Instagram eyebrows, rainbow hair, contouring, strobing: Take a look at the hottest beauty trends from the past five years, and odds are you’ll find a YouTube star or hot Instagram craze behind it, along with plenty of mixed feelings. “Social media is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the beauty industry,” celebrity makeup artist Pati Dubroff told The Cut in an interview earlier this year, citing a proliferation of sameness as the result of an Instagram-obsessed culture.
That sameness has revolutionized the industry in some ways, leading to influencer-curated collections for major beauty brands and a monetization of social stardom that the business side of the industry has struggled to keep pace with. Likewise, the debate has raged on about what, exactly, that does to fans of these media mavens; whether the fetishization of a particular look is damaging in creating a false dichotomy — the right way to look vs. every other way.
