Influencer Rachel Rigler, 23, always starts the day with an iced latte, but while taking a mid-morning sip and scrolling through Pinterest in June, she spotted more than usual in her coffee cup.
“As I was drinking my latte, I was seeing pictures of this bronze, smokey eye makeup look, and it was like — you know, it’s kind of like doing latte makeup,” Atlanta-based Rigler said, immediately posting on TikTok. tutorial for the view.
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The launch video has since racked up more than 2.7 million views, 183,000 likes, and spawned a slew of side looks, including matcha makeup, pumpkin spice makeup, and mocha makeup (not to be confused with cherry mocha makeup—a slightly bigger success story). .
“It was definitely a gradual evolution,” Rigler said of the latte makeup, which earned a Hailey Bieber co-sign a month after its debut (when Trendalytics data showed the trend had peaked) and ushered in the next era of foodie-inspired beauty aesthetics. strawberry girl makeup, cherry cola lips, blueberry milk nails, tomato girl makeup and the like.
But before that, it was the all-pink “cool girl” makeup look that had TikTok’s beauty community clogging up. There was also Chinese-inspired Douyin makeup, which shared similar minimalist components with previous “clean girl” and “that girl” makeups. Office siren makeup (which isn’t really about makeup at all, but rather means wearing rectangular glasses à la Giselle Bündchen in “The Devil Wears Prada”) has also risen in the rankings.
Now characterized by bold lips, full lashes, and a completely matte finish, the mafia wife makeup heads the TikTok beauty aesthetic’s groundbreaking cycle as its newest entrant.
As for what exactly starts a trend, “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Hailey Bieber, but it has to be something; a culturally significant person or thing,” said Kendall Becker, director of trend and editorial strategy at Trendalytics. .
“Sometimes the beginning of a trend is not as important as the person who decides it is the beginning,” added art historian and cultural commentator Seema Rao. “The person who is at the right height, the person who can tell when a trend is good and push it forward may be the person with the right amount of ‘influence’.”
Whatever the catalyst, many of these aesthetics are what Trendalytics classifies as microtrends, or “those that pop up weekly on TikTok and are often overly specific or reactive to things like celebrity posts,” said Chief Operating Officer Michael Appler. and creative director at Cancel Communications.
Lauren Bitar, chief innovation and strategy officer at Trendalytics, said the average lifecycle of a microtrend is about six months or less, but “the more specific a trend is, the shorter its shelf life will be.”
During the trend’s peak in July-August, the latte makeover was getting nearly 35,000 weekly Google searches; In January, that number dropped to just over 4,000 per week. Mafia wife, meanwhile, peaked on January 20 after breaking into mainstream discourse in early January, indicating a potentially shorter life cycle.
The “clean girl”, on the contrary, has a rare longevity. One of the first aesthetics to pop up on TikTok, this trend includes a glowing, “no-makeup” beauty look as well as a wellness-focused lifestyle; The so-called clean girl is someone who wakes up early, drinks green juice, exercises regularly, wears a greasy back bun, and embodies countless other stereotypical indicators of togetherness.
The “it girl” aesthetic, which is also on the rise in summer 2022, is an almost identical, if slightly less controversial concept (“clean girl” quickly received backlash for its seemingly exclusionary and inaccessible nature).
Unlike most of their peers, these two trends have been appearing and disappearing since they emerged nearly two years ago, according to Trendalytics; they never completely disappear and even see significant increases in searches and social media around March 2023 and again this past December. .
“Something like ‘clean girl’ is one of those easy-to-do looks; it can be created using products you already own; it hits a lot of the key factors that make you want to come back again and again,” Becker said.
For beauty creator Alissa Holmes (@alissajanay1), who likes to tinker with new trends as they emerge, the “clean girl” serves as a staple look, while trend-focused videos or tutorials can be a tool to acquire an audience.
“Clean girl makeup is more like my everyday makeup look, but sharing about trends helps your content stand out more and people start to see: ‘Oh, she’s doing that trend again, now she’s doing this trend’ — some of these people wouldn’t be looking for you if they weren’t looking for the trend.” they couldn’t find it,” said Holmes, who has more than 800,000 followers on TikTok and usually uploads a video for every new trend she decides to try.
For brands, jumping on these trends may be more serendipitous.
Not only does time to market need to be intensified, which is tricky in itself, but brands that try to bounce back on a trend and miss the mark pose the biggest risk: appearing too tough.
“The hope is that a brand can capitalize on an organic trend, but I think that’s also when fatigue and frustration comes out of the consumer; that’s when they can say, ‘Okay, I’m not on board with that,'” said Yarden Horwitz, co-founder of Spate.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is fast fashion retailers such as Boohoo, Shein and Fashion Nova that are most integrating trend language into their products and marketing; Trendalytics data shows that more than 86 products in Boohoo’s range currently reference the “that girl” trend.
Beauty brands, on the other hand, transfer these trends to their marketing through influencer content. Armani Beauty, for example, enlisted the help of a group of creatives, including Meredith Duxbury, to spearhead a “pumpkin spice makeup” campaign last fall, while Holmes says she’s crafted a series of trend-focused briefings for brand partners, especially on latte makeup and hot products. chocolate makeup.
“It’s all about timing; If you’re a brand and you’re following a trend, you may be too late and that might flirt with you, said Cecilia Gates, founder of Gates Creative Agency.
Jade Beguelin, co-founder of 4am Skin, added: “There’s definitely a careful balance; As a brand, you want to be a trendsetter rather than a trend follower, and sometimes that can be a slower game.”
Still, brands can benefit from tapping into trends that clearly align with their identity.
“It may be easier to accommodate makeup look trends versus category trends, which can be a little more ephemeral,” said Gates, who has facilitated a series of lip combination campaigns with MAC Cosmetics that leveraged a number of popular beauty products from the brand. Creators like Jodie Woods and Alissa Ashley are making their own lipstick, gloss, and liner packs.
“Everyone on TikTok was talking about lip combinations, and MAC has the variety to back it up. You have to make sure what you’re doing is in line with your brand, otherwise you run the risk of looking like you’re all over the place,” Gates said.
In fact, Gates’ distinction between product trends and these more emerging “look” trends is an increasingly important topic, especially given how often trendy looks of varying relevance actually share key components.
“A lot of people will look at what’s happening on TikTok and assume they’re looking at a different consumer, or a consumer whose interests are changing very quickly,” Horwitz said. “Strawberry Girl is not that far from Clean Girl, but it evokes a completely different feeling.”
The appeal of joining TikTok’s daily trend lies not in any specific innovation of the look itself, but in the act of enjoying a new vibe with a community of people doing the same.
“Beauty is the most accessible change one can make on their own,” Rao said, adding that this low barrier to entry fuels the trend cycle while fueling consumers’ appetite for constant innovation.
However, the speed of these trends is not as linked to actual product trends as one might think. Bronzing drops, which form the basis of the latte makeup look, have continued to gain traction long after latte makeup’s peak, with searches up 218 percent in the last three months compared to last year.
Moreover, the emergence of one trend does not necessarily mean the end of another.
“People say [mob wife] Stating that searches for “clean girl make-up” increased by 29 percent compared to last year, Horwitz said, “The death of the clean girl, our data does not show this.”
As a testament to the importance of the right trending name at the right time, Horwitz said the mob wife actually shares the ideals of the quietly growing Tumblr girl and indie misery trends — a look that went mega-viral as the mob wife (some theorized) This year, “The Sopranos” had 25 episodes. . is associated with the anniversary).
While the mob wife may indeed be reacting to the clean girl and quiet luxury aesthetic, “these trends exist in the same ecosystem and benefit from each other,” Appler said.
“We don’t know if ‘Mob wife’ will necessarily continue into the fall, but the hair and makeup aesthetic will certainly continue to see continued growth,” Horwitz added.
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