Concealer Lips Make Their (Unfortunate) Return

At this point, just about every Y2K beauty trend — from visible lip liner to blue eyeshadow — is making a return. Unfortunately, this also means some trends that we’d hope never rear their ugly head again — most notably, using concealer as lipstick, a trend that’s seen a recent resurgence on TikTok.

Concealed lips were popular in the mid-00s, where lips were caked with concealer as a lip product. Chalk it up to big lips not yet being the beauty standard or (for some reason) everyone being scared of lip color, but the concealed lips lasted for a number of years before they were replaced with lipstick in a move that we had hoped would be for good.

Arguably the ugliest trend of the decade, it’s a slight shock to see concealed lips return on TikTok, but thankfully beauty creators today are giving them a far less ugly twist. They might actually have just cracked the trend, making it work for all skin tones.

In a viral video, TikTok beauty creator Kyra Nikole showed how she uses concealer as a lip “hack”. She starts by lining her lips using a concealer that’s darker than her skin tone, followed up by filling her lips in with a lighter concealer, and finished with lipgloss. The result is a take on the dark lipliner trend, another throwback Y2K trend that’s also gaining popularity.

Other creators soon attempted the look, proving the results depend on matching the darker and lighter concealer shades perfectly. If you nail the color matching, it can give a natural effect that you wouldn’t even guess is concealer, but if you go to light or yellow, you can end up with a makeup fail. One creator even shared that she uses concealer over lipstick that’s too dark for her to lighten it.

There you have it. We’re using concealer on our lips again but (thankfully) not in the same way. We will totally understand if you want to skip this revival altogether, though. There have been a lot of makeup advances since the ‘00s and you can absolutely achieve the same look by using lip liner and lipstick, keeping concealer on your pimples or under your eyes where it belongs.