A Zillennial Ode to the 2010s Smoky Eye

“Whenever you’d open Vogue, People, or Allure, it would always be Mila Kunis with that sparkly-ish smoky eye, or Nina Dobrev, Vanessa Hudgens. Those were the smoky eyes [I remember],” says Lila Childs, a New York City-based makeup artist and podcast host who’s been posting beauty tutorials online since 2012. “It wasn’t even [considered] loud makeup. It weirdly looked like it was part of the face. The tones matched [the client’s] eye color and skin tone, making the eye appear lower contrast and softer—even though they were wearing lashes and a full Naked palette on their eyes.”

My morning routine now consists of rolling over, working from my bed until noon, and getting ready for the day by applying skin-care products to my face. Even on nights out, my eyes remained relatively naked, save for mascara. It seems like the rest of the world traded their once, tried-and-true palettes for cream blushes and clear brow gel (unless they’d gotten really into Euphoria).

Childs believes this new era stemmed from the age gap between trendsetter and consumer. As the celebrities and vloggers Gen Z and Zillennials took inspiration from matured, their looks became subtler. She adds that brands that featured more of a luminous, refined glam—like Charlotte Tilbury and Hourglass—rose in prominence during this period. “It was a little bit more Victoria’s Secret bombshell—a bit more natural. And then Glossier was so minimal. There were just beauty brands that were coming out with this whole concept of wearing a more natural face.”

“Clean” beauty looks became the standard (perhaps due to trend cycles, exhaustion from a world shut down, a growing emphasis on wellness culture, or all of the above). A TikTok search shows an abundance of glowy no-makeup makeup looks, centered around brushed-up brows, tinted cheeks, and blurred lips. Pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Haily Bieber further popularized this angelic, coquetteish aesthetic, which is arguably the antithesis of the sultry, dark vibe the smoky eye embodies. With this shift, lids are essentially neglected.

If you opened any social media app during the first couple of weeks of this year, you were met with every Zillennial It-Girl posting that “2016 is the new 2026.” King Kylie made her return, along with the Snapchat dog filter. All of this reminiscing revealed that what most people missed about this time period (along with blissfully ignorant hopecore) was the playful experimentation. “Doing my makeup like it’s 2016” quickly took off as a trend, with beauty creators posting tutorials set to Roses by the Chainsmokers, placing pieces of tape along their cheekbones to create the sharpest cat eye and minimize shadow fallout.