They say you can spot a millennial by their self-presentation.
Skinny jeans, ankle boots and tucked-in tops are a dead giveaway that someone was born between 1981 and 1996, at least according to a certain online breed of Gen Z.
And while some trends popular in the millennial heyday have seen a recent resurgence – JNCO jeans, Sex And The City and photo dumps are all on the up and up, one feature appears to be a millennial signifier: heavy winged eyeliner.
When Ilinca Sipos, 29, posted a video of herself on TikTok asking her 22-year-old sister if people could tell she was seven years older, her sister’s answer – and that of thousands of commenters – was a resounding yes.
But only because of her eyeliner: blunt, thick and flicked upward.
“Maybe it’s the cat eye?” as her younger sister, Maia Sipos, put it in the video.
“I didn’t expect it to go as viral as it did,” Ilinca said of her video, which has received more than three million views and has reinvigorated the millennial eyeliner debate.
“Never when I was doing my makeup did it occur to me that my eyeliner is dated. I just like how it looks.”
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The upward-angled, elongated wing shape, created with jet-black liquid liner, has become a makeup signature of Ilinca’ generation.
Popularised by millennial celebrities like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, it rose to prominence in the 2010s before giving way to the more natural look favoured by members of younger generations.
“Gen Z is very ‘clean girl aesthetic,’” said Erica Taylor, a makeup artist who specialises in midlife makeup.
“I feel like they don’t even necessarily wear eyeliner. It’s just a glowy lid and mascara.”
While Taylor believes winged eyeliner is “very indicative of a millennial”, she said, she also described such application as a timeless trend that has endured throughout the decades, “from Cleopatra to Audrey Hepburn to Taylor Swift to Selena Gomez”.
Writer Zahra Hankir said that while researching her 2023 book, Eyeliner: A Cultural History, she noticed the generational eyeliner debate starting to take shape on social media.
“I came across TikToks where Gen Z influencers joked that you can spot a millennial by the angle or shape of their wing, much like the side part or skinny jeans,” she added.
“It’s really just another example of how quickly beauty trends become generational markers.”
Hankir said that generational differences over eyeliner are nothing new, and have long existed across different regions and time periods.
“In the 1960s, for example, younger women embraced bold, graphic liner as part of a wider cultural shift,” she wrote in an email.
“In regions like the Middle East and North Africa, kohl has been used for centuries, but its application has evolved across generations under different social and cultural influences.
For example, younger women in cities may turn to Western or liquid formulations of eyeliner, while older generations in rural areas may continue to use traditional kohl.”
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While Ilinca said that she was going to expand her repertoire to include the Gen Z version of a cat eye – light, thin and less extended – she won’t abandon millennial eyeliner entirely.
“This is how I’ve always done my makeup, and it’s probably how I’m going to continue to do my makeup,” she said.
Her younger sister, Maia, said in an interview that she would also wear winged eyeliner, but would stick to the “thinner, more Gen Z version”.
For the elder Sipos, keeping up with trends is fun, but not as important as staying true to herself.
“It’s most important to do what’s fitting for each individual,” she said. “At the end of the day, the millennial cat eye – it’s a pretty iconic look,” she added. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
