2016 Makeup (in praise of artifice)

Toward the end of my adolescence, a frankly bizarre number of my friends suddenly confessed a desire to become professional makeup artists. And the thing is, they weren’t being silly. They really could have. They spent their free time practicing new makeup looks, completely transforming their faces in front of their bedroom mirrors. They discoursed on water vs. silicon-based products. They spent all their pocket money at Sephora. Their time, effort, and money were funneled toward makeup. Their skills were prodigious.

The style we now derisively call “2016 Makeup” was self-consciously over the top and artificial. It wasn’t only the looks themselves. The culture around makeup at the time highlighted artistry, effort, and artificiality. People didn’t just spend long hours practicing their makeup. They boasted about how long their makeup took them, how many products they owned, how many skills they had mastered. The focus on makeup artists as heroes of the trend, rather than on, say, supermodels or influencers, revealed an understanding of beauty as a kind of artifice and artistry. Beauty, construed as the result of money, work, and skill, was framed as a lovely deviation from or improvement upon nature, a contrivance.

Things have changed. Now, the beauty trends themselves have gone minimal. The culture around beauty, meanwhile, has shifted towards a kind of pseudoscientific, capital-R Romantic embrace of the “natural.” As this excellent essay by

Jessica DeFino

points out, influencers and brands now frequently discuss beauty not as the result of hard work or artistic skill, but rather as a way to achieve “harmony”—that is, as a return to what is natural and correct. This “harmony” framing extends even to obviously unnatural interventions like cosmetic surgery, because these surgeries are now marketed and discussed as a way to “harmonize” or “balance” your features. That is to say, they are highly unnatural interventions performed in the service of bringing your face back to its objectively correct proportions, much in the way a surgeon might remove a tumor with cutting-edge techniques in order to bring the body back into its precancerous state of health. Thus, even creative and impressive beauty interventions are described as formulaic corrections—damage control rather than invention.

In other words: to be beautiful is the inevitable outcome of good health and a happy, productive life. Deviations from beauty norms are a result of “inflammation” or “cortisol face” or “hormone imbalances” or even just “imbalanced features.” Ugliness is hard, because you are fighting nature. Beauty is easy, or it should be, because it’s what happens when you let nature take its course.

2016 makeup was about making yourself a God with the power to reinvent your own face. 2025 makeup is about getting closer to a distant God (sometimes in a very literal way—think “divine feminine”) in a sort of protestant sense. If you can only be good enough and clean enough and healthy enough, you will return to the body the good lord intended for you. You will show that you are one of the elect, your soul safe and shining within, by acting like one of the elect (cutting out seed oils, I guess).¹

DeFino does an excellent job describing the longstanding historical links between beauty-as-harmony, on the one hand, and race science on the other, and I recommend pausing to read her essay. “Harmony symbolized supposed biological superiority,” DeFino writes. For the Nazis, Aryan beauty was inextricable from goodness, bodily health, hygiene, and connection to the land. Non-Aryan features were not just unattractive but incorrect, unnatural—and meanwhile, Jews and other undesirable races were actually hostile to the health and beauty of the natural landscape. The disharmony within the undesirable face was viewed as inextricable from the social and environmental disharmony wrought by the presence of the undesirable person. The Third Reich’s Minister of Food and Agriculture argued that the Nazi must serve the role of a gardener “ruthlessly eliminating the [human] weeds that would deprive the better plants of nutrition, the air, light, sun”: That is, an unnatural intervention in service of steering the physical and social environment back in its natural and correct direction.

Maybe it’s hysterical to suggest that we all shifted into little race scientists the moment heavy contour and winged liner went out of style. The culture did seem to shift alarmingly rightward, but coincidences happen, trends are always shifting, and the rate at which teenagers were stealing from Sephora was completely unsustainable anyway. The pendulum swings: beauty as harmony/health/balance/nature one year, beauty as play and artifice the next. And every trend is multifaceted. This was, after all, the year that Chappell Roan burst onto the mainstream in makeup inspired in equal measure by drag queens and clowns. Meanwhile new brands overtake old ones, consumers get tired of their expired products and reject their mothers’ tastes.

And still, there’s something ungenerous about the current “natural” beauty framework, which does not in fact celebrate the full range of naturally-occurring human bodies, but rather argues that there is a single normative body—a platonic form—which we can either cling to (success) or deviate from (failure). This framework offers no room for play, novelty, or invention. It tamps down what is most exciting about beauty, whether one’s own or someone else’s: the surprise of it, the way it can distract, overwhelm. It’s a remarkably unsexy and humorless approach to the question of being beautiful. In contrast, the beauty-as-artifice framework welcomes every face with open arms: each one is ripe for the ritual of modification.

Movies and TV shows set in the Victorian era frequently depict women being stuffed into corsets, gasping in pain while a no-nonsense ladies maid pulls the strings as tight as they’ll go. Feminist fashion historians and writers tend to take issue with these depictions. For one thing, they say, corsets (well, stays, actually—people tend to mix the two up) existed for back and bust support and could actually make women more comfortable, like bras today. For another, they point out, the exaggerated silhouettes of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with their wasplike waists and enormous hips, were created by clothing: padding on the hips, crinolines, and, yes, stays and corsets. Now, women starve themselves or give up gluten or spend hours doing squats and then panic that the squats are making them too buff or manly and then pivot to pilates and self-starvation again (and I say this as someone who loves pilates). Is this better than wearing a crinoline? Maybe! But it’s not lower-effort or more natural, it’s just that the artistry of the endeavor is concealed inside the body itself, much as it has been concealed in the recent shift from heavy makeup to elaborate skincare to today’s moral-mystical-thereapeutic blend of dieting, supplements, injections, and surgery.

Not coincidentally, we are living in a moment where artistry in general is treated with denigration and suspicion. We don’t dress like the Victorians anymore for a whole variety of reasons, but one reason is that those clothes were expensive and difficult to make—the opposite of cheap fast fashion created by an underpaid, faceless worker and then tossed out in two weeks. Various CEOs gleefully explain that AI is going to replace illustrators and graphic designers, that books will be replaced by NFTs, etc. Some people on the ostensible left offer a weaker echo of the tech-overlord hatred of art and beauty, insisting that it’s somehow classist or ableist or whatever to read anything other than kids’ books and romance, or to wear anything other than Shein and Temu. Many people, ostensibly across the political spectrum, treat any kind of aesthetic effort—in art or in fashion or in beauty—as a morally suspect form of indulgence, as if they are Roundheads shuttering the theaters and shrieking about popishness.

Once upon a time we stored vast amounts of information in our brains: poems and bible verses and, later, phone numbers and addresses and directions. With the advent and spread of writing, and then other technologies—GPS, for instance—we have shifted these cognitive duties outward. The theory of extended cognition proposes that, as we lean on external technologies to perform these duties, we are in effect enlarging the territory occupied by our own minds, spreading our cognition into the surrounding environment. Written text is literally part of your mind. Google Maps is part of your mind. This essay, and the word processor I’m using to write it, is part of my mind.

One way to think about this entire trend cycle—from the embrace of overt artificiality in beauty to the embrace of an (equally effortful and contrived) “natural” beauty—is as a movement between extended and narrowed approaches to embodiment. 2016 makeup, like corsets and crinolines, extended our bodies in the same way that writing extended our minds. Our bodies were in the brow pencils and the powder highlighter. Our bodies were in the Sephora stockroom. The shift toward athleisure and exercise and “lowering your inflammation” is a narrowing of the body’s territory to such a point that even external beauty must come from inside, from further within the human form. If you don’t have it, it’s because you don’t want it bad enough inside, or because you want it the wrong way, or you’re lazy, or there’s simply something wrong with you. Your inner disharmony shows on your face. Your facial disharmony threatens the harmony of the external world. You’re ugly outside because you’re ugly on the inside. You’re a shit-stirrer. Go get a laser facial.

1. Last night, my boyfriend and I watched an episode of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City in which the ladies, judged by Trixie Mattel, participate in a drag competition. They demonstrate varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, but one of them throws an absolute fit and refuses to participate: Lisa Barlow, a New York Jew turned Mormon convert, and probably the first Google result when you search “prosperity gospel.” Poor Lisa Barlow’s discomfort with the concept of a colorful eyeshadow feels like a real encapsulation of this whole thing.