Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero, who is also a CAMPSSAH scholar with the Office of Academic Diversity, will give a presentation on Beauty as Routine and Refresh: The “Copy and Paste Latina Makeup” Trend on TikTok. The talk is April 29 at 12 p.m. at the WRRC’s Joy Fergoda Library in North Hall and includes a Q&A session. 

Since October 2022, Latinx/e users on TikTok have steadily engaged with a beauty trend known as “Copy and Paste Latina Makeup.” Videos featuring titles and/or hashtags with this term average a minute in length and typically follow an abbreviated beauty tutorial format in which a non-famous girl demonstrates the steps towards achieving a desired makeup look. In this talk, I recognize “Copy and Paste Latina Makeup” to be distinguishable from other recent beauty trends, specifically in its focus on Latina creators and engagement of Latinx/e viewers. I contend that the viral popularity of “Copy and Paste” is significant, as it helps highlight Latina TikTokers’ contributions to the platform and elevates their visibility within a disproportionately white beauty subculture. At the same time, the trend’s formulaic, Eurocentric look is reminiscent of the archetypal “Hollywood Latin Look” that essentializes Latinas as non-Black and non-Indigenous. I add to Latina feminist media scholarship on the Hollywood Latin Look in 20th-century legacy media by tracking the look’s reemergence in new media via TikTok. I ultimately argue that the “Copy and Paste” trend, as a variation of this look, constrains Latina representation by upholding beauty as a prerequisite for Latinas’ visibility. However, the discourse that emerges between Latinx/e viewers of these videos also showcases the degree to which this trend cultivates intracultural discourse about Latina beauty in new media spaces.