July is the slowest month of the year for new beauty launches and the loudest month for testing what we already own. The bathroom counter in the first week of July 2013 was a study in summer triage — a half-empty dry shampoo, a small army of travel-size sunscreens, an aluminum-free deodorant we were giving our seventh chance, and the texture spray we had committed to in May. The Fourth of July weekend tested everything, the heat dome that settled across the East Coast for the second week tested it harder, and by the first Tuesday of the month we had a clear set of products that were going to carry us through to Labor Day.
The dry shampoo wars finally got serious
Dry shampoo had existed for decades — Klorane’s yellow-and-blue can had been a French pharmacy staple since 1971 — but July 2013 was when the US prestige tier finally took the category seriously. Living Proof’s Perfect Hair Day Dry Shampoo had launched a few months earlier and by July it was the editor reference, the can that turned up in every magazine’s “summer hair survival” column. The texture was different from the white-cast aerosols of a decade earlier — invisible on darker hair, actively absorbing oil rather than just hiding it, and on the fourth-day-after-a-blowout test, it genuinely worked.
The drugstore tier was just as competitive. Batiste had become the ubiquitous answer at every CVS endcap, the can in every commuter’s gym bag. Klorane’s oat-milk dry shampoo was the gentler alternative for anyone whose scalp had started reacting to the harsher formulas. Between the three, the “wash less, dry-shampoo more” routine that hair stylists had been preaching for years finally had real product support at every price tier.
Aluminum-free deodorant got better
The natural-deodorant pivot had been threatening to happen for years. The problem was that the formulas had been bad. They smelled odd, they did not actually work for the eight hours a typical workday demanded, and the people who had switched in 2010 had mostly switched back. July 2013 was the month a few brands finally cracked the formula problem. Tom’s of Maine’s Long Lasting Natural Deodorant was the gateway — drugstore-priced, widely distributed, fragrance options that did not smell aggressively like an essential-oil store.
The prestige tier was just being seeded — the brand that would eventually dominate the category had not launched yet — but the Whole Foods aisle in summer 2013 had genuinely usable options for anyone who had been trying for years. The hot summer commute test was the only real evaluator, and the products that survived the July subway became the products people actually committed to.
The hot-weather makeup edit narrowed
By July, the makeup bag had ruthlessly trimmed itself. Foundation was out — at most a tinted moisturizer, more often just a sheer skin tint and a concealer where it was actually needed. Laura Mercier’s Tinted Moisturizer was still doing the heaviest lift in this category — a product that had been around since 1996 and that became the summer default once the formula update of the late 2000s caught up with the SPF expectations of the 2010s. Benefit’s Benetint, the original cheek-and-lip stain in a small bottle, was carrying the cheek tint conversation through the summer because it lasted on warm skin where powders were sliding off.
The makeup-artist pro tip that bounced through every hot-weather column we read in mid-July was the Q-tip-and-setting-spray reset. Spray a Q-tip with a setting spray, run it under the eyes to clean up mascara migration, then spray the rest of the face. The face read fresh again in under fifteen seconds. We tested it. It worked. We carried a travel size to every July outdoor wedding we attended.
Marc Jacobs Beauty announcement made the rounds
The big launch teaser of the month was the announcement that Marc Jacobs was preparing his own beauty line for an August 2013 debut at Sephora. The campaign images had started leaking — Marc Jacobs himself in dramatic black eyeliner, the packaging in a chrome-leaning silver and black, the line described as “makeup for the woman who is never afraid to push back.” The pricing was going to be prestige — comparable to NARS at the high end — and Sephora was reorganizing its endcaps in late July in preparation. We were curious to see whether a designer-fronted beauty brand could compete with the makeup-artist-fronted lines that had dominated US prestige for the previous decade.
Body lotion learned to behave in July humidity
The other quiet improvement of July 2013 was the in-shower body lotion category. The standard advice for years had been to apply lotion immediately after towel-drying, which is fine in February and a sweaty mess in July. Nivea’s In-Shower Body Lotion — applied wet, rinsed off, somehow leaving the skin softer — was the gimmicky-but-effective answer that became the summer commute hack of the year. The premise sounded wrong; the result was that the skin actually felt soft for fourteen hours in the kind of July weather that normally made any post-shower skincare step pointless.
What we’re watching for August
August is back-to-school season at every drugstore in the country, even for people who have not been in school in twenty years, and the launches that drop in the first two weeks of the month set the fall conversation. We were waiting for the Marc Jacobs Beauty rollout. We were watching the Sephora August Beauty Insider event, which was already on the calendar. And we were curious about the back-to-school drugstore launches — Maybelline, L’Oréal Paris, and Revlon all had Q3 lipstick reformulations queued up. We will see you on the first Tuesday of August.