Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Whether or not the name “King Kylie” rings any bells, you definitely know the archetype: Teal wig, latex dress, caked-on makeup, spidery faux lashes, and Cartier Love bangles stacked to the elbow. In 2015, the year Kylie Jenner launched the lip kit that broke the internet, the then-17-year-old dubbed herself King Kylie. Ten years, two children, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, that technicolor visage is back to haunt us, and the reason why isn’t as simple as just selling more makeup.
For those who haven’t been religiously keeping up with the reality star, this month she’s celebrating a decade of Kylie Cosmetics by throwing it back to where it all began—the Lip Kit. Jenner is rereleasing updated versions of many of the products that made her makeup empire such a booming success in 2015, including her famously bone-dry Matte Lip Kits in discontinued original shades. The collection’s name is a reference to her teenage social media alter ego and the aesthetic she helped popularize. It’s not just the look that she’s bringing back for a 2025 audience—it’s also the rage-bait. It’s yet another throwback to a previous era of Kardashian media domination, and one that feels like it should’ve been left in the past.
Jenner said at the time of her first release that the makeup line was inspired by her biggest insecurity, the size of her lips, which prompted her to start over-lining them to make them appear larger—a look that quickly became her signature. The following year she would confirm on an episode of her short-lived spinoff reality show Life of Kylie that her plump pout wasn’t just a makeup optical illusion, she was also getting lip injections. By that point, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of lip kits had already been sold.
While this new collection is ostensibly about celebrating a decade in business, the move had many crying recession indicator as the brand is clearly attempting to cash in on a bygone era of Jenner’s popularity and influence. It’s true that a Kylie Cosmetics drop doesn’t cause anywhere close to the same pandemonium it did a decade ago, when seemingly constant launches were met with reams of media coverage. But it’s hardly on the brink of bankruptcy, either. In November 2019, Jenner sold 51 percent of her company to Coty Inc. for $600 million, which put the total value of the business at $1.2 billion. However, after the deal closed, its value took a major hit and multiple outlets speculated that the company may have been misrepresenting its worth to begin with. A few months prior to the acquisition, the New York Post reported that sales of Kylie Cosmetics were down 14 percent, per Rakuten Intelligence. They also found that 60 percent of the brand’s customers shopped the brand just once. Then, in early 2020, in an article titled “Inside Kylie Jenner’s Web of Lies—And Why She’s No Longer a Billionaire,” Forbes reported that according to documentation from the Coty deal, Kylie Cosmetics had overvalued itself. The article concluded that the company was significantly smaller and less profitable than Forbes had previously reported. Ultimately, however, the real finances or scale of Jenner’s business don’t really matter. The ink on the Coty deal was already dry.
Much like the makeup itself, the commercial announcing the collection is also a throwback to a very different, far less politically correct era of celebrity. The clip picks up the plot of the first commercial a decade on, with Jenner being interrogated by the police and imprisoned—sexily, of course—before being released to her momager on recognizance. Watching the ad, one can’t help but get the feeling that in an alternate timeline where the combination of this family, two Trump presidencies, and social media hadn’t already exhausted the public’s ability to be outrage-baited to the max, this would’ve caused pushback on par with Kendall solving systemic racism by handing a cop a Pepsi. In 2025, an almost-billionaire cosplaying her way through the carceral system to sell makeup feels like just another news day.
This particular brand of intentionally provocative tone-deafness is very much the foundation upon which the Kardashian-Jenner empire was built. (Let’s not forget the cornrows and “boxer braids” that the family spent so much of the 2010s defending.) And it’s an attitude that’s also very much in line with the current anti-woke cultural zeitgeist that has already brought us such advertorial bangers as Sydney Sweeney’s vaguely eugenicist American Eagle ad and hot chicks in bikinis eating Carl’s Jr. burgers again. In that light, the return of King Kylie could even be read as some sort of overture to the political right. Her older sister Kim has certainly done as much in recent months, between posing on the cover of Perfect magazine alongside one of Elon Musk’s robots post–“Roman salute” or wordlessly sharing a photo of Melania Trump on Inauguration Day to her Instagram Stories. If the Kardashian-Jenners know anything, it’s how to read a room and use that reading to anger the public to their own enormous financial gain. Engaging in the aesthetics of the right at this particularly fascist-leaning moment in history seems like a surefire—if shortsighted—way to achieve those ends.
This launch also serves as a way for Jenner to test out yet another potential career pivot—pop star. As part of the rollout for this collection, she released the deeply autotuned track “Fourth Strike” in collaboration with Terror Jr. This too is a self-referential moment: Terror Jr.’s real song “3 Strikes” was used in the original Kylie Cosmetics ad, which spawned an internet conspiracy theory that it was actually Kylie singing on the song. (It was not.) While “Fourth Strike” is, in part, an inside joke for those in the know, it also feels like a trial run for a music career side quest. And given the public’s positive response to the song—and every time Jenner sings, for that matter—it seems likely we’ll be hearing more in the near future.
Staff
How a Former Polygamist “Sister Wife” Learned to Love Monogamy
Read More
But beyond the cash grab and fleeting PR boost, this type of self-referential product push is also a classic Kardashian-Jenner strategy: curating the narrative of their own fame while simultaneously amplifying it. The world-building the family does via their businesses is often about reinforcing their own mythology and iconography. They’ve manufactured a type of celebrity that can only exist by insisting upon itself. Hence the constant documentation, the endless launches, the birthday parties, the red carpets. Or the way these women can regularly be spotted in merch featuring their own faces, or using products to reclaim negative press about themselves. The new King Kylie merch features Jenner’s teen self with a pink wig and diamond-grilled snarl. It’s reminiscent of Kris Jenner getting a kickback from every person she refers to her plastic surgeon for a facelift, or Kim’s now-shuttered Kimoji company—a business that did the legwork for her fans by providing them with a highlight reel of Kim’s most iconic and memeable moments, as dictated by the reality star, for their dissemination.
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
Trump’s ICE Has a Fitness Test Would-Be Agents Are Failing. I Took It. Yikes.
She’s One of the Most Famous Women on Earth. Why Does She Want to Be a Teenager Again?
Has Anyone Else Noticed How Much Kids’ TV Has Changed Lately?
What Will Moms for Liberty Do, Now That MAGA Runs Everything? Apparently, Bring Lawsuits.
Jenner is doing something similar here, referencing her own style and glam choices in a way that raises them up on the pedestal of nostalgia, rewriting history slightly to present herself as the originator of that aesthetic. But the technicolor hair units, the stacks of diamond-encrusted bracelets, the Anastasia Dipbrow, and the heavy-handed contour were all already trends born of that decade, specifically among the Black women she was so closely modeling her look after. Kylie simply brought the look to a wider white audience.
Part of this mythmaking is also about securing the longevity of a business built entirely on the continued popularity of her public persona. Jenner told Beauty Inc. in an interview last month that it’s her “dream” for her 7-year-old daughter Stormi to “take over” Kylie Cosmetics one day. “I would love for this to be a legacy brand, and I’m working hard every day to set up that future,” she said. And one surefire way for Jenner to achieve that type of longevity is to transform herself from just a celebrity, with all the mercuriality that entails, into a full-fledged icon of a certain era. I have no doubt that she’ll do it, one chalky lip and turquoise hair extension at a time.
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.