Beware the Return of 2000s Makeup
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War is waging in the Middle East. A right-wing nepo baby with a talent for making baffling proclamations just won his second presidential election. On our screens, spray-tanned political pundits drone on about immigration, abortion, and whether or not LGBTQ people deserve to have rights. They’re interrupted every so often, of course, by an advertisement for a drug that claims it will help you drop 40 pounds without trying. I’m talking about today, but I’m also talking about 2004. What does this have to do with makeup? Everything, I think.
In the weeks following the 2024 presidential election, my social media feeds seem to have unanimously decided the ‘90s-inspired fashion and beauty looks that have been popular for years now are no longer of interest. Media and it girls of the early-to-mid 2000s are now the point of reference. Case in point: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, the twin sisters who defined the tastes of a generation of young girls with a then-unprecedented merchandising extravaganza spanning the early 1990s through the late 2000s—including a clothing line, a beauty brand, video games, movies, toys, books, and more.
Their presence on beauty and fashion TikTok has been virtually inescapable lately, despite the fact they’ve been notoriously avoiding the public eye for years now. In the past few days alone, I’ve seen numerous love letters to the understated way they used to coordinate their outfits, the decades-old Balenciaga purse that Mary Kate wore to near death, and, most notably for this story, Ashley’s signature makeup look from the early oughts.
One particular picture of Ashley from September of 2004 has caught the app’s undivided attention: Her wide eyes are lined in smudgy black and bronze; her lips are a frosty, glossy baby pink; it might just be because of the camera flashing in her face, but her complexion is mindbogglingly tan and pale and matte and dewy all at once. Without trying, I’ve encountered at least a dozen makeup tutorials for emulating this exact look on TikTok in the past two weeks—if you search “Ashley Olsen makeup” on the app, you’ll find dozens more, a couple of which have hundreds of thousands of likes.
Vanity Fair Party At The 2004 Tribeca Film Festival
The makeup itself is totally harmless (in fact, I think it looks awesome), but there’s an icky feeling that settles in my stomach when I think about what our refreshed obsession with these young women from 20 years ago means about where American culture is headed. Whereas our years-long love for the aesthetics of the 1990s just felt like nostalgia, the timing of the 2000s coming back post-election feels more like backsliding. And I say this as someone who owned virtually all of those books, toys, DVDS, and video games.
Obviously, the reflex to bring this style of makeup back is part of a widespread yearning to turn back the clock, which is understandable for people my age (in their 30s) and and little younger. While Mary Kate and Ashley were solving mysteries, having hijinx, and talking to cute boys, Rory Gilmore was moving into her dorm at Yale, Lizzie McGuire was singing at the Colosseum, and Elle Woods was winning the fight against animal cruelty—girlhood on screen was cool and exciting, and it retrospectively makes the early 2000s feel like a cozy, emotionally soothing blanket. (It probably helps that, back then, we were mostly too young and unaware to worry about paying bills or maintaining our civil rights.) Being old enough and having the skill set to recreate the makeup looks we loved so much back then must be doing some kind of inner-child healing, if not simply pacifying us in a very dark and scary time.
But this nostalgia of ours relies on cherry-picked memories of the past, stubbornly viewed through rose-colored glasses. The celebrity culture we're yearning for is no longer viewed as ethical. Reality wasn’t so cool; at the height of their fame in the 2000s, the Olsen twins had virtually no privacy, were the butt of countless inappropriately sexual jokes (do not watch the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, I beg you), and were a tabloid target for body-shaming. Though they haven’t spoken much about their choice to leave the entertainment industry, their staunch avoidance of the public today speaks volumes.
Generally speaking, back then diet culture was rampant, reflected by the ubiquity of weight-loss advertisements, broad size-exclusion in fashion, and a media obsession with famous women’s bodies. Consumerism among young people was itself a strange, competitive hobby wherein we roamed aimlessly around malls, praying we could one day afford (or fit into) a pair of Hollister jeans. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, fatphobia, and ableism were all default punchlines for mainstream comedians, who were selling out stadiums on world tours.
Much of those good and bad vibes from the 2000s were unquestionably tied to political turmoil, terrorism, and war, and the same thing is happening in our popular culture now. It just looks different because technology has advanced so much. Things move faster, sure, but the underlying truth remains: When politics fail to progress, so does our culture. We just have Ozempic instead of Orlistat, Stanley cups instead of the George Foreman Grill, and TikTok instead of MySpace. These all serve as convenient ways to distract us from the political injustices within our government we see or hear about every single day.
If you think that sounds a little tin-foil-hat, I can’t blame you. To be clear, I don’t think the NSA is planting Ashley Olsen makeup tutorials online to brainwash society into complacency (but that would make a thrilling sequel to my favorite movie, 2001’s live-action Josie and the Pussycats). I just think that, as the next Trump administration approaches, now is a better time than ever to evaluate just how much our country’s politics inform our aesthetic trends—and just how much power those trends have to hurt people, whether they’re celebrities or everyday people. I’m not saying you can’t wear smudgy, Olsen-twin-inspired eye makeup at all (you very well may see me doing it once or twice), but just to remember that while the 2000s makeup is worth romanticizing, the 2000s culture very much is not.
As history quite literally repeats itself, the things we find cool and the way we want to look seem to be following suit, this time maybe for the worst. Though we might have outwardly hidden them for a while, many of us are still carrying insecurities about our faces, hair, and bodies from the staunch beauty standards the 2000s set for us. It would be far too easy to give in again to the pull of the highly profitable diet industry (now rebranded as “wellness” and “self care”) and condition ourselves further to believe that our appearances are more important than our feelings and our health. It would infuriate me if we let that myth overtake another generation (and another one, and another one) by failing to at least acknowledge it.
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