Maximalism, wapas aa jao! Please return, I miss you…
It’s been a year of witnessing random fashion and beauty trends that don’t have staying power beyond a couple of months. The internet is saturated with content about new products and trends like they can cure cancer or something. Not complaining, because I do like having options, but I hate having the illusion of choice.
Let me explain.
Everything is the same?
Every makeup product being pushed out in the market by major brands and companies are ALL the damn same! They talk about having the same sheer coverage for a “natural finish”. For people not invested in skincare trends, sheer-coverage doesn’t cover anything at all, actually. It is simply meant to help your complexion look even. To actually cover pimples, spots etc., you will need anything between a medium (buildable) to full coverage product. Now the ‘clean girl’ trend that brought sheer coverage to the forefront of trends, started off with wanting to look nice without having to cake your whole face with makeup, while allowing your skin and you to breathe better.
While the origins of the trend is understandable, the name – clean girl makeup – itself has adjectives that are exclusionary in nature. It glamorises a very specific brand of ordinary and mediocre, in my opinion. The same chiselled cheekbones, pouty lips and thin, slicked-back hair – while these may be nice to look at, they are being commodified to become the aspirational norm that people are expected to conform to!
Although this trend has taken off, makeup brands continue to produce and sell all 3 types of foundations/concealers – sheer-coverage, medium (buildable), and full coverage products. Drag queens and professional makeup artists still use heavy-coverage base products, to achieve flamboyant and varied looks. To me, the problem lies in the way products are marketed. Yes, in the capitalist system, marketing has always been the source of evil in promoting products that no one actually needs. Allow me to clarify the paradox – no one “needs” makeup, it’s still a want. But the virtue-signalling tone of ‘clean girl’ as if every other way of being is not ‘clean’ is simply appalling. Being bare skin is not a sin nor is wanting to wear full-coverage foundations. Each way of presenting serves its purpose in a person’s life. Secondly, my gripe is also with pushing the need for elaborate makeup & skincare routines on everyone through content overload, making it look like a need rather than an option.
In my opinion, the “clean girl” aesthetic, the ever-so controversial beauty trend has not been criticised nearly enough. If we actually understood the weight of the cultural critique as to how the trend is inherently popularising something Latina, Black and even Indian makeup tricks that they were shamed for, then it would have been unpacked for the cultural appropriation that it is. Think using a dark lip-liner with light lip-gloss that’s now called ‘doughnut glazed lips” or wearing gold jewellery with slicked back hair. Women of colour were called “ghetto” and “oily” for doing these trends back in the 90s and early 2000s. Only for the same things to be applauded when the owner of Rhode Beauty does it?
Leave it to the professionals
People have been reminiscing about 2016’s makeup trends, which celebrated using makeup as a tool for expression. The makeup tricks that reigned supreme on the internet in 2016 were largely taught by queer and drag makeup artists like Nikkie Tutorials, Bretman Rock, Jefree Star, Gigi Gorgeous, and even RuPaul. Personally, I learnt most of my makeup tricks over the past decade from watching Nikkie Tutorials since I stumbled upon it in 2014. I still follow her tips and tricks to do a smokey eye (anybody else miss doing that? No? Just me then?).
2016 was a pivotal year for makeup, we had drag queens, cis-women and even teenagers on board with doing extremely elaborate makeup routines. Everyone was experimenting with makeup looks at 6am in the morning, everyone’s brows were on fleek, and matte lipsticks were the thing!
Grateful to the algorithm that has managed to recommend queer makeup artists/content creators like Frederic Chen and Stanzi Potenza to me, who are not only fellow non-binary theylies like yours truly, but also quite creative with their fashion and makeup! Stanzi, who is technically a comedy content-creator, has always shown up with elaborate and colourful makeup (think bold eyeliner, falsies and vibrant eyeshadow). She would take on the avatar of a sexist Chad (basic cis-white man) and mock it, making for hilarious skits!
Makes me also question, if queer content creators are the only ones pushing boundaries in terms of makeup? Think The Lipstick Lesbians’ Alexis Androulakis who explains makeup manufacturing like no other in the industry. Think Indian influencers like Shantanu Dhope, Rajkumari Coco, who have been creating original makeup content, pushing boundaries and absolutely not listening to haters!
Queer-led fashion and makeup creativity has always been a point of criticism, only to eventually be appropriated by the mainstream to profit from. I mean see the way Karan Johar is constantly criticised for his fashion choices. It’s a separate discussion that KJo’s sexuality is still widely speculated on the basis of his fashion choices, but the point is – are we perpetuating stereotypes that position queer folx as being good with makeup just by the virtue of being queer?
It’s a route we can’t escape, it’s a stereotype that both helps and suffocates. Surely makeup left in normie hands is ripe for capitalist exploitation through endless “trends”, but makeup left in queer (and professional MUA) hands immediately lends space for experimentation and creativity, it seems.
Why is this a problem?
Brands like Fenty, Rare Beauty and Rhode are able to market themselves as iconic, but their innovation stops at packaging and paying for their elaborate PR list of beauty creators who cater to their very-specific facial features and skin tone (wherever applicable).
As a consequence, Beauty and aesthetics have come to be perceived as 2 sides of the same coin, where beauty deals with trends, physical qualities and aesthetics is the larger picture that is a curation of things that are “beautiful”. Instagram filters and trends like the Clean Girl “aesthetic” have managed to alter our idea of beauty in that we see the same old types of faces and think, “yes that’s what is beautiful ”. Beauty standards do tend to fixate on one particular idealised feature(s), but what trends do is that they streamline one particular type of beauty, aesthetic, face and features as “it”!
What is a “clean” girl? Who is she? Why is she a ‘she’? Technically clean is just someone who has taken a bath, which also comes with a certain privilege in the present-day socio-political scenario. Does that mean we’re adding shame to the context of beauty? Why is it necessary to look “clean” (no, that does not mean that you start cosplaying as ‘working class’, looking at you, Jojo Siwa!)? Why is this a “beauty standard”? And why is it that “doing too much” is not considered fun anymore, but construed as a chore or a dread-worthy performance?
People do have the choice to do makeup as they like, but the second we start treating one choice as being better than the other, not because of the effort or personal preference but because of what looks better, then we are creating hierarchies. Can there really be levels to beauty? Can life be reduced to an aesthetic? Think about it.
