Did beauty take a backseat in 2020? It might be easy to think so, considering the circumstances. As our homes became our entire worlds due to the pandemic, many people decided to put away their hot tools and makeup almost entirely. Salons and spas weren’t always accessible, so neither were professional manicures, haircuts, facials, or any other form of pampering. We couldn’t examine runway or red carpet trends to the same degree as they shifted to contactless, webcam-friendly formats. In short, we were strictly limited by what we were able to accomplish at home. But despite all of that, Google’s end-of-year search data proves that beauty isn’t dead. In fact, it’s from it.
According to the top 10 trending beauty searches of the year, beauty didn’t disappear; it just changed — a lot. We relied on Google more than ever this year to help us with what would, during any other year, be considered basic beauty tasks — especially when it came to hair. Evidently, we were all full-on obsessed with our hair.
Instead of booking appointments for drastic cut and color changes at a salon, we took the cutting shears and dye developers into our own hands and asked the search engine how to do so without royally screwing it up. Many discovered their natural hair textures, sweeping in a new generation of the curly-hair community who learned how to plop, clap, pray, and every other styling technique between. Those of us living with men might’ve learned how to cut and groom for them as well.
If we can glean anything from this year’s beauty search trends — not to be confused with the most searched terms, period; think of them like trending Twitter hashtags — is that we’re all capable of becoming our own hairstylists (even if we don’t want to). Trends about at-home hair cutting, styling, and coloring unsurprisingly dominated the list alongside queries about dermaplaning and handwashing.
Check out Google’s End of Year beauty list, below.
1. How to cut men’s hair at home
2. How to plop hair
3. How to color your hair at home
4. How to wash your hands
5. How to style curtain bangs
6. How to cut women’s hair
7. How to do knotless braids
8. How to fade hair
9. How to trim your own hair
10. How to dermaplane
Hopefully, by the time Google puts out the end-of-year data for 2021, we won’t have to do all these things on our own and we can safely go back to visiting the trained professionals with the proper precautions in place. Still, it’s comforting to know that now, with our unexpected at-home know-how, we’re capable of getting stuff done on our own when stuff goes awry.
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