Coachella’s Messy Girl Look Is the Y2K Rewind Millennials Have Been Begging For

Of course, Coachella is where you see it most clearly, but it’s hardly the only place it exists. At Coachella, most of this is just physics. You're in the desert. It's 98 degrees and you're walking four miles a day across a field in the sun. A 12-step routine was never going to survive that, and anyone who tried looked a little sad by Saturday afternoon. But some of it is taste, and that part is more interesting. Looking too controlled feels off right now. Too considered. These days, a full face of perfectly applied makeup at an outdoor music festival reads less glamorous and more…exhausting. 

And outside the festival circuit, that same feeling is starting to creep into everyday beauty, too. Last year, the clean girl aesthetic quietly lost its grip with less slick buns on the runways, fewer perfectly glazed faces; and now, the shift is obvious. Makeup is much more lived-in. We saw this at At Prada, Miu Miu and at Chanel as models walked with diffused eyes and flushed cheeks. We’re in our full era of blushing, not contouring, worn off lip stains and blurred eyeliners. 

What I love (and keep coming back to) is the sparkle-of-at-all. Coachella reeks of body gems scattered across collarbones, crystals clustered at the corners of eyes, shimmer that catches light from every angle. None of it looks precise, and that's what the wearers want. You put it on, you go dance, you stop thinking about it. Same with the hair. Braids threaded with beads, gold hair rings catching the afternoon light, texture left completely alone instead of smoothed. And crochet hats everywhere. And, yes, the same with nails. Even Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber leaned in. Both showed up with playful floral nails. It’s not hard to trace all of this back to Y2K when beauty was a little more experimental, a little less controlled and a lot more fun.

The biggest question this trend raises is whether we actually need all the steps we've been told to adopt. The 10-step skincare routine. The color corrector under the concealer under the foundation. The setting spray, the baking, the whole production. Because from the fields, the answer looks increasingly like no. Or at least, not always. Not for this.

Messy girl beauty is about showing that you were genuinely somewhere, doing something, having a good time (in the scorching heat, no less) with people you like. You were living!