As 2023 comes to a close, Allure dives into those moments when beauty took center stage this year: the trends, the people, and the technologies that filled our feeds and captured our imaginations. As always, we're here to chronicle, to celebrate, and to make sense of it all — or at least try. Welcome to the Year in Beauty.
It was blueberry milk nails that signaled the end of beauty trends as we knew them. At first, all the food-related trends were kinda fun. Glazed donut skin was so fresh! Strawberry girl was cute, if a bit derivative of 2022’s cold girl. Latte makeup… Well, everyone’s got brown eye shadow so at least it’s accessible, right? But when blueberry milk nails — that is, a plain old baby blue manicure with a new name — hit our For You Pages last summer, shit also hit the fan. In particular, Gen Z users of TikTok revolted, blaming capitalism for a lost sense of individuality. “There’s so much fatigue,” says Kendall Becker, director of fashion and media relations at Trendalytics. With a new trend going viral several times a week, keeping up with them was no longer a good time; it was just annoying.
Before the explosion of algorithm-based social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, trends were still largely driven by capitalistic intentions. But back then, the speed with which trends appeared was far more manageable for consumers and brands alike. If presented with a pre-2015 photo of someone all done up, anyone even vaguely in tune with beauty trends could likely identify which decade the image was from — because trends once lasted five, 10, even 20 years. Now, having a look that trends for a full year is almost unimaginable.
Part of the problem is that these looks, in a sense, aren’t even new. For one thing, a lot of them are repackaged techniques that have been used for decades, especially when it comes to makeup. Makeup artist Danessa Myricks summarized it perfectly on an episode of the Gloss Angeles podcast: “None of these trends are new. They’re all fundamental concepts in beauty. But if you want to call [monochromatic makeup] ‘latte’… If you want to say ‘This is a concealer hack,’ that’s great. Whatever makes it more palatable for you and your audience.” Framed this way, all of the catchy names are just helping to educate a new batch of beauty beginners — but they aren’t actually introducing trend innovation.
To go further, this repackaging of basics isn't even becoming ubiquitous the way trends used to. What makes you continue scrolling on TikTok is its algorithm, which is so able to pinpoint your unique set of interests that no two For You Pages are exactly alike, regardless of how much you have in common with other users. Content is being produced at such an accelerated rate that we’ve lost any sense of a centralized cultural moment. Think of the friend with whom you send the most videos back and forth. Theoretically, you two would be served the same content. But even if you are extremely online, chances are the videos (often those with millions of views) that hit your inbox are still new to you.
A rep from TikTok confirms that videos with the #StrawberryMakeup hashtag have a combined nearly 500 million views, but I, a person who actively seeks out beauty content on TikTok for work, had never organically come across any of the top 20 videos in that category — and yet I couldn’t escape #AuraNails, with a comparatively measly 260 million views. There’s no longer one must-see viral beauty video of the week, but thousands.
The term that seems to be catching on for this moment in internet history — in which there is so much content that it’s impossible to tell what is actually popular — is “The Vapor Web,” coined by reporter Ryan Broderick. Mainly, Broderick is talking about how this phenomenon affects individuals who get most of their news about global conflicts from TikTok, but the same applies to people who use TikTok to try to figure out if we’re doing matte or dewy foundation right now.
Based on the chaos that is my work inbox alone, this has become an existential problem for brands, many of which flood my email with pitches every time one of their products can even tangentially tie in to a video that is going viral on the app. (Becker confirms that she’s seen a lot of anxiety among retailers and brands about keeping up with the trend cycle.) These are rarely new products; the production timeline for beauty products is far too long to be able to react in real time to a whiplash trend cycle. Instead, older products get pitched with the potential to become relevant again, thanks, for instance, to the latest creator who is racking up millions of views with a clever name for burgundy lipstick. Like Myricks, Becker sees this as a positive: “Using more of these colloquial terms started to allow people to partake in conversations in an easier way,” she says.
Sometimes, though, there is backlash from digital-savvy consumers, as in the blueberry milk nails example. Most people will happily save a pretty makeup look to their inspo folders for future reference, but because the trend cycle has become so short and repetitive, they’re likely to already have the tools they need to create the look. In turn, they might bristle at any brand that tries to convince them this is an entirely new thing for which they need to buy new products.
Says Becker, companies are starting to recognize that keeping up with the internet’s whims is unsustainable. She predicts we’ll see a shift toward more brands, like Merit or Ami Colé, that sell a smaller collection of core products for a dedicated customer base. “You don’t need to go viral to still have really great sales or community engagement,” she notes. Trying to hop on every trend is “a very good way to lose your brand’s identity.”
The current trend cycle is also, perhaps, a problem for how this era of beauty will be viewed in history. In a much-shared New York Times article, culture critic Jason Farago argues that we are in the “least innovative century for the arts in 500 years” due to that constant churn of trends, which essentially makes recycling old ideas a requirement. Like Broderick, Farago is not talking specifically about beauty trends — his examples are primarily music and the type of art you see hanging in museums — but his critique certainly applies to our culture’s obsession with nostalgic looks for hair, makeup, and nails. “The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten,” Farago wrote, before going on to outline some exceptions to the rule.
Many media outlets, Allure included, are not helping the culture out there. In case you’re blissfully unaware, current best practices for optimizing evergreen service content for search engines recommend “refreshing” existing, highly trafficked URLs at least once a year by replacing most, if not all, of the article with brand-new content. The print version of Allure published fall-trend reports in its pages annually, cementing those looks as the looks of that particular era for future record. In the digital-only age of our brand, we dutifully refresh allure.com/story/fall-makeup-trends every year, wiping away any evidence of what was cool last year.
I’m not spilling any proprietary secrets here: This is a highly successful traffic-gaining strategy (therefore, a successful business plan, at least short-term) for many similar sites. It also ensures that a reader is finding relevant-right-now content, not accidentally landing on last year’s trends when they’re searching for autumnal makeup inspiration. I only realized the potential long-term effects when I was trying to remind myself of some notable 2015 trends to reference in another story. Those archives are becoming harder and harder to find.
But you know who I would argue this is not a problem for? The individual, beauty-loving people who are just trying to play around with something that brings them joy. There are too many real problems in the world to be concerned about whether someone thinks your haircut looks dated. More than ever, beauty should be a tool for judgment-free self-expression and happiness.
Maybe it’s true that this will be an era the world at large ultimately forgets. If that happens, then the hair and makeup and nail styles we’re wearing will truly have been just for us. Perhaps you post a selfie to Instagram or share a GRWM video on TikTok, but I have to assume all the currently popular social platforms will go the way of LiveJournal and MySpace, taking our publicly available content with it. And when that happens, what got the most likes will become the stuff of legend or, more likely, be forgotten. That might be a good thing.
As we prepare to ring in 2024, I hope to impart some comfort for you in regard to trying to keep up with what’s “on trend” or not. Buy yourself something pretty, even if it’s not going viral. Use the products you already have to create a look that brings you joy. Post about it or keep it for your own records. With trends as a concept in their flop era, maybe individual creativity will finally be able to shine.
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