Social media hasn’t just changed Indian beauty. It has standardised it

In this personal essay, hair and make-up artist Mitesh Rajani reflects on what it means to stay authentic in a beauty industry obsessed with replication. The real test isn’t how well we follow trends—but whether we can resist them

Like most of us, my earliest memories of beauty come from my mother and my aunt—fresh flowers in their hair, the perfection of a saree drape, the natural yet kempt eyebrows. A lot of those memories also come from the unfiltered beauty seen in Bollywood films as well as regional cinema that shaped a distinctive idea of the beauty I admired. 

My own path to beauty wasn’t linear. Frequent moves led me from corporate client servicing to managing a salon in Hyderabad. Around that time, Sandeep Molugu (Sandy) introduced me to professional artistry. My relationship with beauty has grown to be very personal, and I owe that to my over-a-decade experience of being a hair and make-up artist.

Yet, over the years, my deep attachment to work has been laced with a growing sense of loss—the loss of individuality and creative expression. Working closely with different faces over the years has only deepened my belief: beauty was never meant to look the same. 

However, when it comes to beauty, we’ve moved in the opposite direction. 

Today, individuality in beauty feels increasingly rare. The pressure to blend in—to replicate viral aesthetics—has replaced personal expression. When did beauty become so singular?

Are viral make-up trends on social media to blame? 

In India, popular culture, celebrity culture, and art culture bleed into each other, with Bollywood at the forefront. Today, beauty is reduced to a single, trend-driven aesthetic, and everyone simply jumps on the bandwagon. Brides, for instance, often say, “I want to look like Deepika (Padukone) or Alia (Bhatt) or Janhvi (Kapoor)”, but I feel like their individual personality should shine on their special day.

Trends are for social media platforms—not every look trending on Reels will look good in real life too. Artistry thrives on personalisation and diversity. The best looks aren’t born from trends—they’re shaped by understanding the face, real skin, and the mood.

For several projects, I still receive reference images from Pinterest of skin and hair that looks nothing like the cast of the shoot. But what often goes unacknowledged is the fundamental difference between Indian and Western skin and hair textures. 

Replicating a look designed for one aesthetic onto another is like tailoring a dress for the wrong body—it rarely fits. As artists, being asked to recreate any  viral ‘Instagram face’  not only limits creativity, but also strips away opportunities that could have emerged from showcasing personal style.

It feels extremely rewarding when I work with designers and brands that find a way to bring an element of freshness in one way or another—a little nuance, some detail that tells a new story. Sabyasachi, for example, imagines a woman first—real, layered, and specific; when he gives a brief for hair and make-up, it’s like he is letting me into her world. He doesn’t just want me to make her look good, he wants you to understand her. Similarly, when stylists share briefs on a look’s breakdown, and leave the hair and make-up to me, it creates room for creativity to flourish. 

Ideally, jobs should be given based on your capability, your past work. That’s how it was expected to work. Today, social media has become less of a portfolio and more of a ground to prove oneself—where visibility often outweighs craft. I remember someone advising me to curate a “bankable” account to attract international opportunities. I found that bizarre. Offering skincare advice without any qualifications, just to feed the content machine, felt disingenuous. So did posting flawless, filtered images of my work—edited beyond recognition. Social media thrives on illusion, but here’s the truth: If the work doesn’t hold up without a filter, it was never built to last 

Are beauty trends limiting creative freedom for Indian make-up artists?

In Indian films of the past, beauty wasn’t something to fix. In Mani Ratnam and Shyam Benegal’s films, for instance, there was an unstyled ease in the beauty portrayed on screen, and actresses’ hair moved naturally. Frizz wasn’t a flaw—it was a marker of individuality, of something human and real. 

It wasn’t absent in the West either—Greta Garbo was once said to have a “mop of hair that was entirely too frizzy”. Until she and everyone else got makeovers: intense blow-dries and heavy treatments that left hair flat, limp, and overworked. Today, from stylists and photographers to celebrities, everyone wants to fix every strand—erasing a texture that once made Indian hair stand out. 

The West made bold, filled-in brows popular—something we flaunted until a few years ago. Today, they’ve gone back to skinny brows, but we haven’t moved on.

The death of an individual idea of beauty combined with perfected, edited images on social media has left every hair and make-up artist’s work looking alarmingly similar. Artists today are striving to prove their skills, not their ideas. But hair and make-up were meant to be forms of art—to inspire you, not to mirror what’s already been done. The challenge isn’t about developing taste—it’s having the conviction to protect it in an industry that thrives on sameness. 

Why individuality in beauty needs to make a comeback  

Considering how rich our culture is, are we willing to give it—and, by extension, our authenticity—a chance?

Beauty has been an integral part of Indian life. Grooming was never restricted to vanity—it was practice, care, expression. And it was deeply personal—there was no single template for beauty. Think of the women on screen: Tabu in The Namesake, Dimple’s (Kapadia) innocence-meets-sensuality in Sagar, Rekha in Umrao Jaan, Supriya Pathak in French film The Bengali Night, Karisma (Kapoor) in Zubeidaa, and Sonakshi’s (Sinha) restrained grace in Lootera—each carried a distinct aesthetic of her own, and their individualistic beauty added such a significant layer to their respective characters. They are proof that original, authentic semblance will always remain exotic. 

That individuality has become harder to find today. Kareena Kapoor Khan is one of the few exceptions. Her ease with her raw, real beauty has only made her more relevant with time—a reminder that personal style still speaks louder than trends. It's likely why her relevance and resonance among women of all ages has only deepened over time.

Model Laksmi Menon is so at ease with herself, that even when I’ve done her hair and make-up without using a mirror, she couldn’t care less. As an artist, there is joy to have your muse surrender to your creativity. But moments like these are increasingly few and far between. Today, in our rush to blend in, we’ve forgotten to stand out. 

The question then is: Are we willing to take a bet on the anomaly—on what isn't trending? Can we look inward to define beauty on our own terms, before the algorithm does it for us?

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