Repel, Repulse & Revolt

Let your freak flag fly. Vogue Singapore delves into a subcategory of take-no-prisoners make-up that subverts expectations endorsed by the patriarchy.

- EMILY HENG

In hindsight, the signs were there all along. In fact, the stirrings of a revolution were first chronicled in 2022, on an American talk show on the Fox network titled The Five. In a now viral segment, news host, Greg Gutfeld, makes an impassioned speech.

“Have you seen how miserable-looking a lot of the students are? They’re deliberately ugly-fying themselves,” he rants. “You see them on TikTok. They’re out of shape, asexual, they’re rejecting the truth in beauty. They all look like rejects from a loony bin.”

Outrage followed. Amid a barrage of opinion pieces and heartfelt pleas for self-love emerged a TikTok video from Julia Fox. The actress recorded herself lip-syncing along to Gutfeld’s tirade in a mocking fashion. In it, she is sporting bleached brows that provide a stark contrast to a dark fan of mascara-coated lashes. Her hair is unstyled. She is incandescent and practically vibrating with verve; blasé towards cries of her unapproachability and the supposed strangeness of her make-up. This phenomenon is best encapsulated by the top-liked comment from the 15-second clip: “We aren’t doing it for the male gaze and they’re mad.” And so, the anti-hot movement was born.

All hail the new sex symbol