I deeply regret not going to Lorde’s surprise concert in Washington Square Park a few weeks ago. I may be on the youngest end of the millennial spectrum, but I was still old and jaded enough in 2013 to feel like she had set my internal monologue to music with her moody debut record, Pure Heroine. That night, I was heading home while my friends posted Instagram stories from the growing crowd, eager to get a glimpse of the 28-year-old pop star who hadn’t performed live in years. Even through the metallic glow of my phone screen, the energy felt feral and somewhat romantic, a blur of cropped T-shirts, digital camera flashes, and college students climbing trees or lampposts under the setting sun.
It was a scene pulled straight off of a Tumblr dashboard, an instantly recognizable site for those of us who came of age in the early 2010s. If you ask me, we’ve actually been reliving that era for a minute now. Alongside Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Haim, and Marina (formerly Marina and the Diamonds) are dropping highly anticipated albums this summer, all the while Charli XCX continues to sell out stadiums with Brat; the youths are romanticizing long-outdated tech like wired headphones and vinyl records; just last year, Jeffrey Campbell relaunched the once-ubiquitous Lita boot, which didn’t take long to find their way onto the feet of a bonafide Tumblr influencer by the name of Taylor Swift.
Beauty looks from the 2010s have been making a comeback, too. Softly-smudged, slept-in eyeliner has been popularized once again by Charli XCX. Glitter-grunge party makeup tutorials are all over TikTok. Young people stopped wearing undereye concealer a while ago and have yet to pick it back up. Deeply side-parted hair dominated this season’s New York Fashion Week runways. We also owe these trends to Tumblr, where the cool-girl aesthetic of today has been steeping for more than 15 years.
Despite its reputation as a place reserved for moody teens, aspiring poets, and art school types, Tumblr was massive for its time—by 2014, it housed over 100 million users (comparable to peak MySpace numbers). Arguably more than any other social media platform, it was an incubator for taste. Users reblogged images of their favorite celebrities, blurry selfies taken on Macbook webcams, grainy film stills, flashing gifs from movies and music videos, and quotes (mostly pulled from Sylvia Plath’s journals or snippets of Charles Bukowski’s poetry) to create hyper-curated digital collages.
As you’ve likely guessed by now, I was one of those users, trying on different aesthetics and slipping between subcultures, never settling on a specific blog theme or style for too long. I moved around a lot as a teenager—new states, new schools, constantly starting over. Tumblr was the first place that gave me a sense of community, a feeling of stability I didn’t necessarily have in real life. The platform encouraged me to experiment with my look, to see beauty as something I could shape and play with freely when the rest of my life felt out of my control. It was where I discovered Lana Del Rey, the person whose early signature look—deeply side-parted auburn hair, glowy skin, long acrylic nails, and chunky cat eyeliner—influenced not just my own approach to beauty but Tumblr’s as a whole.
By the time I was in college in 2012, I had perfected my own version of that look, spending hours on my eye makeup before going out—winged eyeliner that reached the tips of my eyebrows and false lashes so heavy they weighed my eyelids down, which I thought made me look sexy and mysterious but in a vaguely melancholic way. When Lana adopted a grungier look for her 2014 sophomore album Ultraviolence, Tumblr and I followed suit with purple smoky eyes, lots of smudgy mascara, and, crucially, no concealer.
But it wasn’t just Del Rey influencing that tired-yet-glamorous aesthetic—the British TV series Skins was another major reference point. The teen drama’s cult status on Tumblr can’t be overstate. The cool, detached Effy Stonem, with her patterned tights and lived-in blue eyeliner, became the poster girl for Tumblr’s signature soft-grunge vibe.
Those weren’t by far the only beauty trends Tumblr catalyzed back then. There was the thick brow craze inspired by Cara Delevingne’s meteoric rise (and that one specific photo of her by Matt Irwin that everyone had on their blog); matte plum lips à la Lorde; candy-colored hair had a moment thanks to the influence of people like Lime Crime founder Doe Deere (who initially gained notoriety on another microblogging platform, LiveJournal, whose users left in droves in the late 2000s before finding a new home on, you guessed it, Tumblr).
While some might say these looks are of a specific, bygone era, I'd argue they'll never die. Trends don't disappear completely; they just shapeshift. Trends of decades past shapeshifted to form Tumblr’s signature looks, and now Tumblr’s signature looks are shapeshifting to fit modern times.
For example, Euphoria, with its ever-viral makeup, is just today’s iteration of Skins. Effy’s aforementioned eyeliner and Cassie Ainsworth’s frosty eye shadow are the spiritual predecessors of Rue’s glitter tears and Maddy’s sharp double liner. It’s no coincidence that two of Euphoria’s stars were 2010s cool girls—Barbie Ferreira was a Tumblr it-girl, and Alexa Demie once modeled for the platform’s most coveted clothing brand, American Apparel.
The bright, cutesy Starface pimple patches adorning the face of every cool teen on the subway remind me of another Tumblr it-girl, model Joanna Kuchta, who wore sparkly star-shaped stickers in her makeup looks long before that was a thing. The brand recently launched a campaign for its Marc Jacobs collaboration starring a handful of artists including Grimes, another former Tumblr icon, wearing tiny tattoo-inspired pimple patches.
Today’s TikTok clean girls, armed with Rhode skin care, Laneige lip masks, and buns slicked back with Olaplex, owe a debt to Tumblr as well. Its beauty wasn’t always maximalist or experimental. There was a bare-faced coolness to it, too—a kind of minimalism that prioritized fresh, dewy skin over full coverage foundation and concealer, a barely-there flush on the cheeks, and once again, full, bushy brows. I’d argue this sensibility helped pave the way for the blockbuster success Glossier, which launched in the fall of 2014 and had a chokehold on me and every blogger I followed. On sunny weekends in New York City, you’ll still see lines forming outside the brand’s brick-and mortar-store in Williamsburg, a neighborhood that has managed to remain synonymous with hipsterdom despite its demographics looking more and more like the Financial District every day.
While the revival of some of these Tumblr-born beauty trends is genuinely exciting, I’ve noticed other resurfacing facets of Tumblr culture that remind me why we moved on in the first place. There was a dark side to the platform, especially in regard to body image. Scrolling a little too far down someone’s soft-grunge blog could take you from black-and-white photos of The 1975 to “thinspo” in an instant. Short for “thinspiration,” this subgenre of content was devoted to the display and vocal admiration of extremely thin bodies, often in a hyper-sexualized way. That’s the part of the culture I hoped we’d lost interest in, but today, that language has also shapeshifted.
Enter TikTok’s #SkinnyTok, where users partake in ruthless commentary on their own and others’ bodies, share questionable wellness “hacks,” and express what seems to be an obsession with control. These creators are likely to say they aren’t promoting disordered eating—they’re just being “honest” or worse, promoting a so-called healthy lifestyle. They tend to frame their content as motivational, a big-sisterly kind of tough love. It’s a stark contrast to Tumblr’s flavor of body worship, which glorified thinness in a way that was far more overt—thinspo bloggers who shared advice on how to get the elusive “thigh gap” were never concerned with health or “educating” others, after all—they just wanted to be thin by any means necessary.
But revival doesn’t have to mean regression. Celebrities like Jenna Ortega, with her gothic-glam makeup looks, would have been reblogged into oblivion on Tumblr, and Doechii, with her bold use of exposed face tape and editorialized beauty choices, are proof that we can enjoy the return of Tumblrcore without reliving the worst aspects of it—which also include, but aren’t limited to, the romanticization of self-destruction, widespread exclusion of people of color, and the brutal judgement of anyone deemed uncool or politically incorrect. They don’t project pain as personality or have to posture for approval. Instead, they channel the aesthetics Tumblr loved, like smoky eyes, 90s references, and It-girl-coolness, in a way that feels refreshingly authentic.
Though some might get defensive or panic about their age when they see young people recycle the trends they claim to have pioneered, I think it’s cool to watch a new generation discover and reinterpret the artists, aesthetics, and makeup trends that shaped my own coming of age. I even find myself going back into my archive (yes, I still have my Tumblr account!), sifting through vintage advertisements, photos of 19th century artwork, and David Lynch stills for inspiration whenever I feel like I’m in a beauty rut. And why not? The past is just a click, tap, and a scroll away. I suppose the future is, too.
More from our opinion section:
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Now, watch Isabela Merced's 10-minute beauty routine:
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