Could full glam makeup be making a comeback? After years of restraint, the beauty industry is shifting toward color, shine, and excess. The “clean girl” aesthetic, dominated by neutral tones and dewy skin, defined much of the past five years, but 2026 signals a turn toward bold glamour. On social media and runways alike, nostalgia for the mid-2010s is building momentum. The contour kits, holographic highlighters, and overlined lips once dismissed as relics of influencer beauty are being re-examined with a sense of affection.
The renewed attention around Kylie Jenner’s King Kylie collection has accelerated this shift. Within days of the launch, global searches for her lip kits doubled. Online, fans joke that Jenner could “end the clean girl era,” but their comments speak to a broader craving. Beauty consumers want spectacle again. They want texture, shimmer, and visible makeup, signs that expression has replaced effortlessness as the new ideal.
DISCOVER: Kylie Jenner Revives Her Viral Era with the King Kylie Collection
Runway beauty this season reinforced that desire for drama. At Chloé, vivid lip colors brightened natural glam, showing how a single pop of pigment can shift the mood of a look. At Vivetta, lashes appeared in electric shades, blue, fuchsia, even green, reviving the colored mascara trend that once defined early 2000s experimentation. Beauty leans again toward excess, as indulgence replaces simplicity and glamour takes center stage once more.
Culturally, the return of high-glam makeup speaks to more than nostalgia. After years of economic uncertainty, environmental anxiety, and filtered realism, people are reaching for something vivid. Philosopher Svetlana Boym described nostalgia as a way of remembering possibility, a desire to revisit emotions rather than eras. The shimmer of metallic shadow or the exaggerated lip liner becomes a small act of control, a way to feel excitement again in uncertain times.
Television and celebrity culture are feeding that appetite. Euphoria shaped a generation’s approach to makeup, bringing back glitter, gemstones, and the sense of fun that once defined getting ready. Its visual language, bold, emotional, and experimental, turned beauty into self-expression again. On TikTok, creators now remix 2016 style tutorials with humor and sincerity, aware they’re reviving an aesthetic once called excessive, and that awareness makes it feel new rather than nostalgic.
Earlier this year, the Mob Wife aesthetic captured a collective desire for visible luxury, smoky eyes, glossy lips, and deliberate excess. The look’s unapologetic confidence reignited interest in full glam, suggesting that people were once again drawn to makeup that feels textured, and alive.
Makeup may be entering a new phase, one that leans toward expression over simplicity. The return of color, texture, and visible effort suggests a shift in how beauty is being used again: as play, transformation, and mood. If minimalism defined the last chapter, this one leans toward curiosity, a soft return to expression, joy, and a touch of glitter.
