overshadowed by other occasions. Graphic designer Cheyanne Carroll, who lives in Florida, doesn’t celebrate her own, but a few years ago she made a half-birthday card to surprise her husband, who was born on New Year’s Eve. The design – in which only the top half of the greeting appears – is now one of her top three sellers, and she posts the cards around the world. “It was just a funny thing I thought I would do for my husband. Now I see that lots of people celebrate.” Or maybe, she says, the algorithm just likes to serve her every sort of birthday, from halves to dogs. As time has gone by, she and her husband still mark his halves, but the occasion has become more low-key. Maybe your first half is always your biggest.
