Beauty Archivist: Blush Blindness and Self Referential Makeup Trends

Words: Grace Ellington

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Beauty has been steadily moving towards a more natural skin care focused look over the last several years - there are notable exceptions, of course, but overall the pendulum has swung from the full structured glam of the mid teens to various iterations of clean girl becoming the baseline idea of a “normal” beauty look. What is interesting however, is how one makeup element has been growing more and more stylised - even borderline cartoonish - whilst still being considered part of that clean girl canon. Blush.

Right now, a hyper saturated cheek paired with a bare eye and lip feels low key and fresh faced, despite a hot pink mid face not exactly being commonly natural. Not that I don’t like it, I also tend to apply a cream blush across the bridge of my nose even on days when I’m not wearing any other makeup, and like everything that everyone else is doing, it looks totally normal whilst it remains popular - it’s only in hindsight that these trends are in danger of becoming embarrassing. The blush blindness trend on socials is pretty cheerful whilst acknowledging that this might be one of those trends we look back on while squinting through our fingers. Most of the content is along the ‘if blush blindness is wrong I don’t want to be right’ lines. 

I do think the root of blush’s resurgence in popularity is in the fact it’s a visible - and therefore sellable - product in a look that doesn’t contain many highly visible products. It’s hard to have viral marketing success for something that doesn’t really show up that much, like the other essentials of the clean girl look. Maybe that’s why brands like Rhode Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics have leaned so heavily into blush in their advertising, and why recommended application styles have spiralled from ‘make you look a bit less tired’ to ‘make this the dominant feature of your look’. 

An obsession with high pigmentation in blush formulas seems designed specifically for content creation rather than real life. A key part of any makeup video featuring blush is the moment a dot of insanely bright colour is applied, the influencer says wow look at that pigment and then it’s sort of blended out whilst still remaining extremely saturated. The blush is then considered good. It’s an obvious point, but these products are suited to content creation because who wants to watch a video where it’s difficult to tell what’s even happening during the application process. In reality, a blush with a lower pigment ratio in the formula does not have a fault, it is designed that way because it’s much more user friendly. 

Rare Beauty’s blushes are consistently super popular on social media whilst there are a lot of very mixed reviews for Dior’s backstage collection, despite those actually being one of my favourite products. You can swish a brush in the Dior blush, take one pass across your face and instantly look subtly fresher or build it to a more stylised glow without having to furiously blend and soften the edges like the Rare one. 

Products with instant impact on application drive content however, and so, sales. There are a lot of great things about a saturated blush and I do use them often, but it’s hard not to be a little bit cynical about the push on intensity of blush in a landscape where the dominant natural look makes it harder to shill individual hero products. It doesn’t take a lot to wonder if the preference for bright bright blusher is entirely organic or delivered directly from marketing meetings. 

I do think the root of blush’s resurgence in popularity is in the fact it’s a visible - and therefore sellable - product in a look that doesn’t contain many highly visible products.

So, will we look back at images of ourselves with 2024 levels of blusher and be shocked and appalled in the same way people are at pictures of their 2017 eyebrows? I think probably not. While I am sure this trend will date, I feel like there is a strong correlation between the regrettability of a trend and its focus on restructuring or correcting a natural feature. Part of the reason eyebrows date badly is eyebrow products normally seek to ‘fix’ a ‘problem’ and to create a simulacrum of a natural beauty ideal. 

Soap brows and laminations are designed to offer the illusion of a fuller brow, but illusions often lose contact with their source material in repetition. Where once these techniques gave a passible estimation of what a naturally thick brow looks like, after a while they start to reference themselves, and the goal begins to be to look more soap brow-y or more laminated rather than simply fuller. 

Same for very bright under eye concealer, as the trend progresses it morphs into exaggerated and self referential versions. Soon we are trying to get the brightest under eye concealer rather than trying to look rested. It’s hard to recognise this pattern in the midst of the trend itself until the underlying beauty ideal moves on - bushy brows giving way to thin arches, eliminated dark circles giving way to a moodier, tired-er look. Now suddenly the approximations look alien and weird and you realise you were suffering from some form of beauty blindness.

Trends that were never meant to approximate natural beauty in some form don’t fare as badly in retrospect. Frosted blue eyeshadow goes in and out of fashion, but when it’s out it can be looked at with more fun nostalgia - never having really been linked to a specific insecurity in the first place being more about accessorising. 

Despite blush having roots as a product designed to fix a washed out complexion, I would argue that in its current form it is way less about correction. Sunset blush, Boyfriend blush, Cold Girl blush and all other blush iterations are all meant to be noticed as part of a hyper visible, stylised makeup look rather than alter any perceived flaws. Whilst I think blush is in the inevitable process of escalation and exaggeration that happens with so many makeup trends until they are suddenly over, I do think the fact it’s divorced from an obvious real world ideal means we will at least be able to look back at it without the same anxiety we feel looking at our decade-old eyebrow and complexion choices.