Brownie Glazed Lips have everything a beauty trend needs: hot looks, hyped products, simple tutorials and Hailey Bieber. The Brownie Glazed Lips trend could have been perfect if there wasn’t a problem: it’s not a new trend at all, it’s cultural appropriation. We explain to what extent a make-up look could trigger a mega trend and a shitstorm at the same time, but also how you can apply make-up to Brownie Glazed Lips without getting involved in the problem.
What are brownie glazed lips anyway?
TikTok has done it again: a makeup technique or beauty method known, used and celebrated in Black communities for decades has been repurposed into a new trend for white people. The newcomer to the list of cultural appropriation from the beauty bubble: the brownie glazed lips. But more on that below. First, let’s clarify what the Brownie Glazed Look looks like and what Brownie Glazed Lips are.
Brownie Glazed Lips are simple yet super sexy. For the look, the lips are outlined with brown lip liner and then covered with lip gloss. We will also come to the individual steps in a moment, but first we want to discuss why this classic has suddenly popped up again as a “trend”.
The trigger for the trend and the discussion surrounding it was Hailey Bieber, who popularized the term when she shared a video of her “brownie glazed lips” on TikTok and introduced them as her favorite lip combination.
Hailey Biebers Brownie Glazed Lips
Hailey Bieber is The Queen of Glaze. She has already brought Donut Glazed Skin and Donut Glazed Nails into our lives. She just loves the dewy juicy look so much that it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she also wears glazed lips. Nevertheless, her brown glazed lips were suddenly on everyone’s lips. What happened?
In the original video, Hailey Bieber applies lip liner, then gloss and then films her lipstick in close-up. That’s it. Nothing else happens at first. No brand new ideas, no hot tips, no exciting products.
Neither in this nor in the following videos does the model claim that she invented the brownie glazed lips. Despite this, she was hailed by her TikTok followers and eventually social media as if she had made a groundbreaking discovery. Copycat videos and tutorials spread at lightning speed, which is usual for the video app, and almost simultaneously the first critical voices, which drew attention to the fact that she was wrongly given so much exaggerated recognition for this look. After all, dark-skinned women, blacks and Latinas in particular, have been wearing the look for decades. He also had a trending moment among white supermodels in the ’90s, and now it’s another white supermodel that’s bringing him back.
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t wear the brownie glazed lips trend. It doesn’t matter what skin color you have, it’s ok to recreate the contoured glossy lips as long as you don’t attribute the trend exclusively to Hailey Bieber and the clean girls from TikTok. Let’s look at how to do the Brownie Glazed Lips makeup, then discuss how not to engage in cultural appropriation.
This is how the perfect brownie glazed lips succeed
We already touched on it, Brownie Glazed Lips are ready in a few really easy steps.
- Step: Outline the lips with a lip liner and optimize the shape as you wish. This means you can easily draw your lips a little fuller than they are, shade the corners of the mouth or the heart of the lips and thus contour the lips.
- Step: Blend the frame with your fingers and blur the transitions.
- Step: In the middle of the mouth, just below the heart of the lips, draw a cross at the top and bottom. And also blur this contour with your fingers.
- Step: Apply a generous amount of lip gloss and the brownie glazed lips look is complete.
Products for brownie glazed lips
In the TikTok video, the Rhode Beauty founder only uses two products to create the brownie glazed look. Eventually, the video would promote one of those two products before it became a much bigger item on the beauty agenda. Namely her own Rhode Beauty Peptide Lip Treatment. The gloss that has been sold out almost continuously ever since.
The brown lip liner that Ms. Bieber is using is by Scott Barnes Atelier in the shade “Naomi”. There are enough (cheaper) alternatives for both. All you need is a liner in a rich shade of brown. Adapted to your own skin and lip color, this can be warmer or cooler, darker or lighter. And finally you use a transparent gloss, which gives you the glazed finish.
The problem with the brownie glazed lips
In a nutshell, Hailey Bieber’s Brownie Glazed Lips are another example of cultural appropriation in the beauty world. But only a example of many. The underlying problem is much deeper than the glossy “trend” suggests.
The model and beauty brand founder has faced criticism for her brownie glazed lips. She has since changed the video with the original caption “ready for all fall stuff including glazed brownie lips”. Now it says: “The lip combo vibe I feel in the fall”.
So she has claimed the makeup technique or combination as her own. But the numerous almost exclusively white imitators have hailed her as her great inspiration and trendsetter of brownie glazed lips.
The look has always been a typical style worn by POC women and has its origins in the Cholas aesthetic. Women with dark lip colors invented the combination of a brown eyebrow pencil or eyeliner and clear lip gloss to create a nude look on their own, because for a long time there were simply no suitable lip products on the market for them.
Creator Victoria Lyn’s video, in which she dubbed the beauty trend “Hailey Bieber’s favorite fall lip combo,” has been widely cited on TikTok and Twitter as critics point out that both the look and the technique are nothing new and also not an invention from the house of Bieber and that the description of the technique as “glazed brownie lips” is problematic.
The problem is not new either and unfortunately it is repeated again and again in the beauty sphere: women like Hailey Bieber, i.e. a conventionally attractive, white model, are celebrated for exactly what black women are criticized for. The look is the same, the methods are the same, but the societal response couldn’t be more different. While women of color originally got creative out of necessity and invented the make-up technique for lack of suitable products, for white lip gloss customers it’s just a nice “new” trend.
Finally, in the case of Brownie Glazed Lips, numerous creators of color responded and explained the community’s point of view. Latina beauty influencer @benulus shares how she regularly wears a combination of dark liner and gloss in her videos, but doesn’t get nearly the recognition that Hailey Biber gets – quite the opposite. She adds: “I’m so flattered that Hailey Bieber takes inspiration from my community, a POC community. But now that she’s wearing the look, all the people who have told me that those lips are ugly will become obsolete , be the very ones who jump on this trend.”
So what needs to be done is credit beauty trends to those who actually created them. We can get inspiration from anywhere. Regardless of gender, lip shape and skin color, we can wear Brownie Glazed Lips. However, without criticizing them on other people, without selling them as a new trend, without stigmatizing them and just celebrating them on white model faces.
The great discussion about the cultural appropriation of beauty looks
TikTok is full of examples that represent cultural appropriation through beauty methods and typical looks. Arguably one of the most talked about cases of the past year has been the “clean girl aesthetic.” The so-called clean girls featured aesthetic elements that are ingrained among Latinas and black women, but were rebranded in 2022 as a “model off-duty” look. Long nails were once considered “ghetto” when Black and Latina women sported them proudly. But in recent years they have become en vogue for white women. People of color were criticized and discriminated against for braid hairstyles, which were supposed to maintain and style their natural curls, until the hairstyles first appeared on the heads of white models, actors and musicians in the 70s but have continued to this day and thus considered a trend.
The common thread that runs through all examples such as the Clean Girls and the Brownie Glazed Lips: the idealization of white beauty standards.
The urge to see everything as a trend leads to situations where POC’s inventions are appropriated, or at least borrowed, without being given credit or even knowing where they come from.
First, looks, techniques and treatments such as braids, sleek buns or even acrylic nails are stigmatized and associated with negative attributes such as frizzy hair (a stigma that the natural hair movement is fighting against). It is only when women who correspond to a white ideal of beauty pick up and copy the style that it is suddenly celebrated as a trend.
In the case of Hailey Bieber, the appropriation appears to have been unintentional. However, this only shows how quickly the mainstream masses fall for it and how deeply the idealization of the slim white woman is anchored in their heads. Even more problematic are cases where clean girls celebrate themselves as the inventors of the minimalist aesthetic, or when Kylie Jenner claims she was the first to wear wigs, or when Kim Kardashian refers to her cornrows as “Bo Derek braids.”
The Internet, mainstream media and social media have always offered us very similar examples. It’s up to us to examine them and attribute the hairstyles, looks and techniques to those who actually created them. In most cases, one will then come to the conclusion that the alleged trend is not such a trend at all.
