May is the month every email from every retailer pivots, all at once, to weddings — bridal-prep skincare, bridesmaids’ gifting, day-of makeup tutorials, the whole package. The Met Gala on the first Monday of the month sets the tone for the runway-adjacent red-carpet conversation, Mother’s Day on the second Sunday rearranges the gift-aisle endcaps, and Memorial Day weekend at the end of the month signals that summer skincare is officially open for business. By the first Tuesday of May 2013 we already had a stack of bridal-shower invitations on the kitchen counter and three brightening serums under consideration. Below, what we kept reaching for.
Brightening serum had its quiet moment
The vitamin-C conversation had been building since January, but May 2013 was when the brightening-serum category got real for the average bathroom counter. Wedding-prep skincare timelines (six weeks out, three weeks out, the morning of) put a heavy emphasis on glow, and the products that delivered it were vitamin-C based — the unstable, slightly-orange-when-it-oxidizes, smells-like-old-citrus liquid that nobody loved using but everybody wanted the results from. SkinCeuticals’ C E Ferulic was the editor reference, the bottle that came up in every prestige-skincare conversation that month. Kiehl’s’ Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate was the more accessible alternative, half the price and a third of the prestige but the same general gear shift in the mirror two weeks in.
What was new about the conversation in May 2013 was the willingness to layer it under sunscreen. The standard advice for years had been “vitamin C in the morning, retinol at night” and most people had been doing the second part more reliably than the first. By spring 2013 the morning routine was finally getting equal attention.
Texture sprays beat salt sprays in the LA-to-NY transfer
Beach hair as a category had existed for years — Bumble and bumble’s Surf Spray had been the West Coast hair stylist’s go-to since the early 2000s — but May 2013 was when the LA stylists shifted away from straight salt spray and toward the slightly polymer-leaning texture spray, and the rest of the country followed. Oribe’s Dry Texturizing Spray was the ur-product. The difference mattered: salt spray gave you crunchy beach-on-Tuesday hair; texture spray gave you the same lift but with a softer, swishier finish that actually lasted into a wedding reception.
The price point was a problem. Forty-plus dollars for a styling spray was a tough conversation outside major-city salons. The drugstore answer was already being teased — TRESemmé was running ads for what would become a passable copy by fall — but in May 2013 the Oribe bottle on someone’s vanity was a quiet status signal in the bridesmaid group chat.
The Met Gala set the year’s lipstick conversation
The 2013 Met Gala on May 6 had “Punk: Chaos to Couture” as the theme, which gave the red-carpet beauty work an unusual amount of room to be confrontational. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a tartan-feathered Philip Treacy headpiece and a deep red lip; Anne Hathaway showed up with bleached short hair that the entire industry talked about for the rest of the year. The lipstick on the carpet split between two camps — confrontational matte black-red, and a paler, almost-nude pink — and that division basically defined the lipstick conversation for the rest of 2013.
The product on a lot of those lips, behind the scenes, was M·A·C’s Diva for the dark camp and NARS Dolce Vita for the warm-nude camp. By the following weekend both shades had a measurable spike at every Sephora we walked into.
Mother’s Day gifting got smart
The Mother’s Day gift-set displays at Sephora were noticeably better in 2013 than the year before. Less “random pink ribbon, three things that don’t go together”; more “curated travel size of three products from the same line, in a small zip pouch, for under fifty dollars.” Fresh’s Soy Face Cleanser sets were the workhorse — the cleanser was a universal-skin-type win, the gift-set price was reasonable, and the packaging was beautiful enough to leave wrapped. We bought three.
The other category that finally got it together was the candle gift. Diptyque had been the editor default for years, but May 2013 was the month a Diptyque Baies turned up in roughly half the Mother’s Day brunch bags we encountered. The fragrance was inarguable, the size was right for a gift, the price tagged you as having paid attention.
Sunscreen got serious before Memorial Day
The Memorial Day weekend at the end of May is when most US bathrooms accept that summer skincare has different rules than winter skincare, and the sunscreen aisle finally gets the attention it deserves. The 2013 conversation was meaningfully different. The dermatologists writing on Into the Gloss, the magazine columns, and the early skincare bloggers were all making the same point at once: the heavy mineral white-cast formulas of a few years earlier were not the only option anymore, daily-use sheer sunscreen had genuinely caught up.
The drugstore winner that spring was Neutrogena’s Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch — the white pump bottle that nobody was particularly excited about but that did genuinely sit invisible under makeup. EltaMD UV Clear was the dermatologist-shelf alternative that crossed into mainstream conversation that year, mostly because aestheticians stopped gatekeeping it. By Memorial Day weekend it had sold out at every spa we tried to buy it from.
What we’re watching for June
June is full sunscreen season, full self-tanner season, and the start of the strange in-between-collections quiet that happens before the back-to-school launches in August. We were watching the body-care conversation, which had started picking up around scrubs and hair-removal alternatives. We were also tracking the slow rise of the gel manicure as a normal-people thing rather than a salon-only specialty — the home gel kits had not arrived yet, but the conversation about the in-salon shellac category was getting louder. We will see you on the first Tuesday of June.