It’s not a phase, mom… No, really, it isn’t.
You might think the emo music that ravaged millennials’ earbuds in the 2000s— such as Taking Back Sunday’s “Cute Without the ‘E'” or “Ohio Is For Lovers” by Hawthorne Heights—was born and died within the same decade, but perhaps you just stopped listening. Some of us didn’t. Now it’s 2025, and it appears the genre and its accompanying doom-and-gloom beauty aesthetic has made a full-blown comeback. But the hill I choose to die on is that emo (the music, the look, all of it) never actually went away.
With the 2000s rounding back into relevancy (yes, trends are, in fact, cyclical) the staple emo side parts and chunky colorful streaks first popularized by Myspace models such as Hanna Beth and Audrey Kitching have been reinvented on runways and red carpets over the past couple of years, and moody black eyeliner has reinstated its staple status in those places, too, albeit in a far more subtle fashion.
It makes sense that these emo-adjacent hair and makeup looks happen to be popular again when you consider how much the music genre is thriving right now. Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Fall Out Boy (what many fans argue is the true “Emo Holy Trinity”) have all performed multiple sold-out stadium tours in recent years after making triumphant returns from indefinite hiatuses. A slew of other defunct emo bands—including The Academy Is…, Motion City Soundtrack, Say Anything, and Panic! At the Disco—have reunited or have plans to reunite in 2025, either to release new music or to put on special live performances of their most beloved works. The 2023 revival of the emo-focused When We Were Young Music Festival, which is still going strong, now offers those bands a perfect place to do that among the genre’s most devoted fans.
Getty Images
Getty Images
The first time emo made its go-round in mainstream pop culture, I called everyone a poser out of protectiveness of the genre (and, you know, being 13). Now, it just fills me with nostalgic glee and a much-needed feeling of connection. Even now in my early 30s, the mere mention of any of these bands still makes me foam at the mouth—Fall Out Boy more than any other. I have no shame in loving a band that titles its songs with angsty full sentences like “I’ve Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth” because laughing, crying, and shouting along to their lyrics molded me into the person I am. Until they released From Under the Cork Tree, the 2005 album that catapulted them to stardom, I was nothing but a pre-teen with lots of pent-up rage and no idea of who I was or what I liked independent of other people. If you think it sounds dramatic, go ahead and think that; drama is what emo’s all about, after all. Ask any 20-something on the street wearing checkered slip-on Vans and they’ll likely tell you the same.
I certainly had the band tees, studded belts, and skinny jeans, but that wasn’t emo’s greatest influence on me. Before beauty YouTubers dominated the Internet, my primary sources of #inspo were Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz’s perpetually smudged black “guyliner,” the intricate face paintings of Panic! At the Disco guitarist Ryan Ross, and My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way‘s signature wash of rusty red eye shadow. I’d tear their pictures from magazine pages and study their faces for hours. That was mostly because they were—gasp!—cute boys, but I was also endlessly fascinated by the idea of men unashamedly wearing edgy makeup looks I had previously never even thought to attempt. At that point in pop culture, the glitter-clad glam-rock icons like David Bowie, Prince, and KISS seemed like mere relics of a time gone by, and the men I saw on screen often donned the same hyper-masculine California-prep uniform (The O.C., The Hills, etc.). Emo makeup at that time wasn’t just defiant to me; it was a sign of bravery. And as an awkward tween who’d just moved to a new city where she had no friends, I wanted nothing more at that time than to feel brave.
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