Beauty trends of yore are having something of a renaissance, courtesy of decade-spanning nostalgia – and TikTok. According to the creative and image director for Christian Dior Makeup, Peter Philips, there’s always room for reinterpretation.

I was a teenager in the ’90s, which means a few things: I always rewind my VHS tapes, I don’t really understand TikTok, and the natural shape of my eyebrows is a distant and hazy memory. I blame Judy Blume’s Forever, the teen bible of yesteryear, for igniting the courage to pick up that Lady Bic razor in the first place. The concise description of Blume’s protagonist, Katherine, “plucking six hairs from one eyebrow and five from the other,” changed something in me. She was a young woman in control of her own aesthetic destiny, and so was I! In retrospect, it was not a good idea to shave my bushy monobrow; for the rest of the school year, the gap between my eyebrows was the exact width of said Lady Bic, and the eyebrows themselves were two rudimentary lines that looked as if they had been thinly drawn on by someone who had simply put their crayon down when they’d finished.

Thirty years later, my brows and I have found something of a groove. But I still shudder at the sight of an unattended razor. So you can imagine my surprise to see some of Gen Z’s most notable ambassadors – Iris Law, Amelia Gray, and soon-to-be The 1975 WAG, Gabbriette – sporting pencil-thin arches, not to mention the bleached and bedazzled brows that dominated the spring couture shows. Drawn on by Dame Pat McGrath, Gwendoline Christie’s slim arches for her Maison Margiela debut were reminiscent of a china doll, whereas Irina Shayk and Karlie Kloss’s bleached brows at Schiaparelli resembled something more alien-like, their foreheads appearing bare from eyeball to hairline. How did we possibly get back here?

“Trends in makeup come and go, and every generation gives new life to existing interpretations,” says Peter Philips, creative and image director for Christian Dior Makeup. “There are, of course, styles and fashions that mark a certain period,” he continues as I recall the ubiquity of seeing my own skinny brows staring back at me in all manner of pre-social media, typically paired with mauvey-nude lips courtesy of M.A.C.’s era-defining Lip Liner in Spice. “But that doesn’t mean that later generations should be denied the joy of experiment-ing and playing with those styles. By doing so, they’re reinventing them simply by the fact that they are now applied in a different context.”

Much of our current context, of course, is generated by TikTok. “If you’re a young person now you just do what TikTok says because that is where you get your information,” says Andrew Gallimore, a London-based makeup artist who regularly works with the Gossip frontwoman, Beth Ditto, on her rockabilly cat eye and brow-free forehead. Right now, TikTok is a major purveyor of beauty nostalgia, causing, among other things, a blush boom, a mascara bust, and a run on ’90s lip liner (thank you, Sabrina Carpenter). Makeup artist Daniel Martin, the global director of artistry and education for Tatcha, has seen the throwbacks. “People are now trying what their parents wore when they were young. It’s new to them, but they don’t know how to get there. That’s actually the thing about social media that I hate,” he says. “It brings back these moments without the understanding of what you had to do to get the look.”

While recent beauty trend resurrections may lack what Martin calls “the intention and the soul” of their subculture-born predecessors, they often benefit from the technological advancements of hindsight, which only aids their virality. “Modern formulas go hand in hand with the modern world,” says Philips, who created the images here using standouts from Dior Makeup’s fall launches, which include Rouge Dior’s new nudes. An update on the ’90s lipstick mainstay that accounts for every possible lip tone courtesy of a collaboration with the LVMH Research International Center for Cosmetic Expertise Evaluation, the selection of nine new shades rounds out a collection of 40-plus nudes in satin and velvet finishes. The same shade-mapping work also yielded seven new creamy, flesh-toned colours of Rouge Dior Contour lip liners for inclusive, ultra-precise shaping that does not move.

Similar innovations have helped make blush a shopping cart staple (it’s currently a $59 million business on Amazon alone). The time-honoured product, which dates back to ancient Egypt, has experienced a resurgence thanks in large part to novel formulas, as seen with Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez’s hyper-pigmented Soft Pinch Liquid Blush, and new entrants from brands like Saie, Dior Makeup’s dual-sided Rouge Blush & Glow palettes – four duos of matte blush alongside creamy highlighter – and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode. Bieber recently hosted a “pocket-sized” pop-up in New York for her new Pocket Blush, a clever on-the-go cream blush stick boosted with peptides and tamanu oil. About a thousand fans showed up before the doors even opened.

“It’s not just updating the products, it’s about updating the ideas too,” Martin says, noting that something like goth makeup, once the mainstay of the moody and miserable, has been defibrillated with new interpretations that are “cool” and even “sexy.” Tish Weinstock, the English beauty editor and influencer, has made this confluence her aesthetic calling card. Eschewing undereye concealer, Weinstock relies on Vaseline-slicked lids, a thick coat of black mascara, and a “’90s, throwback” brown lipstick to fully execute her version of 21st-century goth, which she described as “giving fresh up top and death below” in a recent post on Instagram.

But some things can’t be improved on – not even with the aid of new ingredients and social media. “What you remember versus what your daughter is living are two very different things,” says Martin, who finds the modern version of M.A.C.’s Lip Liner in Spice to be slightly warmer and more orange-toned than the original. Some trends maybe shouldn’t be revisited, either. Adds Martin, “kids these days do not have the foresight that plucking your eyebrows right off might be kind of permanent!”

dior.com

Taken from Issue 73 of 10 Magazine UK – RISING, RENEW, RENAISSANCE – out NOW.

Photographers ANTOINE AND CHARLIE
Creative Director and Make-up PETER PHILIPS
Text HANNA HANRA
Make-up PETER PHILIPS using Dior Forever throughout
Models EVA KOMUVES and NYAKONG CHAN at Select Model Management, TIDA ROSVALL at IMG and XINYUE GUO at Premium Model Management
Hair SEBASTIEN RICHARD
Manicurist ANATOLE RAINEY
Digital operator LOUIS CLERC
Photographers’ assistants JULES MARTIN and MARTA PABA
Make-up assistants AYANA AWATA and SAYURI YAMASHITA
Hair assistant SADEK LARDJANE
SFX assistant AUDREY GARRELON
Production ELISSA THOMAS