The Take
Уровень B2· 769 слов
Euphoria didn't just change its makeup, it lost control of it. In season 1, the glitter meant something. By season 2, it mostly meant Euphoria. And now season 3 is here. That should make this problem feel finished, but it doesn't. Because the real shift in Euphoria was never just rhinestones giving way to bare
skin, it was meaning giving way to bland recognition. In season 1, the makeup wasn't just pretty, it wasn't just iconic, it was part of the storytelling.
It created a captivating visual language. >> And you just kind of kept leveling up. >> Then the internet got hold of it. It became a trend, a tutorial ecosystem, a social image people recognized immediately, copied endlessly.
>> Today we are doing a Euphoria inspired makeup. >> And eventually read before they even thought about what it meant. And once that happened, the show could never use it the same way again. By season 2, the makeup was subdued and less expressive.
It was starting to read more like a brand than a language. So now that season 3 is finally here, the question isn't just whether Euphoria can still look good, it's whether it can make style mean something again. Euphoria didn't just lose its glitter, it lost control of what the glitter means. In
season 1, the makeup was part of the storytelling. >> [ __ ] you're my soulmate. >> By season 2, it had started collapsing into branding. And now season 3 has arrived with a bigger world, older characters, and a show that wants to feel larger than ever. Which raises the real question, after all this time, has
Euphoria found a new visual language, or is it still chasing the afterimage of the old one? Because what made Euphoria matter was never just that it looked cool, it was that its style used to mean something before the internet and the creators turned it into a superficial brand. This mattered because Euphoria's
style was never just a wrapper around the story. Style was one of the ways the story thought. The cosmetic aesthetic turns desire into styling. It lets fantasy alter the face. The makeup doesn't just decorate the fantasy, it gives the fantasy emotional weight.
Season 1 didn't just invent a look, it invented a language. As Laura Mulvey famously wrote in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema about how female faces are usually treated as objects to be displayed and gazed at by men. Season 1 Euphoria reversed this.
Where so much screen culture treats the female face as something to be looked at, Season 1 often used makeup to make the face think, to turn it into a playground of subjectivity, not just desirability. Season 3 sets up the gauntlet for whether Euphoria can reclaim its own visual punch. Even when
the makeup was real, Euphoria still refused realism. The black eyeliner is sharp and architectural. The skin looks perfected, never casual. Even the rhinestones feel less whimsical and more strategic. The colors feel airy, pastel, sometimes almost childlike, sometimes futuristic. Her face often looks less
finished than invented, like identity being shaped in real time. >> What are you doing here? >> These looks don't just reflect personality, they exaggerate it into legibility. And that is exactly why Season 2's pullback mattered more than people think, and where Season 3 has more to answer for.
