The Biggest Beauty Moments of the Last Decade, From Contouring to K-Beauty

The explosion of reality shows, like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and our fascination with them has influenced beauty ideals of the 2010s. From the Kardashian-Jenner beauty empire to the contoured face made popular by RuPaul's Drag Race, celebrities and socialites brought more dramatic aesthetics to the looks of the decade.

The Kardashians are pretty slick with appropriation, but they're not going to own the most defining beauty trend of the decade — the contoured face — which is an old-school makeup technique used regularly by drag artists that ultimately became more mainstream this decade with the popularity of RuPaul's Drag Race. The contoured face, the hyperfeminine body proportions, and the snatched wigs (move over, Kylie) are all thanks to the original kitty girl, RuPaul, and all the drag queens who came before her.

It may have happened toward the end of the decade, but Fenty Beauty shook up the beauty industry in a major way when it launched in 2017. Rihanna's first beauty launch included an impressive 40+ shade range of foundations, over a dozen (and in some cases, two dozen) more than most heritage beauty brands. The launch spoke to so many black and brown girls who previously struggled to find coverage that matched their skin tone — and simultaneously forced a majority of beauty brands to follow suit.

While we love to thank Rihanna for this move toward greater inclusivity in the beauty industry, she's not the only person who should get credit. Social media may have a lot of downsides, but it also helped start intimate conversations between brands and consumers. "Call out culture" on platforms like Twitter and Instagram allowed us to directly demand brands to do better. Most notably, Diet Prada's launch in 2014, and Estée Laundry in 2018, have both helped to call out big brands in the fashion and beauty industries — for better or worse.

It wasn't just an expansion of shades that was revolutionary this decade: we saw curvy models, mature models, hijabi models, models with disabilities, and men in gorgeous makeup and glamorous gowns walk the catwalks — and be featured in major editorial campaigns — in a capacity that transcended tokenism.

This decade saw Korea make its way to the center of the global skincare industry. Korea made multiple steps fun, sheet masks trendy, and peaked our curiosity about the most obscure of ingredients — like snail slime and cica. K-beauty also inspired us to experiment with essences, ampules, and BB creams in our skincare routines, and reintroduced many to the world of toners. Korea got us serious about skin care this decade, and the men of K-pop also did their part in introducing men's makeup to the mainstream.

Do you remember Michelle Phan? Before James Charles, Patrick Starr, and Huda Kattan, Phan was the original YouTube beauty influencer. While she may not have created the makeup tutorial, she certainly paved the way — with her video formats and friendly personality — for many other vloggers to make it big and monetize. Phan, along with a handful of others, is where influencer culture began — until it transformed through the hyperfiltered hallways of Instagram, and then TikTok gave way to VSCO girl, Egirl, and Softgirl subcultures.

Influencer culture has also led the way for Snapchat filters and facetuning apps, which have given us a warped, unattainable new beauty ideal. The world of hyperfiltered beauty is both dangerous and awe-inspiring, but digital perfection took a whole new form when computer-generated models, like Shudu, and influencers, like Lil Miquela, entered the race for likes.

The 2010s also saw the return of the face-framing eyebrow. Cara Delevingne's thick bushy, arches launched a million Google searches. And the return was quite literal, as many people who grew up in the '90s and early 2000s desperately tried to grow their brows back after years of plucking them into pencil-thin oblivion.