Soon, I had in my possession a Prada that looked like a cheerleader’s pom pom and a 1920s cloche had a baby, a Tory Burch that had an extended back and a long ribbon, and a normcore North Face. After trying all of them on, I realized that in order to pull off a bucket hat, you have to either be palpably cool, fashionable, or really pretty, something that was later confirmed once I looked up celebrities who consistently wear them—Tyler the Creator, Rihanna, Hailey Bieber, and Alexa Chung among them.

The bucket hat, I’ve concluded, is one of the nerdiest items of clothing in existence, along with suspenders and the fanny pack. Dudley Heinsbergen in The Royal Tenenbaums comes to mind, with his monogrammed hat resting atop his transition glasses. In order to transcend the bucket hat’s unmistakable, undeniable nerdiness, you can’t even have the slightest drop of nerd blood in your body. No one needs a negligible and highly flexible hat rim that basically only shades the eyes (better to see the fish with?). Not only that, but unlike suspenders and the fanny pack, the bucket hat has no real utilitarian value. It’s the appendix of hats. Its brim doesn’t even provide enough coverage from the sun! It’s closer to a piece of jewelry than it is to a hat.

But despite the bucket hat being a completely unnecessary item of clothing, people love to wear it. However, as someone who is a repository of nerd blood and wants to wear a hat that does not still render my face fully lit, the bucket hat would probably not be for me. I just was not palpably cool, fashionable, or pretty enough.