MakeupAlley was the beauty internet before Instagram — 26 years later it shut down

MakeupAlley was one of the internet's first and most influential beauty communities, founded in 1999. Long before YouTube tutorials, Instagram beauty gurus or TikTok trends, it was where beauty enthusiasts gathered to review products, swap tips and debate the merits of everything from drugstore mascaras to luxury serums. At its peak it had millions of registered users and an archive of product reviews that shaped purchasing decisions across the beauty industry.

On August 25, 2025, MakeupAlley announced it was shutting down after 26 years. The closure was reported by Business of Fashion, The Cut, BeautyMatter and other industry outlets, which described it as the end of an era for online beauty communities. The forum had been in gradual decline as beauty conversation moved to visual platforms: Instagram for product imagery, TikTok for trends and YouTube for tutorials.

The shutdown marked the final chapter for a pre-social-media online institution. Unlike platform-based communities that benefit from network effects and algorithmic discovery, MakeupAlley remained a traditional forum — a format that had not fundamentally changed since the late 1990s. Its users lamented the loss of a space where a 50-post thread on a single eyeshadow shade could feel like a genuine conversation, something the algorithm-driven platforms had never quite replicated.