Why New Makeup Will Never Hit Like It Did in the ‘90s and 2000s

I remember my first love affair with an eye shadow palette. Urban Decay’s Skull Shadow Box, with its crinkly silver wrapping and cutesy foam skull appliqué, came out in the 2000s with a nine-pan color story that could kindly be described as “eclectic.” The shade that hooked me was Cherry, a pastel pink with silver micro glitter that I wore down to the metal again and again. I’d routinely re-buy the palette just for that one shade.

Back then, as a teenager in suburbia without a credit card or a Sephora in sight, I’d save all my Christmas and birthday cash, stalk eBay for my most coveted products, then trek to the drugstore to buy money orders (money orders!) to pay for them. Waiting weeks for a package made each product feel like a treasure.

Now, as a professional makeup artist in my thirties, I’m blessed with a level of access to products my younger self would have envied. I have a fully stocked kit, drawers overflowing with palettes, stacks of PR mailers, every shade and formula I could have dreamed of back then. And yet, something is missing. I no longer get that sugar-high kind of rush when I open new products. In fact, when I recently decluttered my entire collection, I came to find that—aside from boring necessities like mascara, primer, and brow pencils—there were only a couple of products in my kit that I loved anywhere near as much as my old favorites. The last time I was truly excited about a beauty product, I realized, was in high school.

At first, I thought this was because so many of my original favorites had been discontinued. I bought a Natasha Denona palette once simply because it had a light pink shade that looked like it could be somewhat similar to Urban Decay’s Cherry. It wasn’t. Beautiful, but too refined, too wet-looking, not quite right. So I went back on eBay and there it was: the Skull Shadow Box, over two decades old now and absolutely not talc-free—and, impossibly, an untouched, full-size Cherry eye shadow single (that cost a whopping $70 by itself, by the way). I bought both and waited with anticipation for the little packages in the mail. I wondered: Was my enthusiasm truly gone, or would opening these products feel the same as it did decades ago? When they arrived, my heart raced. It did feel the same. Better, maybe–it felt like coming home.

Anyone who gets wistful about makeup from the ‘90s and 2000s will tell you that their magic was never in the formulas. Many of the products themselves were arguably worse than they are today. Hard Candy polishes chipped rapidly. Urban Decay’s glitter eye shadows were fallout central (I love you, Midnight Cowboy Rides Again, but your chunky glitter was not the most eye-safe). MAC lipsticks, dreamily sweet as they smelled, couldn’t help but be drying. Rather, the magic came from something that beauty as a whole—the products, the practice, the culture—simply lacks now: imagination, possibility, context.