Where you are in the world plays a huge role in determining how you look and what you consider beautiful. For instance, in America, makeup is all about deep contour, blinding highlight, big lips and a dramatic wing and lash. In Korea, however, beauty gurus focus more on small, gradient lips, widening the eyes and circular blush.
While beauty is highly cultural, cringe-worthy trends transcend all boundaries. Indeed, 2018 was filled with a handful of regrettable makeup faux pas that, in retrospect, are nearly universal in their tackiness. So, here are the beauty trends that should stay in 2018.
1. Water Bottle Curls
One huge trend in the beauty world is to find the quickest and easiest alternatives to curling your hair. Many Instagram pages posted their versions of imitating the Dyson Airwrap, a tool that claims to style hair using the power of aerodynamics. This hair wand is built to blow air and wrap sections of your hair around itself to curl hair as opposed to using direct heat, such as with curling wands and irons. Many influencers then took it into their hands to dupe this $550 hair styling tool using only a water bottle and a hairdryer.
To do this, one must simply take a recycled water bottle, cut off the top rounded section and make a vertical slit along the side of a bottle to fit the nozzle of a hair dryer. Once this magical plastic chamber is done, all you’ve got to do is tuck a strand of hair into the bottle and turn your blowdryer on. Because science, or Dyson logic, your hair will then spiral into a noodle, leaving a relatively wearable curl. Top beauty mogul Huda Kattan, founder of cosmetics line Huda Beauty, posted her own attempt of creating this bottle dryer on her Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpw4BPch5p3/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_video_watch_again
2. Fishtail Brows
To begin the horrendous brow train of 2018, beauty gurus took on the slit brow trend.
Rather than going out and down like a normal brow, this beauty trend took the brows to the skies by sharpening them out and up at an angle. Filling a space in the brow with some concealer, a small triangle is made of what remains of the eyebrow, following that normal brow shape that goes down.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf4AB-snngK/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
3. Halo Brows
Halo brows: two words that should not go together. Beauty gurus have long experimented with eyebrow looks, but this goes too far.
To create the style, you have to curve your brows up and around to meet in the center of the forehead, forming a halo look. Personally, I could not imagine using this much brow product, especially on an area that isn’t even the eyebrow.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfy4BaXhH8-/?utm_source=ig_embed
4. Fenty Body Lava Tutorial
To tease her new Fenty Beauty Body Lava, which is a serum-like highlighter that retails for up to $69, Rihanna posted a tutorial showing how to use the new product. Much to the internet’s joy, the video was then parodied over and over again, thus becoming yet another meme.
Riri’s stunning, short video moved even men to imitate her by spraying shaving cream or lotion onto their shoulders then trying to massage it into the skin using a broom, toilet brush, boot or even a dog, highlighting the outrageous price tag on this product that can be recreated using just an old crushed highlighter and baby oil. A handful of the best Body Lava tutorial memes can be found here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh3XyoqvrDo
5. Corkscrew Nails
I suppose these look cool, but other than that, they really have no real function. Nail beauty brand Kiara Sky posted a twistingly extra tutorial creating the nail. Rather than using a normal acrylic mold, the designer used a straw to make the shape spiral twice, looking like twisted Cheetos.
Once the twist was shaped properly, the screen pans to a pastel-themed carousel display of different nail products, including nail polish, glitters and gel polish. Once color is applied to the screw, the nail video is complete. Nail art never fails to boggle the minds of many worldwide, but this was definitely a miss.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bocm2HJHXxC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
6. Garden Brows
Yes, this might be the most intricately worst of all brow styles on this list. People started planting gardens on their faces after IG user @taytay_xx posted multiple photos of herself with green eyebrows and small flowers in them, along with butterflies painted around the brow.
This beauty trend took over spring 2018, thus sprouting many other users to tackle the look on themselves in some variation, and some even on — you guessed it — their dogs.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgOTmrgDLV_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
7. Glitter Face
Glitter is one of those things that never goes away, and in the beauty world, it is often a life saver. Did blending your eyeshadow not go as planned? Cover those lids in glitter. Want a dash of pop on your eyes? Use a glitter liner. Want attention to the lips? Shimmers and shimmers of glitter.
But did your whole face idea not go as planned? I guess the Giambattista Valli fall runways in Paris said otherwise. Doing a full-face of highlight, which closely matched the appearance of glitter, was a beauty trend in 2016 amongst top makeup artists, then Glam Glow peel-off glitter face masks took the skin-care ravers by storm. If you’d like your eyes to shine just as much as these models’ faces, follow this link.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf8nYo6gBi1/?utm_source=ig_embed
8. Tie Dye Hair
Hair color will always be a bold statement, especially if there are unusual colors involved in the transformation. Last year, hairstylist Kelsey Pebler’s Instagram took off after posting about a new transformation. These transformations, though, look oddly similar to everyone’s favorite middle school tee shirts, tie dye.
Pebler’s feed is already full of vibrant colors, but this style is crazy creative because she used actual tape to section off the client’s hair to form the color patterns using Lime Crime’s Unicorn Dyes.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BiPkTHxg4qz/
9. Flower Vase Hair
Making yet another statement, IG user @taytay_xx continued her floral antics, but this time, it literally went to her head. Flowers in people’s hair is no biggie due to flower crowns, Frida Kahlo and hula dancers, but she took this to the extreme.
Resembling Cindy Lou Who, Taylor was inspired by Beyoncé and Rihanna’s floral magazine covers, so she stuck a water bottle on her head, made some hair bubbles and shoved flowers through the top of the bottle. If you are interested in seeing this process bloom to life, watch her video below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnjDGsKjbS5/
Honorable Mention: Asian Makeup Transformations
I’m not saying that these have to go, but if you’ve never watched one of these videos, I hope you are as shocked as I was when I first saw one. Asian makeup transformations started going viral in 2018 because of the unrecognizable before-and-after results. Most women will paint their faces lighter than their actual skin tone, tape parts of the face like their eyes, cheeks, and jawlines and heavily contour their faces to look longer. Besides the tape, one of the most shocking parts of the videos are when these women start peeling off their noses or sometimes, their entire face.
I realize that makeup is different everywhere, but I will admit that these transformations shocked me at first, and now, they are so intriguing. I know I could never pull something like that off, so hats off the these women who go through what seems like a lengthy process to get the final results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmkwaZzsk3U
