Forget grey. Forget plum. This week the goth corner of TikTok and Instagram has gone warm, dusty and sun bleached, and it's calling itself Southern Goth. Think faded corn husks, rusted porch swings, wilting florals pressed between the pages of an old bible. It's goth, but it's been left out in the heat for a decade. 🦇
We first clocked it doing the rounds as this week's "Beauty Freak" challenge theme, and it's spreading fast precisely because it flips the goth colour rulebook on its head. Instead of icy greys and cool blacks, Southern Goth leans into terracotta, rust, dusty rose and warm brown, all worn with the same haunted, romantic intensity as any other goth look. It sits somewhere between whimsigoth and dark academia, with a bit of gothic Americana thrown in for good measure. Here's how we're recreating it, step by step, with kit that's entirely vegan and cruelty free.
Step 1: build a sun worn base
Southern Goth skin isn't pale and powdery, it's warm, slightly weathered, like you've spent too long on a porch at golden hour. Skip your usual cool set powder and reach for the Second Skin Powder Bronzer in Toffee instead. Buff it through the hollows of your cheeks, along your jaw and lightly over your lids as a base, it gives that faded, sun soaked warmth the whole look hinges on.
Step 2: rust and brick across the lid
This is where the trend lives or dies. You want earthy, rusted browns and deep brick tones blended soft at the crease, nothing sharp or graphic. Our Distortion Palette was built for exactly this kind of "perfectly imperfect" grunge blending, all rust, clay and burnt sienna shades that read as weathered rather than washed out. Pat a warm rust shade over the lid, deepen the outer corner with the darkest brick tone in the palette, and smudge everything together with a fluffy brush until the edges disappear.
For liner, ditch the usual jet black wing. A soft brown line looks far more sun faded and in keeping with the theme. The Smoulder Eyeliner Pencil in Dark Brown is perfect for a smudged, lived in tightline, or if you'd rather keep things precise, the Infinity Eyeliner Pen in Dark Brown gives you a finer, more deliberate line without ever tipping back into cool toned goth territory.
Step 3: a dusty, wind chapped flush
Cheeks should look like you've been out walking through overgrown fields at dusk, not contoured within an inch of your life. Sweep the Second Skin Powder Blush in Dusty Rose high on the cheekbones and blend it back towards the temples. It's muted enough to sit happily alongside all that rust without turning the whole look pink and pretty.
Step 4: a lip the colour of dried petals
Finish with a lip that looks like it's been pressed and forgotten between book pages for years: warm, brownish, slightly faded. The Air Matte Liquid Lipstick in Everlasting is doing exactly this on repeat in our inbox this week. It's a lightweight, opaque matte that wears all day without cracking or flaking, giving you that dried petal finish that sits perfectly against all that rust and brick eye work.
Why we're obsessed
Southern Goth feels like the antidote to a summer of icy pastels and glitter. It's warm without being sweet, romantic without being twee, and it gives you full permission to raid the brown and rust end of your makeup bag that usually gets ignored in favour of black. It also happens to be a genuinely flattering palette on a huge range of skin tones, which never hurts.
As always, every product above is 100% vegan and cruelty free, made the way we think goth beauty should be: kind to you, kind to everyone else. Tag us if you give this one a go, we'd love to see your take on it. 🖤