Ugly makeup: the trend highlighting what's beyond conventional beauty

In 2018, Rosanna Meikle felt like a failure. She was toiling through beauty school, and she hadn’t been able to find much work nor garner much attention for her creations online. She was exhausted from the sameness she saw around her, “a sea of beautiful girls, smoky eyes and plumped lips”, she remembers. “My school was in an expensive area of Auckland, which made me feel so out of place. I couldn’t afford the products or the clothes, my kit wasn’t ‘professional’ enough and neither was my look.”

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So she decided to try something totally different. One day, she created “a mess”. For an assignment, she painted her model with black, aggressive scribbles, green cartoonish snakes, blurry orange lips and spiky, Twiggy-esque lashes. “I was under the impression my look was awful,” she says. But on Instagram, it took off.

Meikle didn’t realize it at the time, but she was joining a movement that has been slowly gaining momentum – the ugly makeup revolution, a term coined by the Berlin-based makeup artist and activist Eszter Magyar, who began working on the project in 2018. “Ugly makeup revolution is a community,” she says, as is her other hashtag, makeup brutalism.

I absolutely love it, and want others to see its demanding beauty too.

During quarantine, I’ve been luxuriating in the strangeness of it, and occasionally trying my hand at slightly ugly or off-kilter looks of my own, embracing slime green eye shadow and blue lips.

Online, the best entries into the still-burgeoning canon are often grotesque and rather uncanny. Pearls glued to skin, rimming an eyelid like so many warts. Black scribbled words across a red-painted face, screaming at the viewer to “eat the rich.”. Pollack-like splatters of blue on yellow lips. There’s something dreamlike about them. Some are playful and childlike – Dr Seuss would approve. But others are sinister and menacing, aggressive and slightly brutal. They look like they hurt to wear, and some of them do.

The work of these artists is frequently derided – for being both too ugly and not ugly enough. “It’s not about ugliness,” Magyar says. “It’s about irregularity. Ugly is just a word, which makes you pay attention.”

This irregularity goes against what we’re accustomed of seeing on social media. Over the past five years, a “selfie face” has emerged: pursed lips, big, wide-open eyes, and feature-enhancing makeup applied just so. “The fact that there’s such a specific face associated with the selfie tells us that the portrait is less about expressing one’s self and more about expressing compliance with the idea of what a young woman is,” writes Autumn Whitefield-Madrano in her 2017 book, Face Value. “If there’s self-expression involved in the prototypical selfie, it’s the expression of a wish, not of reality.”

Ugly makeup challenges this status quo. “We’re living in the age of tutorials, when everyone is asking how and never why,” says Magyar. “Lots of people are accepting what they see without questioning anything at all. They know how to draw the perfect liner but they have no idea why they’re doing it.” His looks are different. They’re imperfect, sloppy and chaotic. Some remind me of the Fauvist paintings, while others feel cubist and still others are straight-up dada. While the artists sometimes share how they created a look, the focus is less on remaking what you see. Viewers are there to appreciate the vision, not replicate it on their own bodies.

Ugly makeup also has a political side. It subverts the purpose of makeup that has been imposed on the practice by evolutionary biologists and writers. According to this late-20th-century school of thought, popularized by Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape (1967), women wear lipstick to make our lips look more like blood-swollen labia and eye shadow to give our eyes that sleepy, dewy post-orgasm glow. And so for the past half-century, we have been told that makeup is a tool that aids in procreation, even if on a subconscious horny level. “Lipstick manufacturers did not create an enhanced mouth,” wrote Morris. “They created a pair of super labia.” Talk about a cubist nightmare.

While sociologists and anthropologists have long questioned the accuracy of Morris’s theories, the idea that makeup is about sex remains prevalent. Women who wear lots of makeup are often stigmatized or dismissed. Women who wear too little are called unprofessional or sloppy. And men who wear makeup? They receive their own set of stereotypes.

Ugly makeup flies in the face of all that. While strangeness can be very sexy, the purpose isn’t to be sexy (which, paradoxically, is why it’s can be so sexy, I think). The purpose is to please the wearer. “To look at something ugly, and realize it unexpectedly pleases you, is a rather precious moment that forces us to reconsider the confines of what we deem necessary for something to be beautiful,” says Julia Lee, a 24-year-old designer who lives in Singapore. Lee also occasionally wears her ugly makeup looks in public, even though “Singapore is rather conservative in terms of aesthetics”, she says. Her blue lips, created with eyeshadow, feel like a “middle finger” to social expectations.

Caroline Heggdal, a 27-year-old creator from Norway, is a bit more hesitant about wearing her extreme looks – which include red-rimmed eyes decorated with tiny white flowers – in public. “I’m very shy and afraid of being judged,” she explains. “I really wish I had the courage to walk outside with my makeup.” However, she does see the trend slowly trickling into the mainstream, which gives her some hope. “I think a lot of people have realized that the same smoky eye can be somewhat boring,” she says.

While it’s hard to imagine a world where everyone starts gluing Legos to their eyelids, but I’ve recently been noticing more terracotta eyeshadow and pink eyeliner, two colors that were previously avoided by beauty bloggers for their association with pinkeye. I have also seen more blurry mouths, smudgy lipstick, more under-eye liner, and more drawn-on looks that mimic the facial tattoos popular with the Zoomer set.

Although it may seem insulting for me to categorize these trends as ugly, I like to think of it as Magyar does. It’s a compliment – a word that makes people sit up and pay attention. Ugly exists for ugly’s sake. It’s an underrated aesthetic, one that more people should embrace.