The idea that beauty practices belong to one gender or another is, historically speaking, a relatively recent invention. For most of human history, the application of pigment to the face, the careful arrangement of hair, the use of scent and adornment — these were not coded as feminine. They were coded as powerful. Pharaohs wore kohl. Elizabethan courtiers wore powder and rouge. Samurai maintained elaborate skincare routines. The gendering of beauty as a primarily female domain is largely a product of the 19th and 20th centuries, not a timeless truth.
Understanding that history matters for understanding the current moment. What is described as a new conversation about gender-fluid beauty is, in many ways, a return — a gradual dismantling of a relatively recent restriction that was never as universal or as inevitable as it was presented to be.
The historical precedents
The examples from history are not hard to find once you start looking. In ancient Egypt, both men and women used kohl to line their eyes — the practice was understood as protective as well as decorative, believed to ward off the evil eye and reduce glare. In ancient Rome, men of means used cosmetics to maintain the appearance of health and status. The powdered wigs and rouged cheeks of 18th century European courts were worn by men and women alike, and were markers of social standing rather than gender.
In many non-Western traditions, elaborate personal adornment has never been primarily gendered. The intricate facial tattoos of Māori culture — the tā moko — are worn by both men and women, with specific designs communicating identity, lineage, and social status regardless of gender. In South Asian classical traditions, male dancers have worn full makeup for centuries as part of their performance practice. In many West African cultures, elaborate jewellery and body decoration are worn by men as markers of status and identity.
The strict binary that defined Western beauty culture through most of the 19th and 20th centuries — cosmetics for women, plain faces for men; long hair feminine, short hair masculine — was a cultural construction, enforced with surprising rigidity given how recently it had been established. The pushback against it has been building for decades.
The 2010s shift
The visible acceleration of gender-fluid beauty culture in Western markets happened in the 2010s, driven by several converging forces.
K-beauty — the global wave of interest in Korean beauty culture that began around 2012 and peaked in the mid-decade — introduced Western audiences to a beauty culture in which male grooming was normalised at a level well beyond what Western markets were used to. Korean male celebrities routinely wore BB cream, concealer, and eye makeup. The K-pop idol aesthetic — precise, polished, deliberately androgynous — reached global audiences through social media and created a new visual reference point for what male beauty could look like.
The male grooming market had been growing for years before this, but the K-beauty influence shifted something about its character. The conversation was no longer only about beard oil and moisturiser — products that could be framed as functional rather than aesthetic. It was beginning to include products — tinted moisturisers, brow gels, skin-evening products — that were harder to describe as anything other than cosmetics. The industry, sensing the opportunity, began to respond.
At the same time, a generation of musicians, artists, and public figures were making gender-fluid personal presentation part of their public identity in ways that reached mainstream visibility. The conversation about what men were allowed to look like — and what that meant — was happening in popular culture in a way it hadn’t before, or at least not at that scale.
How social media changed the speed of change
Social media did not create gender-fluid beauty culture, but it changed the speed and scale at which it could spread. Communities that had previously been geographically isolated — people in smaller cities or more conservative environments who were interested in beauty practices that fell outside their local norm — could find each other online and share practices, products, and references.
The makeup tutorial as a format democratised beauty knowledge in a way that the traditional magazine never had. Anyone with a camera and a platform could teach, learn, and experiment. The gatekeepers — the editors, the brands, the photographers who had previously controlled what beauty looked like — lost their monopoly on the conversation.
This had complicated effects. On one hand, it created genuine space for a much wider range of beauty expression to find an audience and a community. On the other, it created new standards with their own pressures — the highly produced, filter-heavy aesthetic of social media beauty culture is not obviously more liberating than the airbrushed magazine page it replaced. The platforms that enabled more diverse beauty expression also algorithmically rewarded a specific kind of content that quickly became its own form of conformity.
The industry response
The beauty industry’s response to the rise of gender-fluid beauty has been characterised by genuine innovation in some areas and strategic repositioning in others.
Some brands have genuinely rethought their approach — launching products without gendered marketing, creating ranges explicitly designed for all genders, changing the language they use to describe their products and their customers. These changes reflect a real shift in who the industry understands its market to be.
Others have added a gender-neutral range alongside their existing gendered lines without fundamentally changing anything — a diversification of product rather than a rethinking of philosophy. The packaging changes, the language softens, but the underlying assumption that there is a default beauty customer — still often coded as a young, thin, light-skinned woman — remains embedded in the brand’s identity.
Salons and barbershops have been slower to change than the product industry, and the reasons are partly economic and partly cultural. Pricing structures that charge more for women’s haircuts than men’s for equivalent work have been challenged in some markets and defended in others. The question of which spaces feel genuinely welcoming to people whose gender presentation doesn’t fit the traditional salon or barbershop model is still being worked out.
What gender-fluid beauty means in practice
For most people navigating personal presentation in the current moment, gender-fluid beauty is less a political position than a practical expansion of options. The question is simply: what do I want to do with my appearance, and what is available to me?
For some, this means incorporating products or practices previously coded as belonging to another gender — a man using concealer, a woman maintaining a fade, a non-binary person assembling a beauty routine from across the traditional spectrum. For others, it means a deliberate aesthetic statement — a commitment to an appearance that resists easy gender categorisation.
What has changed, genuinely, is the range of references available. The person figuring out their personal presentation today has access to a far wider vocabulary of images, products, techniques, and communities than existed a generation ago. Whether they use that vocabulary to express a gender-fluid identity or simply to find what works best for their face and hair is their own decision to make.
Where the conversation is going
The cultural conversation about gender-fluid beauty continues to move, and continues to generate resistance alongside acceptance. The progress is real but uneven — more visible in some communities, industries, and geographies than others. The pushback — from those who experience the dismantling of gendered beauty norms as a cultural loss or a political provocation — is also real, and has intensified in some contexts as the conversation has become more mainstream.
What seems clear is that the direction of travel is not reversing. The conditions that produced the shift — globalisation, social media, changing generational attitudes toward gender — are structural rather than temporary. The specific forms that gender-fluid beauty takes will continue to evolve, but the expanding of the conversation beyond a strict binary seems unlikely to contract back to what it was.
The more interesting question, perhaps, is not whether gender-fluid beauty will continue but what it will look like when it is no longer remarkable — when the full range of personal presentation options is simply available, unremarkable, and understood as belonging to everyone.