Forget beauty dream, suitable makeup for every occasion. Put aside perfect eyeliner, correct shade foundation, vermilion lips and lacquered nails. Make Up Brutalism is the upside down of this graced world, it is the disturbing anti-aesthetics that makes us screech of annoyance just looking at the feed. Is that why he attracts us so much? Created by Eszter Magyar, born in Budapest and based in Berlin, the Instagram page @makeupbrutalism gained in 2018 the title of “most hated beauty account of the year”.
Much more than a provocation, this page is a political manifesto, an act of resistance against the beauty industry that wants us eternal and superhuman. The price to pay for this digital revolt are (badly) colored teeth, cosmetic inks that flood on the cornea, foundation that falls in droplets from the eyelashes, mouths surrounded by black, writings that cross the face. Every single detail seems to have been designed to be in a wrong position. Yet, it is the right one to build a new brutalism, which this time does not apply to art or architecture, but to the aesthetics of the body, transforming make-up from something ornamental to a gesture of unbridled madness.
“I always loved the buildings built in the brutalist era... I always thought of brutalism as a new aesthetic, difficult for everyone to digest. It is here that I found the clues for my contents” she told to Dazed, being renamed the “make-up activist” or the “beauty terrorist”, today with an audience of 108 thousand followers. “The influencer follows a model of society obsessed with youth and perfection,” she continues. "Everything around us teaches us self-hatred, so much so that many people just want to hide behind layers of makeup. Everyone on Instagram looks like a Kardashian sister and in my eyes, this is pure character murder”.