When did beauty get so dirty?

Runways this SS26 season were dirty. At Dilara Findikoglu and Di Petsa, models walked with mud-smeared faces and chests; at Charlie Constantinou, they had dirt streaked down their faces; and at Lueder, models dragged clumps of soil across a dining table in their upturned, spiked shoes. It’s a material that’s been resurfacing for a few years now, splashing the legs of Balenciaga’s SS23 models as they waded through a peat bog, and coating the bodies of Elena Velez’s SS23 cast as they thrashed around in her mud pit show. But this season, the dirt has kicked its way up to faces, as our relationships to grime, the world around us, and authenticity continue to shift.

Part of dirt’s new appeal lies in its distance from our current reality. It belongs to a broader turn toward fantasy and escapism that’s defined both the runway and the wider zeitgeist in recent years. Charlie Constantinou’s collections have drawn on mythic and historical worlds; Lueder’s on medieval silhouettes and “mental armour.” Beyond fashion, the same impulse surfaces in neo-medieval tattooing and bardcore music — aesthetics reaching back to pre-digital eras that now feel aspirational precisely because they’re so far removed from the present. As with all collective desires, that longing inevitably takes shape through the aesthetics we gravitate towards.

In the product world, beauty is embracing a grimier aesthetic. Last month, Blend Bunny x Mei Peng released the Rotten Palette, inspired by mould spores with shades like Stain, Spora and Mildew; meanwhile, Huda Beauty’s Face Gloss mimics mould spreading in a petri dish. These are part of a wider fascination with decay, also seen in the rise of grotesque nails and other looks that draw from the detritus of the world around us.

This aestheticisation of grime functions as a kind of resistance, challenging the gleaming perfection long upheld in mainstream beauty. It’s the same impulse behind the mud-streaked faces at Dilara Findikoglu’s runway show, which explored “the expectations of purity and lightness that women have for too long been confined by.” It also speaks to a broader embrace of unruly beauty: from “messy girl” to “goblin mode,” a now-exhausted carousel of aesthetics that celebrate curated chaos. Greasy hair, chipped nails and smudged eyeliner become their calling cards. As an antithesis to the hyper-groomed ideals of “clean-girl” culture, these looks reject filters, pixel-perfect imagery and the sanitised aspirations of the online world.

In their upcoming macrotrend The Great Beauty Blur, The Future Laboratory frames this resistance as a form of “anti-fluencing aesthetics,” which Alice Crossley, senior foresight analyst at the consultancy, tells me is “a way of thinking about beauty that’s less about harmony or perfection and more about provocation, strangeness and visual interruption as a means of disrupting the homogenisation of appearance that we are currently experiencing.”

This presentation of dirt within beauty also acts as a marker of experience. Tutorials for the look often come with captions like “look like you’ve been too busy to do your make-up” or “out all night so my mascara’s smudged.” Dirtiness here becomes a kind of proof of contact. Yet rather than actually living through the moments that make us dirty, we’re simulating them – perhaps because we’re too burnt out, broke, anxious or absorbed in online life. In a sense, we’ve aestheticised experience because we’re starved of it.

Dirt also connects us to the cycles of birth, death and fertility, grounding us in the earth in a way that screens, filters and pixel-perfect aesthetics never can. “Beauty’s embrace of dirt and decay speaks to a growing demand for grounding in fashion and beauty by reconnecting with aspects of the natural world,” says Crossley. She points to examples like Nike’s ISPA shoe, which mimics the sensation of walking barefoot through a forest, describing it as “the beauty industry’s interpretation of this desire to be closer to nature and disconnected from technology.” This attraction to dirt signals a wider cultural yearning to experience the world directly. But in an era when we’re constantly told to “touch grass” to offset the disorientation of digital life, even our dirt is curated.