Following the release of Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” movie – starring iconic actors Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara – the look of the cult character’s black-and-white striped costume has inspired many makeup enthusiasts on the platform.
The aim is simply to create a lip look that echoes the stripes of Beetlejuice’s costume by highlighting the natural cracks and crevices of your lips.
The inspiration behind this trend came from beauty content creator Adrianna Kalisz, who posted a video that has amassed 43.8 million views and almost five million likes.
In the video, the designer applies green liquid eyeshadow to her lips, then puckers her lips to create natural creases before carefully applying black eyeshadow.
Then, once her lips are relaxed, a green and black zebra pattern appears, reminiscent of the motifs on Beetlejuice’s suit.
This technique was initially made popular by the Portuguese content creator, Luara Reisinger, and was dubbed “zebra lips.”
Since then, this new trend has created a viral buzz online, and has been taken up by numerous content creators, usually in video set to the sound of the song “Say My Name” from the “Beetlejuice” musical. And users are trying this technique with all kinds of eyeshadow colours.
More than just another TikTok makeup trend, “Beetlejuice lips” also normalizes natural “imperfections” and goes against the beauty trend for lip fillers – the lip-enhancing and lip-smoothing injections.
Indeed, this makeup trick doesn’t work on a plump, smooth well-moisturised, chap-free mouth. In fact, the creases created are not large enough to make well-defined stripes – much to the chagrin of many beauty content creators, and to the delight of users who haven’t opted for fillers, like the creator Helayna Shelton.
She says: “my new guilty pleasure is watching beauty influencers with too much lip filler try Beetlejuice lips” in a video liked by almost two million people on TikTok and viewed 15.2 million times.
The makeup artist also mentions the case of the famous beauty influencer Jeffree Star, whose video of an unsuccessful attempt at recreating “Beetlejuice lips” has been viewed over 31 million times and scored two million likes.
Underneath the video, a user named Gabby points out that the look doesn’t work because filler makes the influencer’s lip creases less deep and less pronounced. The comment is liked by over 443,300 users.