31 March 2025 |
Spring forward with pop music’s beauty takeover, a category disruption from hair’s heroes, and a plastic surgery bust-up. Plus, all-new ways to bring ritual into your routine— and redefine what it means to live “well.”
Pop music’s beauty monoculture is dead. In its place? Fresh takes on hair and makeup as diverse as the oft-manufactured genre’s varied new sound.
After the last golden gramophone was handed out at the 2018 Grammy Awards, it wasn’t the ceremony that was trending on social media. With only one woman (Alessia Cara) earning a major award, it was the hashtag #GrammysSoMale that made headlines. But seven years on, artists like Chappell Roan, Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter, et al are leading a Femininomenon, ushering in a woman-led pop renaissance. The ramp-up started at last year’s Grammys, where the so-called Big Four—Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist—was an all-female sweep by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish,
Miley Cyrus, and Victoria Monét, respectively. In 2025, women continued to represent across every category, offering a refresh- ing variety of earworms—and an abundance of inspiration to take to your local Sephora.
There are hints of the early aughts, when teenage dreams Britney and Christina dominated the charts, canonizing irresistible hooks and rock-hard abs with hair and makeup that was as memorable as the music they championed. “Women in pop have always had the power to create these iconic looks,” says the hairstylist Evanie Frausto, pointing to Christina’s Dirrty-era high-contrast blonde streaks and Britney’s …Baby One More Time pigtails. Part of that is because being a woman in pop has never solely been about the music; image has long played a significant— some would argue, outsized—role in these ascendance stories. Con- sider Ronnie Spector without the teetering bouffant and thick flick of black eyeliner; Tina Turner minus the wavy mullet-cut mane; or Gwen Stefani without the peroxide blonde hair and fire engine red lip.
The dissemination of these looks into the pub- lic consciousness used to be more of a slow burn, says Frausto, who is behind Sabrina Carpenter’s signature wink-wink, hot-rollered glam, as well as Addison Rae’s tousled Cindy Crawford 2.0 strands in her Diet Pepsi video. But social media has shifted how easily we access pop’s beauty offerings and how rapidly these images need to grab our collective attention to make an impression. As a result, pushing beauty boundaries has become an accepted—almost expected—part of pop superstardom, a freedom many female pop stars in decades past weren’t always afforded, suggests the makeup artist Julianne Kaye. “Women in pop now really play with beauty in a way that I never could,” adds Kaye, who worked with Spears between 1999 and 2004. “You definitely have more license to do whatever you want.”
Chapelle Roan glittering on stage; photograph courtesy of Michael Hurcomb/shutterstock
In tandem with their boundary-pushing lyrics and unorthodox song structures, the current generation of female pop stars, from Eilish to Doja Cat to Ice Spice to FKA twigs, have leaned into that license, toying with our collective notions of what qualifies as “pop”—a term coined in 1926 to describe a popular category of music. What further defines what pop looks and sounds like, however, has continued to evolve: from the 1940s, when jazz ruled the airwaves and Ella Fitzgerald was crowned the “first lady of song” to the squeaky-clean, saccharine sounds of Connie Francis and Brenda Lee in the Fifties and the soulful harmonies of The Supremes in the Sixties, to singular icons like Donna Summer, who arrived against the shimmering backdrop of Seventies disco. The Eighties birthed a slew of one-name wonders, like Madonna, Whitney, Tina, Janet, and Cyndi, with snappy No.1s, followed by the Nineties, which introduced prominent lip liner and power vocals from Mariah Carey and Celine Dion and girl-power anthems from the Spice Girls, further diversifying the full breadth of what it means to be a “pop star.” Billboard recently crowned Beyoncé and Swift the greatest pop stars of the 21st century.
But in 2025, choosing your pop fighter no longer means pledging allegiance to just Bey or Tay, because the breadth of options is just so vast. Are you a SZA or an Olivia Rodrigo, a Doechii or a Rosé, a Tyla or a Beabadoobee? “Poptimism,” a term bandied about (and heavily debated) by music critics, promotes the ideology that pop music should be as worthy of our interest and evaluation as its more serious rock or indie cohorts. And in our current climate, where there isn’t one prescribed, cookie-cutter sound or prescribed way to look, it’s hard to take issue with that argument. A Sabrina is not a Charli or a Chappell, and we’re all better off because of it. “Chappell is maximalist drag-inspired, Sabrina is polished glamour, Charli is dark grunge. There’s variety,” says the makeup artist Ali Scharf, who is responsible for creating the quintessential Roan beauty stamp (first done for an NME cover shoot) of blue eyeshadow plus hot pink blush and a red lip all against a Kabuki white face. It’s a look that doesn’t read “pop girlie,” and that’s the point. The same could be said of Charli xcx’s indie-sleaze, party-girl aesthetic with her overtly lined lips, fuzzy, lived-in eyeliner, and mane of unfettered don’t-give-a-fuck natural curls.“It’s not what you would expect from a chart-topping pop diva, but it’s a direct reflection of who they are,” adds the makeup artist Andrew Dahling, who also regularly works with Roan.
“They all want to create something that’s unique to themselves but also sets them apart from each other,” Frausto says. The common thread? Candor, confidence, and a sense of individuality and ownership over the image they’re projecting to the world.
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 04 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
