I smile to myself when I see a twenty-something-year-old on my TikTok or Insta feed “discovering” a makeup look and presenting it as the definitive trend of the moment. The latest “trend” is smudged eyeliner, untamed brows, and a slightly muddy neutral matte lip, creating an unbothered and slightly messy look. What I find amusing is that this “new” trend strongly resembles the “grunge makeup” of the 1990s.
I’m not saying this to be smug, although I admit it’s tempting. I’m saying it because there’s an actual pattern here, one that goes back further than the dawn of social media, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Makeup doesn’t present a new, innovative look every few seasons. It recycles them on a schedule, with slight modifications, and the schedule is more predictable than the cosmetic industry would like to admit.
That Pattern Has a Name
There’s a name for the pattern: “the twenty-year rule,” though depending on who you ask, it sometimes can stretch to thirty or forty.
It comes from James Laver, a fashion historian at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, better known as the V&A, one of the world’s biggest museums for art and design. He published a theory back in 1937 arguing that styles cycle back into fashion on a set timeline. Laver’s original number was closer to fifty years, not twenty. Somewhere along the way, pop culture rounded it down, so treat the “twenty-year rule” as a widely repeated idea from fashion history.
What holds up under real research is the reason behind the pattern. Psychologists call it the “reminiscence bump”: your most vivid, emotionally charged memories form somewhere between adolescence and your early twenties. Those are the memories a generation reaches for once they’re old enough to actually shape an industry rather than just buy what it’s offering. That’s why trends resurface every 20-30 years. It’s not clever nostalgic marketing. It’s just how long it takes a room full of teenagers to grow up and get a seat at the table where “trend” decisions are made.
The Eighties Resurface
Take a good look at the makeup of the 1980s, because it’s hard not to notice how closely it resembles 2014 through 2020.
The eighties were built on excess: excessively bright, colorful eyeshadow swept from lash line to brow bone, hot pink and fuchsia lips applied with zero apology, purple blush applied so heavily it sometimes made the skin look bruised. Cyndi Lauper wasn’t wearing makeup so much as making a statement with it, and the statement was that subtlety could wait for another decade.
Now think about “Instagram makeup” starting from around 2014 until the COVID lockdown, because it was chasing that same look with a different toolkit. Heavy contour cut in with knife-like precision, cheekbone highlights shining bright enough to show up from space, brows drawn in like architectural monuments, a “full beat” treated as the baseline rather than a special-occasion look. The Kardashian-Jenners didn’t invent maximalist beauty. They just replicated the eighties’ makeup excess with a beauty blender and photo filters.
That’s not a coincidence; it’s the recycling of a makeup look, showing up right on schedule.
We’re Even Recycling the Dueling Makeup Trends of the 1990s
The nineties never fully agreed on one look, and neither do we in the mid-2020s.
In the 1990s, on one side, you had a Calvin Klein/Giorgio Armani natural-looking minimalism: nude lip liner, a barely-there wash of beige shadow on eyelids with a little mascara, skin left alone to be skin. On the other hand, you had grunge: a careless smear of dark eyeshadow on the eyelids, smudged black eyeliner that looked like it had barely survived a long night at the club, lightened skin that looked almost vampiric, matte lips in bruised, muddy shades. Models Kate Moss (grunge) and Christy Turlington (minimalist) were living proof that both aesthetics could coexist in the same era without canceling each other out.
That’s exactly what’s happening right now, and everyone’s already put a name on both halves of it. “Skinimalism” and the clean girl aesthetic picked up where nineties minimalism left off: skin-first, barely-there color, the idea that less product signals more confidence. At the same time, grunge makeup has come back hard enough to show up on current fashion runways and inside a wave of TikTok tutorials, with smudged eyeliner and matte, muddy lips leading the charge.
There’s a certain irony that this revival has created. This time around, beauty marketing is trying desperately to cash in on both sides at once, with brands trying to sell “clean grunge” as a look, which is a total contradiction in terms. The entire point of nineties grunge was the refusal to be polished or “clean.” What I find even more interesting is how both of these competing looks have resurfaced as trends again, at the same time - right on schedule.
Patrick Ta Proves My Point
If you want proof this cycle is playing out in real time, look at the “transition blush” drama that broke out this year. Patrick Ta Beauty launched a collection built around what he called “Transition Blush,” a soft, gradient blush technique blurred up toward the temple, and filed a trademark for the name back in May 2025, a full year before the product ever hit shelves. When it finally launched, the internet did not let it slide.
Here’s why. That gradient blush application has roots dating back centuries, appearing in Tang Dynasty rouge and Heian-era Japanese beni. In the modern era, Serge Lutens brought the technique back into the spotlight in the late 1960s and early 1970s while creating his radical, boundary-pushing makeup line for Dior. Way Bandy repurposed it in the 1980s and gave it the name it still wears today, “blush draping.” Kevyn Aucoin picked it back up in the 1990s and published it in his 1997 book, “Making Faces.” Decades later, makeup artist Ngozi Edeme, known online as Painted by Esther, built a massive following by putting her own spin on it, consistently crediting Aucoin as her inspiration throughout.
So when Ta tried to trademark “Transition Blush” as if he’d invented it, he wasn’t just stepping on one artist’s toes. He was staking a claim to something that had already passed through Asian beauty tradition, a 1970s makeup revolution, and the hands of one of the most influential artists of the 1990s before it ever reached him. He’s since walked it back and given Esther her credit. But the whole episode is a tidy, very current example of exactly what this article is about: someone calling a decades-old idea “new,” and getting caught doing it.
Why I Care
I’m at the age where I’ve actually applied a lot of these looks on real faces - the first time they were popular. It’s great to see some of my favorite makeup styles from the past reemerge, but it’s perplexing to see them promoted as “new”. They’re not innovation; they’re the current reimagining of something that already existed.
When a client asks me for something “totally new,” half the time they’re describing a look I was applying before some of them were born - the only difference is, this time around I’m using better formulas and application tools. I don’t waste time reinventing the wheel; I take the rock-solid techniques handed down by my mentors and reinterpret the iconic makeup looks from the past into something updated and modern.
And if you’re the type who falls for makeup marketing hype that promotes a “new look” every few seasons, hopefully this article has opened your eyes. That “new” grunge palette is, at best, a reference to a makeup trend from over 30 years ago. That doesn’t make it a copycat or bad. It just makes “new” the wrong word for it.
#MyTwoCents
None of what I’m saying is to knock anyone falling in love with a look for the first time. Everyone gets to discover things on their own timeline. What amuses me, and occasionally irritates me, is the industry’s habit of repackaging the past and selling it back to us as innovation, then acting surprised when someone with a memory calls them out.
The cycle isn’t going to stop, and that’s OK.
Right now, we’re reliving a split-screen nineties moment, skin-first minimalism on one side, deliberately messy, undone grunge on the other, both competing for the same social media virality. In twenty years, someone will call this era “iconic” and sell it back to the next generation as something innovative, because that’s how the cycle runs.
How many makeup trends have you seen recycled in your lifetime? What makeup trend do you think will reemerge next? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com