Living Luxe With The Post-Wellness Party Girl

Spring is synonymous with fresh, bright, and clean, which means it’s the perfect time to ditch full coverage products and heavy formulas that weigh us down and instead transition into lightweight, pastel and freckled looks.

We spend hours searching out the best eyebrow gel to tame that strip of forehead hair, and OOTDs get floatier and flowier by the day. Effortless perfection is demanded in the scramble for the clean, spring look. Hair is slicked back without so much as a baby hair out of place, dainty jewellery hangs delicately around the neck, and lips are moisturised and plumped to perfection.

As we all know, this effortless look is anything but effortless. Putting in the hours is required to emulate the off-duty model vibe, and the whole point is to ensure no one knows how long you spent getting ready. All that effort for no recognition?

Can we argue for a second that ‘that girl’ is becoming the new girlboss archetype? Her life is totally in order; she sips green juice on her Parisian balcony in a robe and facemask. She meditates before bed and gets up at 5 AM for the gym. She’s a nice ideal but completely unattainable, yet anyone not subscribing is looked down upon.

Well, that girl is about to be dethroned by her antithesis, the ‘post-wellness party girl’. The post-wellness party girl loves sleek, black clothing, luxurious nightlife, cocktail-ridden parties, decadent food and, most importantly, low maintenance beauty. Her lifestyle is promoted on TikTok using the hashtag’ night luxe’, where a myriad of videos share photo slideshows of extravagant brunches, champagne bars and limo parties played over various sultry Lana Del Rey songs.

The aesthetic is visually inspired by the glamour and glitz of the 1920s and modernised with ideals of noughties club life and icons like Paris Hilton. A subscriber may party all night and smoke a cigarette for breakfast, but she’ll be up and out for brunch mere hours later in a fur coat and last night’s eye look smeared to perfection.

With the insanely popular rise of brunch promoting all-day drinking alongside the already potent drinking culture in the UK, the party girl is putting an inevitable, somewhat classier spin on day drinking. While playing into one part of cult culture, the party girl is revolting against another. It was only a matter of time before a revolt against the highly curated ‘clean’ aesthetic gained traction.

People want to live less rigid lifestyles. Post-pandemic we’re done with restricting the fun we have. We don’t want to worry about being healthy; we want low maintenance and low effort wherever we can get it. We want to use fewer products, save time, and care less while still caring enough. The post-wellness party girl offers us all of this. She has bad habits, but she knows they’re bad and, at least, wants to remedy their consequences–”yeah, I slept with my makeup on and ate pizza for breakfast, but I bought this new face wash.”

The draw of the party girl is living a life with no real consequences, or at least ones that can be easily remedied. Party girl beauty is a reaction to the rigidity of following rules. It’s fun to break those rules; it’s freeing, messy, and honest, something the ‘that girl’ ideal definitely is not.

Messiness is huge at the moment. Ushered in by the likes of everyone’s main muse Julia Fox and her iconic, ‘i did it myself’ black-out eyeshadow, as well as trends like the shaggy wolf cut, mullet and even DIY clothing alteration and home renovation, which all encourage the messiness inherent to DIY – it’s not about the end result, it’s just about having fun getting there.

Christian Cowan’s Spring 2022 collection, photos of which you’ve seen throughout this article, predicted this chic parade of women heading to exclusive events. Inspired by 90’s New York nightlife, the runway saw models toss their hair, twirl, and take their shoes off like an exhausted partygoer heading home at 3 AM. The looks encompassed modern chic, updated old money, and a high class take on the indie sleaze lifestyle.

The look is vastly different from many other Gen-Z pandemic-era trends. From dopamine dressing to the never-ending Y2K resurgence, most of 2020’s trending aesthetics burst with colour, promote maximalism and share the highlights of people’s lives. But night luxe and the party girl depart from the mainstream; rebel against it even. Signature colours include black and deep red partnered with pops of silver and understated sequin. Everything is chic, pared-back and minimalist. It’s a startling departure from current trends, separating the party girl from the trends of her peers and the entire lifestyle they subscribe to.

This longing for a low maintenance lifestyle resonates with people no matter the lifestyle they lead or the trends they buy into. People want to do just enough skincare and beauty to balance out the damage caused by indulging in fun, and brands are popping up to encourage, or at least enable, these less regimented lifestyles.

4AM Skincare wants you to keep your bad habits. They’ve got you. So eat your carbs, drink your wine, and get home at 4 AM, “We’re tired of being told that a perfect skincare routine must come at the expense of enjoying life’s guilty pleasures.”

Speaking to founders Sabrina and Jade, it becomes clear that this brand was born because of an anti-wellness rebellion. “Instead of trying to shame consumers out of those ‘bad habits’, we find effective ways to reduce the harm of them. Typically skincare brands have deemed alcohol, smoking, indulgent foods, and not sleeping enough as ‘bad habits’ and have promoted a perfectionist lifestyle that everyone should aspire to achieve. We want to say that living what’s basically a normal life with some ‘guilty pleasures’ shouldn’t be seen as something to look down upon. We wanted to create solutions that celebrate fun and allow us to reduce the harmful effects of normal activities that so many skincare brands will not even consider finding solutions for.”

Spending time at medical school meant Sabrina learnt how the skin works, leading to the understanding that less is really more – a different message to that pushed out by most brands. The irony is reflected in their brand messaging, “yes, we’re a skincare brand, telling you to do less skincare.”

Selling two fuss-free serums, ‘rise’ for the morning and ‘rest’ for the evening, the minimalist brand gives your skin all it needs in one simple step. “All-in-one products are always typically marketed towards men because apparently, people think they’re the only ones with busy lives. We wanted to make quick, easy, simple solutions for everyone that were thoughtful and effective. We want to get people out of their bathrooms and back to living.”

As some have pointed out, there is an irony in being a party girl. What came as a rebellion to following unattainable aesthetics has now become a new aesthetic to follow that’s just as unobtainable as the clean girl look.

The party girl may seem to stumble across the most lucrative parties and quickly throw together an instagrammable brunch, but her nights out are refined and well organised–ideally by a personal assistant. You see her, cocktail in one hand, oyster in the other, parading about in a slinky designer slip, posing for photos in front of a neon sign or grunge car park. It’s an edgy, effortless glam that is calculated, posed and just as perfected as anything posted by ‘that girl’. At least we can all get in on the party girl’s effortless skincare.

Despite the flaws bound to occur when following any trending aesthetic, we’re just thankful that ‘that girl’ at last has an antithesis. There’s so much demanding our time and energy; it’s nice that skincare and perfected makeup looks don’t also have clog up our minds.

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