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10 Beauty Trends From The Past We Use Today

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The eyeliner Kim Kardashian swears by has a 3,000-year head start.

Every contour kit, wing-tipped liner, and waist trainer flooding Instagram right now has an ancestor buried in the historical record. TheThings Celebrity’s video “10 Beauty Trends From The Past We Use Today” traces the aesthetics popularized by Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner back to ancient Egypt, Golden Age Hollywood soundstages, and 18th-century European court fashion. The throughline is simple: what looks like a 2010s Instagram invention is usually a centuries-old survival tactic or stagecraft trick repackaged for a phone camera.

• Ancient Egyptians applied lead- and galena-based kohl around the eyes both for dramatic effect and to cut desert sun glare while guarding against eye infections.
• Modern contouring descends from stage and Golden Age Hollywood lighting techniques used to sculpt bone structure under harsh studio lights, decades before it became an Instagram staple.
• Waist trainers mirror historical corsets built to force an exaggerated hourglass silhouette, and wigs trace to both ancient royalty and 18th-century European high fashion.

Kohl and the Winged Eye

The video opens with the trend that arguably started it all: heavy black eyeliner rimmed around the eyes and swept out at the corners. Ancient Egyptians weren’t wearing kohl purely for drama — the galena- and lead-based pigment cut down desert glare and offered a layer of protection against eye infections in a climate that gave them plenty of reasons to worry about both. The winged-eye look that Kylie Jenner and countless beauty influencers have made a signature is, functionally, the same shape Egyptians were rimming their eyes with millennia before eyeliner pens existed.

Contouring’s Hollywood Lighting Roots

Contouring gets treated online like a 2010s invention, but the video points to its real origin: stage and Golden Age Hollywood lighting. Studio lights were unforgiving, flattening facial structure unless makeup artists carved in shadow and highlight to sculpt cheekbones and jawlines back into view. That same sculpting logic — dark shade to recede, light shade to project — is exactly what’s happening in every contour tutorial built for a smartphone front-facing camera instead of a klieg light.

Contouring wasn’t built for selfies — it was built to survive studio lighting decades before Instagram existed.

Red Lipstick as a Statement

Red lipstick’s staying power isn’t accidental. The video frames it as an enduring marker of femininity and social statement, with roots in crushed minerals and dyes from antiquity that carried through to early 20th-century suffragette symbolism, when wearing bold red lips became a visible act of defiance and independence. That’s a very different backstory than “flattering shade,” and it’s part of why the color has never really left rotation.

Corsets, Waist Trainers, and Wigs

The waist trainer craze tied to Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner in the 2010s is a direct descendant of historical corsetry — the same exaggerated hourglass silhouette, just marketed with a modern name and a celebrity endorsement instead of a Victorian dressmaker. Wigs and hairpieces get the same treatment: the video connects today’s clip-ins and lace fronts to ancient royal courts and to 18th-century European high fashion, where an elaborate wig wasn’t a beauty accessory so much as a visible marker of status. Even the vanity aspect people mock in Regency-era wigs and modern-day waist trainers alike — comparisons that pop up whenever public figures like Melania Trump get scrutinized over their beauty evolution — traces back to the same instinct to reshape the body and head for the cameras of the moment, whether those cameras were court painters or iPhones.

The video’s real point is that beauty culture doesn’t invent so much as it recycles — dressing up centuries-old survival gear and stagecraft as the latest Kardashian-approved trend, one filter cycle at a time.