The Anti-AI Aesthetic Taking Over Social Media

San Diego-based Vanna Jimenez became a beauty influencer by accident. A year ago, she began posting her morning routines on TikTok and Instagram out of her tiny antique bathroom.

While she initially focused on her love of 1960s fashion, her skincare and makeup – tossed artfully across a silver tray piled with her coffee, jewellery, toothpaste, books and accessories – quickly gained followers and the attention of beauty brands. Chanel Beauty enthusiastically commented on one of her posts and sent her products. Others like Haus Labs and Shark followed suit, in hopes that their offers would wind up in the clutter.

“The whole sink aesthetic is trending because it’s relatable,” said Jimenez.

What looked like an improvised outtake tapped into a broader trend of influencers and brands embracing mess. Scroll through the social media feeds of nearly any cool-girl beauty brand, and you’re more likely to encounter a cluttered sink shot than the once-popular carefully styled shelfies.

The aesthetic shift comes amid not only fatigue with paid influencer content and “overconsumption,” but anxiety around artificial intelligence as its ability to generate realistic images and product reviews reaches an all-time high.

Over the past year, AI-generated visuals have entered fashion and beauty marketing campaign imagery and virtual influencer shopping videos en masse. Marketers are noticing that audiences have become more skeptical: 81 percent of chief marketing officers surveyed by marketing agency Dentsu in 2025 believe their customers will pay more for human-created content, up from 65 percent in 2024. In a post earlier this month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote that fake creator content “indistinguishable from captured media” would be a “key risk” for the platform in 2026, noting that “savvy creators are leaning into unproduced, unflattering images.”

In beauty, that sentiment has been demonstrated by backlash to AI influencers hawking products. In July, beauty company Slate Brands took down the profile of an AI-generated perfume influencer it had created after sending TikTok’s “Perfumetok” fragrance community into an uproar. And deepfakes of influential likenesses, from influencers like Abbey Yung to megastars like Beyoncé, pop up regularly on social media linking to TikTok Shop.

“People want things to be real,” said Dieux co-founder and content creator Charlotte Palermino, who sees messy content like fully-used “empties” as more relatable than computer generated imagery. “I don’t think people want AI.”

The Sink is the New Shelfie

The perfect “Instagram aesthetic” may have been declared dead with the rise of TikTok, but any scroll through the #cleangirl hashtag shows that the polished look never went away.

Now, amid the rise of AI-generated influencers and content, brands are leaning hard into physical proof of human use through empties and imperfection. Products are scratched, labels are worn and caps are missing, giving viewers a feeling that lipstick and blush were actually used before rushing off to a party rather than arranged for a professional photo shoot.

“Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore — it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect,” wrote Mosseri in his post.

Iterations of the messy sink clutter photo can be seen across the feeds of Merit Beauty, Saie, Soft Services and even Glossier, which popularised shelfie-style photography, as brands pursue a realer aesthetic.

“Shelfies were the original voyeurism,” said Merit Beauty chief marketing officer Aila Morin. “You loved a shelfie because you got to see what people were using. The moment that became incredibly curated was the moment it was no longer authentic.”

The carefully arranged flat lay has also been replaced by “cluttercore” imagery of chaotic piles of products spilling out of handbags, crammed into coffee holders or just scattered on the ground. “Girls Carrying Shit,” an Instagram account featuring hands holding piles of random items, has been a direct inspiration for beauty brands to create similar content.

Merit and Fara Homidi Beauty, as well as Dieux, Makeup by Mario and Salt & Stone, are among the beauty labels that have also tapped into the “empties” trend of showing used-up products on their main feeds.

The empties, as well as the various clutter trends, point to brands’ efforts to convey an idea that products are actually being used rather than stacked on a pretty shelf — either real or generated virtually — for status-symbol purposes.

“People are just more interested in saying, ‘This is money well spent, and I invested in this thing,’” said Fara Homidi, whose eponymous makeup brand posts photos of half-used, smudged products like the label’s Essential Bronzer used down to the pan. “Overconsumption in this economy is not really what people are excited about.” Her inspirations hail from fashion’s own version of cluttercore, especially celebrities that carry around beat-up old designer bags.

“We’re in an age of social media where everything is polished and pay for play,” said Morin. “That’s why a used product becomes so important, because it actually shows humanity.”

An AI Slop Antidote

As AI-generated imagery is branded with the cheapening moniker of “slop,” human-created content could become a luxury signifier.

There are signs that the messy trend could quickly move from indie brands into the mainstream. Beyond Chanel Beauty’s embrace of bathroom sink influencer content, Lancôme recently posted a campaign called #MesswithLancome on its social media. Albeit more curated than the smaller brands’ content, it featured Emma Chamberlain in a fully smudged makeup look.

When it comes to beauty marketing, what is seen as authentic and raw frequently becomes commercialised and curated. AI could possibly speed up that pipeline as it is already coming for what was once seen as the unpolished “get-ready-with-me” video format. Executives are bracing for how to stay a step ahead of AI-generated content as Mosseri predicted in his post that it will soon be able to replicate the “imperfect” aesthetic.

“I wonder if brands will be clicking into that and saying ‘We can do this trend, but via AI,’ and just type in a few keywords and see if it works,” said Homidi. “I haven’t seen that yet.”

Beauty brands embracing the “messy” trend have steered clear of AI when it comes to creative, even as they are inundated with pitches for AI-generated imagery or even AI influencer partnerships.

“My entire inbox is AI influencers,” said Morin, describing the flood of companies pitching her brand to use them. “We see influencers as an amazing conduit for storytelling. You give personification and personalisation to an experience. We’re keeping it on the human side for the time being.”

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