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I remember my first love affair with an eye shadow palette. Urban Decay’s Skull Shadow Box, with its crinkly silver wrapping and cutesy foam skull appliqué, came out in the 2000s with a nine-pan color story that could kindly be described as “eclectic.” The shade that hooked me was Cherry, a pastel pink with silver micro glitter that I wore down to the metal again and again. I’d routinely re-buy the palette just for that one shade.
Back then, as a teenager in suburbia without a credit card or a Sephora in sight, I’d save all my Christmas and birthday cash, stalk eBay for my most coveted products, then trek to the drugstore to buy money orders (money orders!) to pay for them. Waiting weeks for a package made each product feel like a treasure.
Now, as a professional makeup artist in my thirties, I’m blessed with a level of access to products my younger self would have envied. I have a fully stocked kit, drawers overflowing with palettes, stacks of PR mailers, every shade and formula I could have dreamed of back then. And yet, something is missing. I no longer get that sugar-high kind of rush when I open new products. In fact, when I recently decluttered my entire collection, I came to find that—aside from boring necessities like mascara, primer, and brow pencils—there were only a couple of products in my kit that I loved anywhere near as much as my old favorites. The last time I was truly excited about a beauty product, I realized, was in high school.
At first, I thought this was because so many of my original favorites had been discontinued. I bought a Natasha Denona palette once simply because it had a light pink shade that looked like it could be somewhat similar to Urban Decay’s Cherry. It wasn’t. Beautiful, but too refined, too wet-looking, not quite right. So I went back on eBay and there it was: the Skull Shadow Box, over two decades old now and absolutely not talc-free—and, impossibly, an untouched, full-size Cherry eye shadow single (that cost a whopping $70 by itself, by the way). I bought both and waited with anticipation for the little packages in the mail. I wondered: Was my enthusiasm truly gone, or would opening these products feel the same as it did decades ago? When they arrived, my heart raced. It did feel the same. Better, maybe–it felt like coming home.
"Influencer culture has turned beauty into a performance wherein the purpose of makeup is content rather than ritual."
Anyone who gets wistful about makeup from the ‘90s and 2000s will tell you that their magic was never in the formulas. Many of the products themselves were arguably worse than they are today. Hard Candy polishes chipped rapidly. Urban Decay’s glitter eye shadows were fallout central (I love you, Midnight Cowboy Rides Again, but your chunky glitter was not the most eye-safe). MAC lipsticks, dreamily sweet as they smelled, couldn’t help but be drying. Rather, the magic came from something that beauty as a whole—the products, the practice, the culture—simply lacks now: imagination, possibility, context.
Makeup came wrapped in myth. Hard Candy’s highly coveted Sky nail polish was conceived by a college student, brand founder Dineh Mohajer, mixing colors by hand in her dorm room. Urban Decay’s ads boldly (or by today’s standards, problematically) asked, “Does pink make you puke?” while throwing shades with names like Asphyxia, Stray Dog, and ABC Gum into a homogenous beauty landscape dominated by repetitive reds and pinks. And because there were far fewer products to choose from, your relationship with each one ran deep. A single lipstick could carry you for years. A palette wasn’t just a palette, it was the palette. Those choices became part of who you were.
Fast forward to now, and the landscape couldn’t be more different. You can order new makeup the day it comes out and have it on your doorstep by lunchtime if you want it that badly. Makeup hauls and kit decluttering videos dominate entire platforms. Microtrends flare and vanish in a week; brands and beauty media outlets can barely keep up. Influencer culture has turned beauty into a performance wherein the purpose of makeup is content rather than ritual. We film our vanities, unbox our PR, post our tutorials, share our selfies, but, like…for what? When’s the last time anyone’s actually gotten ready to go out? (Without posting about it, anyway.)
"Because there were far fewer products to choose from, your relationship with each one ran deep."
That explains why everyone is currently obsessed with the makeup products and trends of the ’90s and early 2000s. TikTok has turned makeup artist Erin Parsons into a beauty historian for the masses; her fascinating deep dives into the lore of products inspire a kind of nostalgic beauty renaissance. The same goes for content creator Vintage Dusties, who has built a devoted following with nothing but voiced-over unboxings, revivals, and swatches of nail polishes from the days of yore. Our collective love for Pamela Anderson (both her past signature look and her pared-down modern pivot) has inspired a new generation of smoky-eyed, frosted-lipped blondes. Cool-toned products are mercifully back in rotation, and brands have taken note; MAC, once the brand of choice for supermodels and It-girls, crashed headfirst into the nostalgia train with its recent MAC Nudes lipstick collection, which resurrected beloved ‘90s and 2000s shades like Folio and Fleshpot.
It’s more than trend cycles at work here. It’s a cultural longing for mood, memory, and discovery. A deep longing for a simpler time. A time when we actually had time to ourselves, away from the prying eyes of a social media culture that demands we expose every waking detail of our lives. Today, we have to go on digital detoxes to just be able to exist as humans in the world. Back in the day, you could leave your house without a phone and simply be gone. Unreachable. Almost no one growing up today will know what that’s like. Millennials like me barely remember what that’s like. My phone recently died while I was out for the day, and after the initial panic of being disconnected died down, I felt a dizzying sense of freedom, like I was high on it.
That’s what the revival is trying but failing to tap into: a time before algorithms told us what to buy, when we could still go out and discover it—on shelves, in magazines, in public—for ourselves. A time before same-day delivery and never-ending processions of “must-haves” inspired by content creators who make commissions on your purchases. Our current appetite for old products is rooted in something deeper than trend nostalgia. It’s about buying a piece of that simpler time back. It’s not the products we miss, but who we were when we wore them and the pre-digital environment in which we discovered them (and in the case of the youngsters, a curiosity about what that kind of life was like).
"That’s what we’re all hungry for: products that help us connect with who we are."
If a trend is always a reaction to or rebellion against what came before, then the intensity of the ‘90s and Y2K beauty revival speaks to craving freedom from being oversaturated, overstimulated, and overconnected. In a cultural landscape that gives us both too much and less of everything, I see this pivot toward the more personal, less polished side of beauty as a sign that—hopefully—we’re all still craving stories over content. Authenticity over hegemony. Long-lasting connections over short-lived flings.
When I tried on the shades from my newly acquired Skull Shadow Box, I finally understood what I’d been missing. The formula definitely hadn’t improved with age. But that didn’t matter. Swiping Cherry across my lids brought me face-to-face with my teenage self, who spent hours perfecting her signature smoky eye in the mirror and found a secret door to her life’s calling.
And maybe that’s what we’re all hungry for now: not another launch to get hyped for, not another viral palette, but for products that help us connect with who we are. Maybe most of us aren’t chasing a trend but instead the feeling of what it was like when our beauty practice was rooted in identity and discovery, not display.
