Grunge Beauty in 2025: Authentic Rebellion or Just Another Trend Cycle?

Sophia, The LuxEco Edit

8/24/20253 min read

Beauty Lens: Grunge Makeup’s Revival — Aesthetic Trend or Empty Performance?

Beauty thrives on reinvention. This season, “grunge makeup” is everywhere—from TikTok tutorials to runway shows. Think smudged eyeliner, lived-in lips, and undone textures. It’s marketed as rebellion, a return to the raw and unpolished.

But here’s the problem: the original grunge movement was a reaction against overconsumption and mainstream gloss. Today’s “grunge” is being polished, packaged, and sold back to consumers by the same luxury houses and beauty conglomerates it once sought to resist. The contradiction is impossible to ignore: Is grunge makeup 2025 truly a cultural revival, or just another performance of trend-driven consumption?

From Subculture to Commodity

In the early 1990s, grunge wasn’t about eyeliner. It was about rejecting the machinery of excess—worn-out flannels, unstyled hair, and music that confronted the corporate sheen of pop culture. Its power lay in authenticity, not aesthetics.

Fast forward to 2025, and we see grunge rebranded as a curated look: precision-smudged eyeliner, perfectly imperfect lipstick, and designer campaigns. When Allure reported that “everyone’s missing the point” about this revival, it wasn’t just a critique of artistry—it was about cultural appropriation of meaning.

For luxury beauty, it raises a deeper question: Can rebellion survive when it’s monetised by the very system it once opposed?

The Neuroscience of Rebellion

Why does grunge resonate again now? Neuroscience offers one explanation: mirror neurons make us gravitate towards signals of authenticity, even if staged. Smudged makeup and raw textures signal “realness” in a hyper-filtered age.

At the same time, dopamine reward pathways are activated when consumers engage with what feels different or subversive. Brands know this, which is why they frame “messy eyeliner” as liberation—even though it’s produced in tightly controlled labs, with mass-market rollouts.

The irony is that the very desire for authenticity is what makes grunge so easily exploitable. Beauty brands understand that consumers crave imperfection—so they engineer it, sell it, and scale it. What was once non-conformity becomes just another SKU on the shelf.

Where Sustainability Gets Lost

The sustainability gap in this trend is stark:

Fast consumption: Most “grunge kits” or seasonal collections rely on mass-market launches, encouraging short product life cycles.
Contradiction with longevity: A style born from anti-fashion ideals now drives more product purchases to achieve a “less polished” look.
Lack of systemic innovation: Instead of investing in refillables or durable pigment technologies, brands often revert to packaging-heavy seasonal drops.

This reflects a wider pattern: Rebellion is marketed, but responsibility is neglected.

Can Grunge Go Green?

Some indie and niche brands are experimenting with ways to reconcile rebellion with sustainability:

Multi-use sticks that work across eyes, lips, and cheeks, reducing product clutter.
Vegan smudge liners with refillable cartridges, combining edge with eco-consciousness.
Water-based formulations in recyclable aluminium tubes, capturing imperfections without unnecessary plastic.

Even luxury could adapt—imagine a maison launching a “rebellion collection” that is entirely refillable, proving that imperfection can be both artistic and responsible. Such moves would align with the consumer’s emotional desire for authenticity while addressing environmental reality.

Cultural Cycles and Consumer Behaviour

The return of grunge also illustrates a wider cultural cycle: When societies face instability, fashion often leans into nostalgia and rebellion. Just as the 1990s responded to commercial excess, today’s generation is responding to hyper-consumerism and digital perfection.

But the difference is stark. In the 1990s, grunge meant buying less. In 2025, the beauty industry risks turning grunge into buying more to look like less. This inversion is where the sustainability conversation becomes essential: rebellion without systemic change is just aesthetic theatre.

Editorial Reflection

Grunge makeup’s 2025 revival is seductive, but also symptomatic. It shows how quickly fashion and beauty repackage authenticity for consumption. Yet it also reveals consumers’ longing for rawness and honesty—a desire brands could answer more meaningfully if they linked aesthetics with sustainability.

For The LuxEco Edit, the takeaway is this: Beauty must evolve beyond performance. The future belongs to brands that understand rebellion not as an eyeliner trend, but as a rejection of waste, excess, and disposability. Real luxury is not pretending to be raw. It is the courage to be responsible.