Influencer Rachel Rigler, 23, always starts her day with an iced latte, but during June’s morning sip and Pinterest scrolling, she saw more than usual in her cup of joe.
“I saw pictures of this bronzed, smoky makeup look while I was drinking my latte and I was like, you know, this is kind of giving makeup with a latte,” said Atlanta-based Rigler, who immediately took to TikTok to share a tutorial on the appearance.
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Her introductory video has since garnered more than 2.7 million views, 183,000 likes, and spawned numerous additional looks, including matcha makeup, pumpkin spice makeup, and mocha makeup (not to be confused with cherry mocha makeup – a success story in a bit to a greater extent).
“It’s definitely been a gradual build,” Rigler said of the latte makeup momentum that won Hailey Bieber’s cosign a month after its debut (when Trendalytics data shows the trend peaked) and ushered in a subsequent era of gourmand-inspired beauty aesthetics including strawberry girl makeup, cherry cola lips, blueberry milk nails, tomato girl makeup and more.
But before them, the all-pink “cool girl” makeup had the TikTok beauty community gasping. There was also the Chinese-inspired Douyin makeup, which shared similar minimalist components as its clean girl and that girl makeup predecessors. Office siren makeup—which isn’t really so much about makeup as it is about wearing rectangular glasses à la Giselle Bündchen in The Devil Wears Prada—has also moved up the ranks.
Now, mobster husband makeup, featuring statement lips, thick lashes, and an all-over matte finish, is the latest entrant in TikTok’s head-turning cycle of beauty aesthetics.
When it comes to what exactly kicks off a trend, “it doesn’t have to be Hailey Bieber, but it has to be something — some culturally significant person or something,” said Kendall Becker, director of trends and editorial strategy at Trendalytics.
“Sometimes the start of a trend is not as important as the person who decided it was the start,” added art historian and cultural commentator Seema Rao. “It can be the person who is at the right height, has the right amount of ‘clout’ to say that a trend is good, to be the one to drive it.”
Whatever the catalyst, most of these aesthetics are what Trendalytics classifies as micro-trends, or ones that “pop up every week on TikTok and are usually hyper-specific or reactionary to things like celebrity posts,” said Michael Apler. , COO and Creative Director at Cancel Communications.
The average life cycle of a micro-trend hovers around six months or less, although “the more specific a trend is, the shorter its shelf life will be,” said Trendalytics’ chief innovation and strategy officer Lauren Bittar.
During the trend’s peak in July-August, latte makeup generated roughly 35,000 weekly Google searches, which dropped to just over 4,000 weekly searches in January. Mob Wife, meanwhile, peaked on January 20 after entering mainstream discourse in early January, indicating a potentially shorter life cycle.
“Clean Girl,” by contrast, has seen rare longevity. One of the first aesthetics to gain notoriety on TikTok, the trend includes a shimmering ‘no-makeup’ beauty look, but also a certain health-oriented lifestyle; the so-called clean girl is one who wakes up early, drinks green juice, exercises regularly, wears a slicked-back bun, and embodies countless other stereotypical signs of togetherness.
The “that girl” aesthetic, which also rose in the summer of 2022, is an almost identical concept, though perhaps a little less controversial (“clean girl” quickly received backlash for its seemingly exclusionary and inaccessible nature).
Unlike most of its peers, the two trends have waxed and waned since their emergence nearly two years ago, never completely going away and even seeing significant peaks in search and social buzz around March 2023 and again this past December, according to Trendalytics.
“Clean girl is one of those looks that’s easy to pull off, can be created using products you already own — it hits on a lot of those key factors that make you want to come back again and again ,” Becker said.
For beauty creator Alyssa Holmes (@alissajanay1), who likes to embrace new trends as they emerge, the “clean girl” serves as something of a staple look, while trend-driven videos or tutorials can be a tool to attract audience.
“Clean girl makeup is more like my everyday makeup, but posting about trends helps push your content out more and then people start seeing, like, ‘oh it’s her again – now she’s doing this trend'” – some of those people wouldn’t have been able to find you if they weren’t looking for the trend,” said Holmes, who has just over 800,000 followers on TikTok and usually uploads a video of a new trend she’s decided to experiment with.
For brands, jumping on these trends can be more successful.
Not only does the speed to market need to increase, which is difficult in itself, but brands that try to get back on trend and miss the mark run the biggest risk: appearing too stubborn.
“The hope is that a brand will be able to capitalize on an organic trend, but I think that’s also when the fatigue and frustration comes from the consumer – then they can say, ‘Okay, I’m not having fun with this,'” the co-founder said of Spate Yarden Horwitz.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, fast fashion retailers such as Boohoo, Shein and Fashion Nova are most often integrating the language of trends into their products and marketing, with Trendalytics data showing that more than 86 products in Boohoo’s range currently refer to the “that girl” trend.
Beauty brands, on the other hand, are bringing these trends into their marketing through influencer content. Armani Beauty, for example, tapped a group of creatives including Meredith Duxbury last fall to front a pumpkin spice makeup campaign, while Holmes says she executed a number of trend-oriented briefs for brand partners, specifically around latte makeup and the hot chocolate makeup.
“It’s all a matter of time; if you’re a brand and you follow a trend, you can be too late and it can backfire,” said Cecilia Gates, founder of Gates Creative Agency.
Added Jade Beguelin, co-founder of 4am Skin, “There’s definitely a careful balance; instead of being a trendsetter, as a brand you want to be a trendsetter – and that can sometimes be a slower game.”
Still, brands can benefit from tapping into trends that are clearly aligned with their identity.
“Category trends can be easier to tap into compared to makeup trends, which can be a little more fleeting,” said Gates, who has facilitated a series of lip pairing campaigns with MAC Cosmetics in which the brand uses a range of popular beauty creators like Jodie Woods and Alyssa Ashley to curate their own lipstick, gloss and pencil packages.
“Everyone on TikTok has been talking about their lip combos and MAC has the range to back it up. You have to make sure what you’re doing is true to your brand, otherwise you risk looking like you’re all over the place,” Gates said.
Indeed, Gates’ distinction between product trends and these more nascent “look” trends is increasingly important—especially given how often modern looks with different meanings actually share core components.
“A lot of people will look at what’s happening on TikTok and assume they’re looking at a different user or a user whose interests are changing very quickly,” Horwitz said. “Strawberry Girl isn’t that far from Pure Girl, but it evokes a completely different feeling.”
Much of the appeal of participating in the TikTok trend du jour lies not in any specific novelty of the look itself, but rather in the act of indulging in a new vibe alongside a community of people doing the same.
“Beauty is the most affordable change someone can make for themselves,” Rao said, adding that this low barrier to entry feeds consumers’ appetite for constant novelty while fueling the trend cycle.
However, the speed of these trends is not as consistent with actual product trends as one might think. Bronzing drops, the foundation of the latte makeup look, continue to enjoy sustained interest long after the latte makeup peak, growing 218 percent in searches over the past three months compared to last year.
Furthermore, the emergence of one trend does not necessarily mean the end of another.
“People say [mob wife] is the death of a clean girl — our data doesn’t point to that,” Horwitz said, adding that searches for “clean girl makeup” remained up 29 percent year-over-year.
A testament to the importance of having the right trend name at the right time, Mob Wife actually shares the ideals of Tumblr’s quietly growing girls and indie slob trends, Horwitz said — the look just went mega-viral as Mob Wife (which some theorized was related to The Sopranos’ 25th anniversary this year).
And while the mob wife may indeed be reactionary to the clean-cut girl and quiet luxury aesthetic, “these trends exist in the same ecosystem and benefit from each other,” Eppler said.
“We don’t know that ‘mob wife’ will necessarily continue into the fall, but the hair and makeup aesthetic will definitely continue to grow,” Horwitz added.
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