There’s something hauntingly beautiful about the way a pair of kohl-lined eyes hover over a mid-drift sedan, headlights slicing through desert haze. Welcome to Arabian Drift Core, the internet’s fever dream: a surreal visual culture that reimagines Saudi Arabia’s underground car scene through digital art and nostalgia.

Long before it became an aesthetic, it was chaos. In the early 2000s, the empty highways of Saudi Arabia turned into impromptu racetracks for a dangerous subculture known as Tafheet or Hajwalah in local slang. Teenagers in stock sedans like Toyota Camrys, Nissan Altimas and Honda Accords tore through public roads at dizzying speeds, swerving wildly from lane to lane. They weren’t professional drifters. This was a raw, reckless act of imitating what drifting looked like. Arabian Drift Core resurrects that energy through Photoshop and digital art, creating nostalgia over the region’s most dangerous pastime. The images most often feature low-resolution sedans mid-drift, desert fog, melancholic Arabic calligraphy, and always, the floating gaze of a woman.

The aesthetic traces back to a single digital artist. On October 13th, 2012, a DeviantArt user named Inamson1 (also known as Farfoor Albaloushi on Flickr) uploaded two haunting images titled Saudi Drift.

Throughout 2012, 2013 and 2014, Inamson1 uploaded multiple photographs of the same style that he labelled Saudi Drift. He also posted the images to his Flickr account Farfoor Albaloushi throughout the timeframe. His edits showcased stock cars frozen mid-spin beneath veiled gazes, and echoes of heartbreak and faith drifting through the sand.

Some of his work referenced darker undercurrents of heartbreak and even suicide turning drifting into a metaphor for emotional freefall. At the time, the images were simply fragments of a digital diary, reflecting the loneliness, danger, and beauty of a subculture no one was documenting. Albaloushi hasn’t been active online since 2015. Unbeknownst to him, these would go viral a decade later. 

In July 2023, the internet rediscovered him when TikTok creator @cressida.cretu posted a slideshow of new Arabian Drift Core edits inspired by Albaloushi’s visual language. Her images felt cinematic, eerie, and hypermodern: Lady Gaga adrift in a sandstorm and Jane from Breaking Bad watching over a spinning Honda. The slideshow amassed nearly 250,000 views. A few months later, she posted another slideshow which soared past 1.4 million views. Suddenly, Arabian Drift Core had a name and a cult following.

Neither Albaloushi nor Cressida have spoken publicly about the aesthetic’s evolution. Their silence allows Arabian Drift Core to exist in mystery, free from the artist’s own definition. Similar to the drifting itself, the art resists control. The aesthetic has become communal, shaped by reposts, remixes, and reinterpretations. Every image, whether created in 2012 or 2023 echoes the memory of Hajwalah.

What began as chaos on the highway has evolved into a visual language for emotion. Arabian Drift Core isn’t just an aesthetic; every image feels like a confession of loneliness and yearning.