If you’ve been online at all this past month, you’ve seen Zendaya’s makeup at the Odyssey London premiere. It’s a masterclass in simplicity: loose curls and undetectable mascara, accompanied by a soft rose pout and blush-tinged cheeks. It’s a face capable of launching a thousand ships — or at least a thousand TikTok reels on how to imitate the look.

Zendaya at the London Odyssey Premiere, Getty Images

There’s a reason a look of such ease broke the Internet: sure, we all love Zendaya (and her chicness, and every look she comes out in), but this particular makeup style went viral for reasons bigger than you’d think. And, no matter how many step-by-step tutorials you watch deconstructing her makeup, you will not be able to replicate it.

A rejection of Instagram face

Just over a decade ago, in 2015, Kylie Jenner told her followers that her shockingly full lips were the product of injections. Far from repelling her fans, the admission sparked the Kylie Jenner effect — the lip challenge, in which young girls puckered into shot glasses, and a rising number of women were funnelled toward injectors promising the same trademark look.

Fast forward to now — and the appetite for overt enhancement has shifted. As one board-certified cosmetic surgery group put it this year: “[Now] you’ll hear the same request over and over: ‘I want to look better, but I don’t want anyone to know I had work done.’ Welcome to the undetectable era.” Gone are the days of mimicking the Instagram face, now that it’s everywhere. As consultant Melinda Farina tells The Coveteur: “the homogeneous face is losing cultural relevance… Beauty is moving away from templates and toward specificity.”

This, perhaps, explains the popularity of Zendaya’s Odyssey look.

Unlike the chiseled contour of Kardashians past, the wash of blush on Zendaya’s cheeks seems like something your kid sister can recreate (she can’t, by the way). Zendaya is herself on the red carpet, albeit a version with golden-hour skin. It is a face that doesn’t try to be an Instagram face, and isn’t a copy of a copy — and it is Zendaya’s ‘specificity,’ as Farina called it, that reads as luxury. Because luxury, at the end of the day, is distinct.

Instagram face, on the other hand, is ubiquitous - everyone has it. As Jia Tolentino defined it in 2019, it’s characterized by youth, full lips, a ski-slope nose and catlike eyes. In her latest New Yorker piece from last month, Tolentino argues instead that, “now we have arrived at a place where you can acquire Instagram Face at your local strip mall and the monied are seeking facelifts instead…the subtle results of the new facelifts conceal serious invasion.”

Sure, botox and fillers now abound among Gen Z, with surgeons seeing real appetite from people under 30. But the distinction is clear: are you relegated to buying Instagram face at your ‘local strip mall,’ as Tolentino puts it, or do you have enough capital to access the good stuff? Because beauty enhancement now depends on what look you can afford.

The Undetectable Era

Makeup and cosmetic surgery are different things. However, interest in cosmetic surgery oscillates with cultural taste, as does makeup — both often correlating to the same beauty standard. Now the signal for both is clear — effort must stay concealed. Conspicuous beauty, where the labor is obvious, is out. The wealthy have always lived in worlds the rest of us can’t access, where labor stays invisible. Aesthetic labor is no exception — the new luxury is a face that appears to take no work.

Zendaya’s Odyssey Premiere looks featured in Harper’s Bazaar

Zendaya is a funny symbol of this. She is a beautiful actress with access to the best of the best — skin treatments, cosmetics, makeup artists the rest of us don’t have. But with barely-there blush and a sweep of lipstick, it almost tricks us into thinking we too could look like that.

Because that visual trick is part of this makeup’s magic. Undetectable beauty still requires capital the ordinary person lacks. You know what to buy to replicate Instagram face; but the beauty Zendaya sells is more opaque. You can copy her Prada routine going viral but it will only take you so far. It likely took a team of experts - not to mention skin boosters and a health regimen - to enhance her glow. Can you, as an average consumer, list everything she used to attain her look — outside of her makeup routine and genetics? Probably not.

Because unlike Instagram face, you can’t buy a face like hers — simply because you wouldn’t know what to buy. Her makeup signals a new beauty standard — one that can afford minimal makeup because it is already impeccably taken care of. Ultimately, beauty is moving towards aesthetic labor - and signals - that you can’t even identify, and, thus, can’t easily duplicate — even with makeup.

It’d be remiss not to mention what else is at play. Zendaya is a mixed-race woman, and her makeup artist, Ernesto Casillas, is Mexican American. That she becomes the symbol of what we could all be with the right makeup raises a real question about how beauty is evolving, and how a new, minimal beauty standard is championed by a woman of color (and not, say, Hailey Bieber). However, that’s a subject that deserves its own essay, and which we won’t explore fully here.

So enjoy the Zendaya viral makeup for what it is — hardly effortless, but a harbinger of the quiet death of Instagram face and the rise of a new, more exclusive beauty class.

Woke Beauty Is Dying

“Wokeness is dead.”

Richard Hanania, the right-wing writer best known for The Origin of Woke, posts this on X in March 2024¹ shortly after Sydney Sweeney’s Saturday Night Live appearance.² The blonde controversy is wearing a skintight dress, cleavage on full display, giggling that the secret to success is to “show boobs.” Hanania’s post gets 50,000 hearts and 1,200 retweets. And while memory of the SNL bit itself will fade, the discourse around it will not: woke beauty, however you define it, is dying. Blonde hair and big boobs, that timeless American ideal, is back on the menu, and, so we are told, this is a fact worth celebrating. The comments spawned in the wake of Sweeney’s success laud her objective beauty. No matter the controversy—the American Eagle ad, Donald Trump’s shout-out—something about her stardom remains untouchable. Because finally, as one columnist puts it, we can admit that beauty is genetic. The question of whose genes, of course, has an implicit answer.

Sweeney in HBO’s Euphoria

Fast-forward two years to the summer of 2026. A scan of Harper’s Bazaar,³ Who What Wear,⁴ and Elle⁵ will tell you - blonde is the hair color of the season. Call it soft champagne, hot honey, buttercream. No matter the label, the product they’re selling is the same. Commentators try to explain the shift. One points to the Baywatch revival, where Brooks Nader and Livvy Dunne adorn the “same ‘90s electric hues a la Pamela Anderson.”³ Others frame it as a cyclical reset. Emaly Baum of Beauty Supply New York tells Harper’s Bazaar that trends “mirror what’s going on in popular culture, as we’re seeing with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy… Going lighter, however, feels like a reset. Something brighter and fresher.”³

A reset. What are we resetting to, exactly?

The Data (Or: Why Your Hinge Date Is Wrong)

A cursory glance at magazine trends is one thing. The data is another. That millennial tech bro you matched with on Hinge would tell you beauty trends aren’t that deep—people just prefer blonde right now, the way they always have.

On the surface, that seems fair enough. Google Trends (2020-2026, US) confirms that interest in blondes has historically dominated brunettes.⁶ But the gap has widened, and the widening is linked clearly to a specific time—the zenith of the Black Lives Matter movement and America’s descent into populist politics. Search interest in blonde hair is up 10% since 2020.⁶

The interest index for “blonde hair” has climbed from 52 to 68 in that window, while “brunette” has flatlined at 8. In the past five years alone, the interest gap between brunette and blonde has grown roughly 30%. On top of that, “Lived-in blonde” is up 20% since the start of 2026,³ while “Old Money Blonde” alone is up 150% this summer.⁷

One can’t help but ask: what fuels the current appetite for being blonde?

We argue that the answer can be found in the dynamics of white anxiety at this moment in time. Per PRRI’s June 2026 study,⁸ 74% of white evangelical Protestants agree America is in danger of losing its culture and identity, followed by 65% of white Catholics and 64% of white mainline Protestants. Pew finds awareness of Christian nationalism up 14 points in two years, from 45% to 59%, and favorability for it has doubled from 5% to 10%, though opposition has also increased in parallel.⁹ Christian nationalism has entered the public consciousness - and the public has not wholly said no thanks.

Two things are happening at once: blonde beauty is spotlit, and white Christian identity feels, to the people who hold it, endangered. But correlation is not causation. Taste, as Bourdieu remarked, is a class signal, a way of marking who belongs.¹⁰ When status-coded phrases like “Old Money Blonde” surface at a moment of white anxiety, at the very least, we should ask ourselves if these two are linked.

Blonde as Racial Code

“We use ‘blonde’ (and to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white,’” the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom argues.¹¹ McMillan Cottom has spent a career writing about beauty as capital, and blonde, in her framing, is capital only white women can fully leverage.

This isn’t to ignore the fact that Black and brown women have sported blonde locks for ages. But the word blonde, spoken casually in conversation, still conjures a specific type: thin, white, blue-eyed. A Pamela Anderson, a Marilyn Monroe, a Sydney Sweeney. The blonde currently being sold—the Bessette-Kennedy reset, the Old Money palette, the Baywatch revival—is not about hair color alone.

Hair color has history. As Arabelle Sicardi writes in Allure, “the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union produced many thousands of films that used blondeness as a symbol of white supremacy.”¹² The white beauty ideal, sociological data suggests, is also enforced most by white women themselves, on their own bodies and each other’s.¹³

If bodies are class-coded, if aesthetic choices signal belonging, what does it mean that this specific blonde is surging? Patricia Hill Collins wrote that women accumulate and deploy aesthetic and symbolic capital, while men master material and financial domains.¹⁴ Blonde, via her framework, is capital: capital urgently desired in an America that is anxious to revive whiteness and white Christianity.

All of this is to say - recall that the trend has been sold to us as a reset. It is worth asking what we are being reset to.

Appendix

1: Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania), post on X, March 2024.

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2: Saturday Night Live, Season 49, hosted by Sydney Sweeney, NBC, March 2, 2024.

3: Harper’s Bazaar UK, “blond hair trends 2026,” https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/beauty/hair/a70959589/blond-hair-trends-2026/. Source of the Emaly Baum quote. Warm, golden blondes are back: how to get your best colour ever this spring, Katie Itner.

4: Who What Wear, “blonde summer hair trend 2026,” https://www.whowhatwear.com/beauty/hair/blonde-summer-hair-trend-2026. Source of the Baywatch revival / Brooks Nader / Livvy Dunne reference. Is It Just Me, or Is Everyone Going Sunrise Blonde This Summer?, Alyssa Brascia.

5: Elle, “hot honey blonde hair trend, Met Gala 2026,” https://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/a71231721/hot-honey-blonde-hair-trend-met-gala-2026/. “Hot Honey” Blonde Is This Summer’s Most Flattering Hair Color—Gigi Hadid and Beyoncé Prove It, Katie Withington.

6: Google Trends, United States, January 2020–July 2026 (accessed July 26, 2026). “Blonde” vs. “brunette” term comparison: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=brunette%2Cblonde&date=2020-01-01%202026-07-26&geo=US. Topic-level series for blonde hair: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0294jb&date=2020-01-01%202026-07-26&geo=US. “Lived-in blonde”: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=lived%2520in%2520blonde&date=2020-01-01%202026-07-26&geo=US. Note: Google Trends values represent relative search interest (indexed 0–100), not absolute search volumes.

7: Google Trends, “old money blonde,” United States, accessed July 26, 2026. https://trends.google.com/explore?q=old%20money%20blonde&date=today%203-m&geo=US

8: PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), June 2026 survey. Competing Visions of America at 250: Politics, Religion, and American Identity. https://prri.org/research/competing-visions-of-america-politics-religion-and-american-identity/

9: Pew Research Center, “How Americans Feel About Religion’s Influence in Government and Public Life,” May 14, 2026, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/05/14/how-americans-feel-about-religions-influence-in-government-and-public-life/.

10: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

11: Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blond,” The New York Times, January 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/opinion/the-enduring-invisible-power-of-blond.html.

12: Arabelle Sicardi, “The History of Blonde Hair,” Allure, https://www.allure.com/story/history-of-blonde-hair.

13: Lora Jacobi and Thomas F. Cash, “In Pursuit of the Perfect Appearance: Discrepancies Among Self-Ideal Percepts of Multiple Physical Attributes,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24, no. 5 (1994): 379–396. Among white female respondents, 92.9% of blondes rated blond hair ideal and 84% of all women believed men preferred blondes, while only about a third of male respondents reported that preference.

14: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990); see also the elites-and-appearance discussion drawing on Collins in https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-08035-6_17.