For years, Kim Kardashian et al, has been encouraging us to "snatch" our faces to high heaven. We'd bought into it way before Skims released their controversial line of face shapewear earlier this month—dutifully carving out our cheekbones, jawlines and eye sockets, as thousands of TikTok tutorials instructed. Some of us took it further: trimming off the ends of eyebrows to look more "lifted", before gelling our hair into restrictive ponytails designed to pull taught foreheads even higher. It's the defining beauty standard of our time and has been adopted by stars as diverse as Lindsay Lohan and Kris Jenner, to Emma Stone. The public, though, seems to be tiring of it.
Over the past few months, I've spotted all manner of social media videos, calling for a return to "soft faces" and sharing tutorials where they work with their features, not against them. "What if your face doesn't need to be snatched and lifted. What if you can stop actively fighting your natural features?" asks Jamie Janejira, a Thai-American, multi-hyphenate make-up artist and model in one such video. Instead of using blush to elongate her cheeks, she melts a dusty pink cream into the apple of her cheeks to mimic her natural flush pattern and emphasise her natural roundness. She says that she once shaved off the ends of her eyebrows to look more lifted, but now emphasises their downward turn: "I think eyebrows curve down for a reason," she adds. "They frame the eye. Brows that curve down are not going to make your face look sad and droopy."
