Yes, Winged Eyeliner Is the Skinny Jean of Makeup

I went to high school from 2009 to 2012 and that means I rarely left the house without putting on two things: a pair of skinny jeans and winged eyeliner. Things pretty much stayed that way through college and onward into my 20s, and the same can be said for many other millennial women.

We all know what wound up happening to skinny jeans at the start of the 2020s: According to a suddenly-grown Gen Z, they became outdated. To see a person wearing skinny jeans in public became a calling card for millennials, and “millennial” suddenly became synonymous with “old” and therefore “cringe.” The same goes for ankle socks, using the cry-laughing emoji, and, it seems, our beloved winged eyeliner.

For the past year or so, the internet has been rife with debate about whether or not winged eyeliner is out of style. But despite many’s insistence that it’s a timeless look that’s always been around (true!), the fact that we’re even having to ask the question probably means that it is out of style, at least in the eyes of the generation that currently dictates what’s considered trendy. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I’d go so far as to make the assertion that winged eyeliner is the makeup equivalent of skinny jeans.

Just like skinny jeans, winged eyeliner became part of a uniform of sorts that all femme millennials in the 2010s were expected or encouraged to wear in some capacity (for examples of said uniform, see: early-stage Pinterest, Tumblr, paparazzi pictures of Emma Stone leaving Starbucks). They were both things we adopted at large because, as we entered our teens, we wanted to adopt an aesthetic we felt like we had ownership of—one that differed as much as possible from the generation of teens before us (see: ‘90s grunge). As a result, they have both become a signifier of our age and have both become “outdated” simply as a result of our getting older.

Emma Stone at the 2012 Academy Awards.Getty Images

Beyoncé at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012.DiGetty Images

Taylor Swift at the 2012 MTV VMAs.Getty Images

It can feel like a personal attack to be told that the makeup we like to wear has gone out of style. It didn’t do so just because the fashion or media industry replaced it with something new to sell to us; it became outdated because at some point younger people collectively decided that we are outdated. And that’s the important part to remember: trends become outdated, but people themselves cannot. People’s worldviews can certainly become outdated and cause all kinds of havoc, but maybe people wouldn’t hold onto outdated ideas so begrudgingly if we didn’t treat each other as if we have expiration dates stickered on our foreheads, our opinions automatically invalidated after we hit a certain age.