One of our absolute favorite things about Instagram, besides its ability to connect people, is the sheer amount of creativity you can discover. And nowhere is that more true than with beauty. Professionals and amateurs alike share some of the most amazing creations and images on Instagram. From mind-blowing makeup transformations to mesmerizing face massaging techniques, there is truly so much experience. It’s a community of beauty lovers from all walks of life and all kinds of styles.

From the very first days of Glow Recipe, Instagram served as a place for us to share our curations, experiences, and skin-care tips with our community. It also played a major part during the development of the Glow Recipe product line, letting our followers come along on the journey as founders Sarah and Christine created the products you know and love.  

In honor of Instagram’s ninth anniversary, we rounded up some of the most beautiful, engaging, artistic, and downright inspiring trends the platform brought to the world. Come with us on a walk down Insta Memory Lane.

Kirakira

The season was Spring 2018, and nary a backstage photo of Bella, Kendall, or Kaia was posted without some seriously high-voltage sparkle dancing across their lips or lids. The culprit: Kirakira, a Japanese app that made the glittery looks by makeup artists Pat McGrath and Peter Philips for Maison Margiela and Dries Van Noten, respectively, appear as eye-catching in pictures as they were in person.

Selfie-Worthy Masks

Find us another social media platform that essentially inspired an entire new category of skin care. Once K-beauty’s best-kept secret, sheet masks became the excuse du jour for shamelessly posting a selfie. Cue the launch of kitten and emoji-emblazoned sheet masks and traditional masks with glitter, metallic, and holographic finishes—and everyone from Kourtney Kardashian to John Stamos rocking them on our feeds. And, of course, the OG sheet maskers, our founders Christine and Sarah.

Lip Art

You may have seen a Klimt or two, but have you ever seen one reproduced on a pair of lips? It’s possible, thanks to Instagram lip artists like @greygirlbeauty, @vladamua, and @ryankellymua, who painstakingly paint designs from fine art to celebrity portraits and memes on their mouths. Most shocking: the final design often takes upwards of six to eight hours.

Shelfies

Call it the democratization of skin care. When celebrities and socialites started posting pictures of the insides of their medicine cabinets, us mere mortals could finally recreate their regimens in a way that felt real. (No ads or sponsored content… at least in the early days of I.G.) It’s how we learned Catherine Zeta-Jones’s favorite deodorant and influencer Deepica Mutyala’s go-to eye makeup remover, just to name a few.

#NoFilter—and Beyond

Instagram hasn’t just been fun and glitter. Ironically, the image-based platform has evolved to become a place to show each other our most raw, unfiltered moments. Remember when Mindy Kaling posted a selfie with globs of zit cream, or when Cardi B professed her newfound love for her natural curl pattern? Now, hundreds of thousands of us have felt inspired to leave the house without concealer or to transition to our natural hair textures.