Messy Makeup Is Back, Just in Time for New Year's Eve
All the cool girls are leaning into smudged eye looks and indie sleaze-inspired glam.
Although the clean girl aesthetic dominated 2025, messy beauty looks are bound to make a huge comeback this upcoming year. With New Year’s Eve right around the corner, lived-in, smudged glam is proving to be just as impactful as the minimalistic looks we’ve seen flooding our feeds. With the no-makeup makeup era seemingly winding down — in 2026, the messier your makeup is, the better.
Led by celebrities like Jenna Ortega and Dua Lipa, along with major sources of maximalist makeup inspiration like Euphoria and Charli xcx‘s Brat, this year, we saw messy makeup slowly overtake the year’s biggest beauty trend: the clean girl era. “As the beauty world shifted from Hailey Bieber’s glazed skin to the slightly chaotic, party girl smudged liner and bold-colored blush that we’re seeing more and more, the clean girl retired her hair gel wand and swapped it for the ’90s dark-lined lips,” Annabelle Taurua, expert at Fresha says.
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Furthermore, Taurua also finds that the push towards grunge-inspired glam comes from Gen Z’s affinity for nostalgic beauty — which ironically, is a major departure from the clean girl’s ethos of modern, stripped-down makeup. “’90s makeup and ’90s grunge makeup seem to be dominating search trends, which indicates these looks are making a comeback,” Taurua adds. “The nostalgic grunge look from the ’90s resembled a messy, imperfect, rebellious look, typically using smudged eyeliner and eyeshadow with dark, stained lips and matte skin.”
Since New Year’s Eve makeup is typically categorized by glittery eye looks, smokey shadow and bold eyeliner, it’s the perfect time to execute the indie sleaze-inspired glam of your dreams. On TikTok, beauty fans are becoming increasingly experimental with their eye looks — meaning, there’s no shortage of messy makeup looks to recreate. With the undone beauty aesthetic already proving to be huge in 2026, the beauty world is bound to experience a big shift in the new year.
While you’re here, read about the best beauty pop-ups of all time.
