Beauty Archivist: When Did Celebrities Start Looking So Flawless?
Words: Grace Ellington
In 2010, I would get home from school and watch Fashion Police on E! Joan Rivers would tear into celebrity red carpet looks with the sort of ferocity which feels hard to imagine today. It belonged to an era, the one I grew up in, of red circles of shame drawn around the cellulite of size 8 women on magazine covers. But aside from the casual racism and general savagery, another thing strikes me. This sort of show feels redundant now because no one actually ever looks that bad anymore – or, at least, not bad in the sense that there is ever a mistake happening. Maybe a look doesn’t hit, but even then it’s been meticulously crafted by a team of professionals. The sense that a celebrity might show up for an event in a look that feels like it was inadvisably put together themselves, or with poorly executed fake tan or something like that just would never happen.
At the same time, the internet loves images of 90s and early 00s stars on the red carpet. Hilary Duff at the VMAs, wearing something along the lines of a tie die maxi skirt and baker boy hat, glittery blue eyeshadow, with no contouring and loads of lipgloss. Winona Ryder in a black cashmere suit, and brick lipstick. Gwyneth Paltrow in a strapless gown paired with poofy hair and an uncurated shine on her skin, forehead freckles visible.
Part of the nostalgia response for these images is that the lack of polish makes you feel like you are getting some insight into the celeb’s real personality. It looks like they did their hair and makeup at home. And whilst they might have been styled to an extent it’s not the same full body, high intensity process that leaves them looking gleaming, more like a walking mannequin than anything so related to flesh they could possibly end up the subject of a red circle.
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Whilst stylists and makeup artists became a red carpet fixture during the 90s, this wasn’t in the way it is now, where everybody regardless of their level of fame would have a team for every event. Well into the 2010s you can see images of celebrities, even high profile ones, at red carpet events in outfits they picked themselves, doing their own makeup then just turning up. You can see variations in skin tone clearly, soft halos of flyways catching the lights. Sometimes an area of poorly placed powder flashes chalky on camera, but the level of, or lack of, detail feels so much more human.
Style icons used to feel like style icons because they had a real and innate sense of it. Kate Moss defined the way a generation wanted to dress, for better or worse, with looks she put together herself. There were a lot of designer gifts, of course, but also, you knew she mixed them with things she bought at Portobello Market, and looked a bit messy or weird at times as a result. Compare her, for example, to current icon Zendaya, who never makes a beauty or style mistake. It’s hard to speculate what Zendaya’s style has to do with her own tastes and preferences, and what is the result of a well documented career long relationship with her stylist Luxury Law. We also don’t really care. Where once stylists and makeup artists were a sort of an industry secret, and we were meant to feel that the look of celebrities was an expression of their personalities, now if we thought Ariana Grande’s Schiaparelli gown at the Oscars looked like a strange sea creature, we knew to blame her team.
“It’s easy to look back at the harsh climate that birthed Fashion Police and get why celebrities today are reluctant to step out in anything less than perfection.”
When makeup artists were employed before the late 2000s, which they definitely weren’t always, I do feel that the advancements in the industry, and the general increase in knowledge of beauty techniques for the general public via social media means that some of these looks from 20-30 years ago feel a bit messy or quaint in comparison to what is expected today. A few months ago an image of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 went viral for their very 2000s soft bronzey makeup look.
A whole slew of tutorials popped up claiming to help recreate the look but, I noticed, when the original makeup artist, Pati Dubroff, weighed in with her own step-by-step, it was far simpler and used way fewer products than the contemporary takes. It is interesting to me that part of what people were responding to in this Olsen image was its relative undoneness – something they were losing in passing it through a modern application filter of multiple steps and complexity.
As well as a steady increase in the level of professional grooming required for a red carpet event, another big change is the style of photography. One reason these 90s and Y2K images feel so charming is that most of them are like snapshots posed for in the midst of enjoying a party. Often we see smiles or goofy poses, and the lighting and angles aren’t uniformly flattering. Now the red carpet images distributed after events are all taken on a step and repeat, and the poses are studied rather than social. Red carpet pap shots are also now retouched to an extent – I know from personal experience. One time during peak pandemic I did a makeup look including a very full red lip for a celebrity attending a fashion show. I topped it with a thick layer of MAC’s Lipglass, the best thing for a patent shine – but the trade off is an incredibly unstable finish. I cringed when I saw her pull a standard sized surgical mask right over her lipstick as she climbed into her car, and spent the next hour anxiously refreshing Getty to see if my reputation was about to be ruined by her inevitably destroyed look. When the photos landed she looked perfect and unsmudged.
It’s easy to look back at the harsh climate that birthed Fashion Police and get why celebrities today are reluctant to step out in anything less than perfection. But I do think we’ve lost something by making our baseline expectations so high. There is a real thirst for these more authentic-seeming images of celebrities, complete with beauty mishaps that read now as idiosyncrasies. The disturbing Pinterest trend of running these older less retouched and styled images through face app filters to bring them more in line with 2025 expectations of beauty (for real, a beauty filter on 90s Angelina Jolie??) makes me depressed – maybe the era of being able to look like a real person on the red carpet has passed for ever.