BEAUTY
On the screen, the woman holds your gaze. Her skin has an otherworldly glow that catches the light like frosting on a cake. Her cheekbones, highlighted between a touch of blush and barely-there bronzer, are as anatomically impossible as her eyebrows. The caption reads #cleangirl.
If you’re unfamiliar with the identikit aesthetic, allow us to fill you in. A step beyond ‘skinimalism’, the lockdown phenomenon that led to a wealth of skincare/makeup hybrids, the goal of the ‘clean’ trend is impossibly glowy skin cleverly made to look au naturel. The term has a billion views on TikTok, which is enough to make your eyes water. But if you count yourself among the growing number of women for whom beige is boring, worry not, because an anti-trend has emerged – an antithesis of the make-up aesthetic that’s comes to define the zeitgeist. Its name? Dopamine beauty.
“When I say dopamine, I mean a slick of red lipstick or lashings of blusher – anything that’s unorthodox, but with lots of fun colour,” explains Sir JohnNPD Group has reported a sales spike in colourful make-up – a category with a sales growth of a hefty 30 per cent in just a sevenmonth period.
