Beauty

The Evolution of Arab Glam & The Colonial Roots of the Clean Girl

BYKhaoula Ghanem

July 31, 2026

I still remember watching my aunt prepare for her Algerian wedding. I followed her into the beauty salon that morning, where several women immediately began working across her face, hair, and body with the focus of a production crew. Over several hours, the woman I knew slowly disappeared beneath their hands. A foundation several shades lighter than her complexion erased every trace of sun from her skin, honey blonde extensions were sculpted into a gravity-defying updo, and sharp geometric eyeliner stretched toward her temples beneath shimmering shadow and thick lashes. A deep red lipstick completed the transformation. By the time she stood up, she looked almost unrecognizable. But nobody in the room considered that result a failure. This was what beauty looked like.

Unless you’re tuning into an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, that face feels almost impossible to find today. Brows once carved into impossibly precise arches have softened into brushed-up feathered shapes, while hair sprayed into architectural updos has been replaced by slick buns that appear to require almost no effort at all. Somewhere between the Arab bridal face of the early 2000s and the clean girl aesthetic of today, an entire way of seeing beauty was gradually displaced.

The disappearance of old Arab glamour is often dismissed as nothing more than the natural cycle of trends. Fashion changes and makeup evolves. Yet that explanation feels strangely incomplete. Beauty has never evolved in a vacuum. If today’s beauty ideals feel radically different from those that dominated Arab salons two decades ago, then the question is not simply what changed, but who decided that one face should replace another.

Cosmetics have always occupied a unique place in the Arab world. Long before makeup became an industry worth billions, Ancient Egyptians used galena—the natural mineral form of lead sulfide— to create dramatic black pigment that protected the eyes from sunlight. Red ochre was ground into fine powder and mixed with waxes or oils to create lipstick.

Meanwhile, Arab people’s relationship with adornment has never been minimalist. Think of the fragrance that lingers after someone leaves a room, the wedding dresses (plural!) embroidered almost to excess, or the gold jewelry passed between generations and worn all at once rather than one delicate piece at a time. Makeup existed within that same philosophy.

Cinema only amplified that philosophy. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Egyptian film established Cairo as the cultural capital of the Arab world, exporting beauty alongside music and storytelling through stars such as Hind Rostom, Soad Hosny, and Faten Hamama. Satellite television and music channels like Rotana and Mazzika later expanded that influence, turning singers including Haifa Wehbe, Elissa, Nancy Ajram, and Nawal Al Zoghbi into salon reference points from Rabat to Riyadh. Unlike today’s algorithmically personalized feeds, millions of women consumed the same images at the same time, producing beauty trends that still felt distinctly regional.

Of course, it would be dishonest to pretend that Arab makeup existed outside colonial influence. The lighter-than-life foundation (a preference reinforced by the lack of inclusive foundation shades) and the penchant for blonde highlights and colored contact lenses reveal that European ideals existed, to some extent, in Arab salons for decades. Yet despite those contradictions, the overall aesthetic of the late 1990s and early 2000s—sharp black eyeliner enclosing the entire eye, dramatic lashes, lips outlined in brown before being filled with pale pink or frosted gloss— still felt unmistakably regional.

Looking back now, it is tempting to describe the style as excessive. At the time, however, it represented technical skill, femininity, and transformation. It also reflected the social lives many women led. Arab glamour wasn’t trying to be wearable every day because it wasn’t for every day.

Its decline had less to do with makeup than with the changing conditions that produced it.

During the early years of social media, Arab maximalism did not vanish overnight. Instead, it entered into conversation with an emerging digital beauty culture that was rapidly collapsing regional boundaries via YouTube tutorials, Instagram filters, and beauty influencers who gradually displaced television stars as the world’s most powerful authorities on the face.

It’s not a coincidence that Arab glam found its way into the global mainstream around the rise of social media. In many ways, Arab makeup artists had understood for decades what influencers were just beginning to discover: Dramatic makeup photographed beautifully. Thus, the techniques that once filled Arab wedding albums suddenly became perfectly suited to Instagram.

However, the face that emerged during the mid-2010s looked radically different from the glamour that had dominated Arab salons only a decade earlier, yet it borrowed more from that world than many people realize. Contoured cheekbones, dramatically over-lined lips, defined brows, false lashes, and architectural cut-creases were hardly inventions of Instagram. Women across the Middle East and North Africa had spent years perfecting many of those techniques before they became fixtures of beauty tutorials and Sephora shelves.

Perhaps no family came to define that transformation more than the Kardashians. By the mid-2010s, Kim Kardashian’s sharply contoured face, dramatic lashes, nude lips, and sculpted features had become one of the most copied beauty templates in the world, while her younger sister Kylie Jenner’s suddenly-fuller lips inspired an entire generation to overline, overdraw, and eventually inject their own.

Dubbed “The Instagram face,” the distinctly white yet ambiguously ethnic look was less a radical invention than a global repackaging of beauty practices that had already existed within Arab, Black, South Asian, and Latina communities, translated to circulate through Western celebrity and social media until it became the decade’s dominant ideal.

Then, almost as quickly as the Instagram face conquered the internet, it fell from favor.

By the early 2020s, a new vocabulary had emerged: Clean girl. Suddenly the makeup tutorials that once encouraged full coverage foundation, dramatic contour, cut creases, and matte lips urged restraint instead.

The shift in trends reveals something important about the way taste operates. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is never simply a matter of personal preference. What societies describe as refined or elegant often reflects the values of those with the greatest cultural power, and eventually, it stops looking like someone’s preference and starts looking like common sense.

Art historian David Batchelor arrives at a similar conclusion from another direction. In his book Chromophobia, he argues that dominant Western traditions have long treated color with suspicion, repeatedly associating it with ornament, femininity, sensuality, excess, and the “Orient.”

The German writer Goethe famously stated that “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness,” whereas “people of refinement” avoid vivid colors (or what he called “pathological colors”).

Seen through that lens, the clean girl aesthetic illustrates Bourdieu’s argument remarkably well. Somewhere along the way, Arab glamour ceased being interpreted as glamorous and began attracting words such as overdone, tacky, or dated. The shift happened so gradually that many of us accepted the new hierarchy without asking who created it.

Meanwhile, many of the defining features celebrated by clean girl influencers such as Hailey Bieber and Sofia Richie have long histories within Black and brown communities. Slicked hair, lipgloss, gold hoops, and manicured nails were frequently dismissed as gaudy, unprofessional, or excessive when worn by the women who popularized them. Their eventual acceptance often depended less on the features themselves than on the bodies wearing them.

Even the name of the trend has colonial undertones. Calling one aesthetic “clean” inevitably suggests that another one is not. Throughout history ideas of cleanliness have often been used to distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized, the respectable from the unruly, and, in colonial contexts, whiteness from everyone else.

Beauty is filled with examples of marginalized aesthetics becoming desirable only after being detached from the people who created them. Arab glamour has followed a similar trajectory. Contouring, dramatic eyes, and sculpted lips entered the global mainstream, but they did so after being translated into a language that no longer appeared distinctly Arab. The techniques remained while the identity faded and what emerged was not Arab beauty becoming the global standard so much as Arab beauty being absorbed into one.

It’s true that beauty has always evolved through exchange, borrowing, and reinvention but what feels different today is the shrinking space for aesthetic difference itself. As far-right politics gain ground around the world, calls for conformity increasingly extend beyond borders and into culture. And in an era that increasingly demands we blend in, maybe it is time to embrace Arab glam again.

The Evolution of Arab Glam & The Colonial Roots of the Clean Girl

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The Evolution of Arab Glam & The Colonial Roots of the Clean Girl

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