By now, you’ve likely read Vogue’s viral article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?”, or at least engaged with the wave of commentary it sparked, from celebrity responses to think pieces. Despite the clickbait headline, the piece taps into a genuine cultural shift: the way women are repositioning themselves in relation to romance and, crucially, to each other. This isn’t happening in isolation. It’s showing up in how we dress, how we think about our careers, and how we engage with beauty.
On TikTok, we’re seeing the rise of content centred around decentering men, and “doing it for the female gaze”. It’s less about looking desirable for someone else and more about crafting an image aligned with ambition, independence, professionalism, confidence and, importantly, yourself. The “male gaze” isn’t the default lens anymore; the sisters are doing it for themselves. Or at least, that’s what we’re being told.
To be honest, I’m not fully convinced. The idea of a self-focused beauty era is undeniably appealing, especially in a climate that seems fixed on optimising our faces for the consumption of others on social media. It just feels too easy to celebrate this as liberation.
The issue is that the internal structures and “rules” of beauty remain unchanged and as powerful as ever. Globally, men dominate senior leadership across the industry. In the UK, 71% of executive committee seats in major beauty companies are held by men, per MBS Intelligence. If the people steering trends and messaging are disproportionately male, can we truly say we’ve moved beyond the male gaze? And in parallel to this trend, we still have the “tradwife” and “clean girl” aesthetics instilling ideals of womanhood that adhere to traditional, and even conservative, ideals.
In Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes about how beauty often creates the illusion of autonomy while quietly reinforcing existing hierarchies—and we can apply this idea here. This trend, and the online discourse around decentring men, is meeting us where we are, and we can be optimistic about it; women are questioning the role of beauty and their part within it.
Still, I’m sceptical. Until we live in a world where women’s appearances aren’t treated as endlessly adjustable and a metric of worth, we’re still playing to the tune of the male gaze. And then there is the algorithm to consider. Yes, we may be opting out of the male gaze, but what defines the female gaze? The algorithms we follow, which are ultimately based on the former, push trends and ideas of what is considered desirable and “good” onto us. Is there any getting away from it?
“Our beauty decisions don’t exist in a vacuum,” beauty journalist Ata-Owaji Victor tells me. “Even as conversations about decentring men or distinguishing between male and female gazes mark the start of a shift in how we approach appearance, wearing makeup to feel beautiful is still rooted in traditional ideals.”
For research purposes, I watched many “female gaze” makeup tutorials on TikTok and one thing they have in common is that they start their videos with a sort of warning. “A really good makeup look should scare a man away” one creator begins her video. The other thing they share is that it’s all still make-up, and the same techniques we’ve used for decades are utilised. You can dress anything up as the female gaze, but it’s ultimately about the individual and their approach.
This isn’t about critiquing the women who participate in these trends, it’s about the narratives built around them and how easily trends are framed as liberation or progress when, in reality, they’re shaped to appeal to algorithms and social approval. That leaves us stagnant, because we invest in the idea of progress instead of actually working to achieve it. Sometimes we get caught up in the delusion of believing things are far more progressive than they are, to the point that we ignore the possibility that something isn’t progressive, or is actually quite harmful.
So where does that leave us? Somewhere in between. Not in a post–male gaze utopia, but in a moment of heightened awareness, where women are more critical of the systems behind beauty culture, more resistant to algorithmic femininity, and more willing to interrogate trends and who they ultimately serve. Perhaps the real shift isn’t the trends themselves, but the willingness to question them. The interrogation of beauty is, at the very least, a solid starting point for real change.