The lipstick shades are in English. The slogans are in English. Half the categories are in English even where the brand, the factory and the customer have never spoken it.
That’s not an accident, and it’s not the whole story either. Here’s how English actually shapes fashion and makeup, and where the influence has started flowing back the other way.
1.English in the Fashion Industry
Nobody planned English as fashion’s working language. It accumulated.
A brand launching in twelve markets needs one campaign, and one campaign needs one language. The language with the widest partial reach wins. Arithmetic, not culture.
I. Fashion’s Borrowed Words Stopped Being Borrowed
Pieces of English vocabulary like “casual,” “vintage” and “chic” aren’t English words anymore in any meaningful sense. They’re industry words, understood in Warsaw and Jakarta the way musicians everywhere read Italian tempo markings.
II. Marketing Runs on it for Reach
Campaigns, taglines and social content ship in English first because one asset covers the most markets. Non-English-speaking creators pick up English phrases too, not out of preference but out of algorithm sense.
III. Visibility Compounds It
Designers from the US, UK and Australia dominate prestigious fashion events and media, so the trends they set travel with English attached.
One ceiling though, and it’s held for a century. Haute couture, prêt-à-porter, maison. The luxury tier still speaks French, and “haute couture” is a designation protected under French law, not a loose descriptor. English signals accessible. The top floor is selling the opposite, so the top floor never switched.
Same conglomerate, adjacent shelves: mass line named in English, flagship in French. The language is a price signal.
2. English in the Makeup Industry
Much of the makeup industry runs the same playbook, with one big exception we’ll get to.
I. Product naming
A shade called “Crimson Charm” isn’t named for clarity. It’s named for association. English on a label reads as modern, international, aspirational, and brands in non-English markets choose it precisely for that signal.
II. Influencers
English-speaking creators lead the conversation because English gives one video the largest possible audience. Everyone else adapts to that math.
III. Events and publications
The trade calendar from New York Fashion Week to Cosmoprof in Bologna runs in English, and leading beauty publications publish predominantly in English, which keeps editorial influence flowing outward from English-language media.
Now the exception, and it’s the biggest shift in a decade.
The most influential makeup vocabulary of recent years didn’t start in English. “Glass skin,” the crystal-clear complexion popularized by Korean pop stars, traveled into English. So did the gradient lip, the “just-bitten” look that’s the direct opposite of the heavy over-lined US matte lip.
Some ideas didn’t translate at all. Aegyo-sal, the under-eye pocket that K-beauty emphasizes while Western routines conceal it, kept its Korean name, and there are liners sold specifically for it.
When a market imports your word instead of translating your concept, that’s the strongest influence there is. It’s exactly what English spent fifty years doing to everyone else.
3. Cultural Exchange and Hybridization
The old model was one-way. Western trend appears, the world adapts. Denim everywhere, red lipstick everywhere, local norms bending around them.
The current model is messier
A Vietnamese customer buys a Korean-formulated cushion foundation with an English name from a French-owned retailer, using a technique from a creator who mixes three languages in one video. In Thailand, Korean-inspired aesthetics get folded into local preferences rather than replacing them.
Korea even named the blend. “Konglish,” Korean-style English with its own nuances, produces coinages like MSBB, “my skin but better,” which English-speaking beauty media now borrows back.
Working professionals live in this mix daily. The set vocabulary of makeup artists is English scaffolding holding Korean concepts, French product names and local slang in a single sentence.
English is the connector in that chain. It’s no longer the author of it.
Where the Influence Goes Next
Watch the direction of borrowing. It’s the honest indicator.
“Smokey eye” untranslated in a dozen languages is English influence. Aegyo-sal untranslated in English is the current reversing. Both are happening at once, and the second kind is accelerating.
So the future of global fashion and makeup trends probably looks like this: English stays the pipes, while the ideas flowing through them start anywhere. The strongest local scenes didn’t resist the global conversation. They walked in and changed what it was talking about.
Next time a shade name catches your eye, check where it started. The label will be in English. The idea, more and more often, won’t be.