In Beauty Freak, a new column for Highsnobiety, writer Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.
“Buck.” “Smog.” “Half Baked.” “Creep.” These words meant something if you wore eyeshadow ten years ago, when Urban Decay’s first Naked Palette launched with 12 evocatively named shades encased in brown velvet.
The set of nude, earthy, and deep-neutral colors was tame for a brand with a reputation for edgy rebelliousness. But the Naked Palette essentially kicked off the beauty aesthetic of the 2010s, centering on high contrast, high glamour, and highlighter.
Arguably, eyeshadow is trend-resistant in that it will never truly go away. There will always be the diehard punks who sport daily dark liner, the cocktail waitresses with a daytime smokey eye, and people committed to glamor in ways that cults could study. I continuously see the blue eyeshadow of The Love Witch, Christina Ricci in Buffalo 66, and Twiggy on moodboards cataloging beauty signatures. In semi-recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic caused eye makeup sales to surge because the eyes were the only things visible behind a KN95.
But the early 2010s beauty landscape was built brick by brick (or palette by palette) from these veritable encyclopedias of eyeshadow. Makeup brands such as Too Faced, Huda Beauty, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Tarte, and Pat McGrath Labs put out some of the best-known franchises. Makeup artist-turned-brand name Natasha Denona proved that people were willing to spend up to $250 for what amounted to about 28 shades. You could whip out a MTHRSHP palette and instantly wield all the clout in the room.
Compared to today’s no-makeup makeup ideal, which leaves the eye seemingly bare (if not smeared with Le Mer or Augustinus Bader eye cream, Botoxed, or Bleph’ed), it was truly a different time; this was the pre-clean-girl era. One could only possess so many nude shades.
For the beauty business, one of the revelations of the Urban Decay Naked palette and its successors was the way they could be released in “drops” — something more akin to sneakers or Pokémon cards than what your mother would buy at the beauty counter. When I was a beauty editor at Allure, any word that Urban Decay was about to release a new Naked palette was an all-hands-on-deck situation with the urgency of geopolitical warfare. It would often be the most-clicked story of the month.
Another driver of the booming eyeshadow economy was the sheer quality of the product. Makeup got good in the 2010s. Colors were rich and highly pigmented. YouTube swatch porn — videos of people dipping a finger into an eyeshadow pan and smearing it on their hand to show the saturation — garnered thousands of views, and that’s before you even saw it on a face. Palette mania and the content created around it proved that everyone was using them, which encouraged makeup enthusiasts to invent increasingly layered and vivid looks. In all, Urban Decay churned out more than 30 Naked palette sequels and offshoots.
“You’re holding colors you would never walk up to [if they were] in a single pan,” says makeup artist Amanda Rodriguez who worked at Urban Decay in sales and then product development when the Naked franchise dominated beauty. “I probably wouldn’t have touched a red copper shadow if it wasn’t sitting in front of me in something like Naked Heat. It gives you permission to go for it.”
Of course, the era of Naked didn’t last. “At a certain point, everything started to look the same — too many dupes, too many safe iterations,” Rodriguez says. “There were a lot of ideas that didn’t make it, especially once you’re owned by L’Oréal. That was always the tension: The brand started a certain way but couldn’t always go there anymore.” (L’Oréal bought Urban Decay in 2012 for an estimated $300 to $400 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.) When Urban Decay discontinued the original Naked palette in 2018, it spelled the unofficial end of the palette index.
By then, the tide had already turned away from eyeshadow as a category. No-makeup makeup had become the foil to the ultra-glam look made ubiquitous by Instagram. Glossier’s approachable and easy-to-use Phase One made looking semi-bare-faced cool; a cut-creased eye and contoured brows felt a bit self-serious in comparison.
Today’s ideal aesthetic is, ironically, a contradictory endeavor; achieving the look often requires just as many — if not more — products than a bold makeup look. First, you have to erase your supposed flaws and blemishes, then you must hide the effort involved in doing so. Things get even more complicated when you factor in skincare prep and all that morning shed business. And yet, these aesthetics are often positioned as opposites: two lewks, both alike in dignity.
Luckily, eyeshadow couldn’t be kept down for long. When Euphoria premiered on HBO in June 2019, it became a sensation not just as a suspenseful teen drama, but also for its use of eye makeup, which became a defining part of the show’s cinematography and character storytelling. With glittery tear trails, crystal face decals, and neon eyeliner, it was a refreshing take on color cosmetics that didn’t feel designed to emphasize femininity or beauty norms. If conventional beauty’s idea of “attractive” was a sports car — where aesthetics enable peak performance — Euphoria’s was more in the vein of a tropical fish, which is striking for the sake of it. See: Maddy’s crystal-lined teal winged liner to match her cheerleader uniform, Jules’s spiky lash decals that made her eyes look like Venus fly traps, Rue’s glittery tears, and Cassie’s lovesick rosy makeup look that spawned many TikTok recreations.
The Euphoria eyeshadow effect was so strong that its production company, A24, launched Half Magic Beauty with Doniella Davy, the lead makeup artist for the show. The line offers colorful shadows, liners, glitters, and crystal embellishment as seen on the Euphoria cast (including its first dedicated Euphoria collection that was recently released, despite the brand having launched four years ago). “The idea of wearing a colorful and shimmery eye look became fair game for every day,” Davy says of the show’s influence. This month, Season 3 began airing, which we might interpret as a sign that eyeshadow is about to be so back. “I think we are already seeing a swing back to bold, colorful eye makeup looks,” she adds.
Indeed, stylization seems to be the draw again, from what I’ve witnessed in my feeds. The grunge eye, the doe eye, the siren eye — all looks meant to evoke an emotion, or a sense of make-believe. Makeup moodboards featuring Y2K era teen celebrities, photos of Pam Anderson, Devon Aoki, and current pop girls like Zara Larsson and Chappell Roan are prompting us to reach for those expired eyeshadow palettes we kept around just in case.
“Even within the ‘clean girl’ space, people are starting to want a little more personality again,” Rodriguez says. “I don’t see it going back to peak palette culture, but I do think eyeshadow as an expression is coming back in a less mass, more intentional way.”
In fact, I’d venture to say that beauty needs eyeshadow now more than ever. The beauty world feels like a perilous place, with the medically assisted homogenization of features pushing the culture toward increasingly inaccessible measures for self-optimization. Eyeshadow is a humble symbol of a time when beauty was just fun. It was a time when we could turn to beauty to feel something other than anxiety and dread.
Davy has a similar idea. People are starting to “inject more feeling and mood into makeup, which can be really therapeutic and cathartic,” she says. “It feels like a good time to show up in color and shimmer to be unapologetic and to be defiant.” At the end of days, we’ll likely still be gazing at the apocalypse with a halo eye, lash strips, and the little highlight on the brow bone.
Highsnobiety has affiliate marketing partnerships, which means we may receive a commission from your purchase. Want to shop the products our editors actually love? Visit HS Shopping for recs on all things fashion, footwear, and beauty.
