November is the month US beauty fully accepts that the year is going to end. The holiday gift guides start landing on every magazine homepage in the first week, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails begin arriving by mid-month, and by Thanksgiving the in-house holiday party season is officially open. By the first Tuesday of November 2013 we already had three gift-buying lists in progress, a stack of party-makeup looks saved on Pinterest, and the strong sense that the next eight weeks would consume a year’s worth of red lipstick. Below, what we kept reaching for as the calendar tightened.
Burgundy nails took over
The deep nail conversation we had been tracking since January peaked in November. The shade everyone was wearing was not just oxblood — it had moved further into the burgundy range, with a slight purple undertone that read more grown-up than the wine-reds of fall 2012. Essie’s Bahama Mama, a near-black raisin, was the workhorse on every editor’s nails by the second week of November. OPI’s Lincoln Park After Dark, the deep aubergine that had carried the matte-topcoat moment in February, came back in November as a glossy original. Deborah Lippmann’s Single Ladies, a smoky berry with a fine micro-shimmer, was the prestige answer for anyone who wanted a slightly more dimensional version.
The technique conversation finally caught up with the shade. The advice in every November column was the same — apply the deep shade in two thin coats rather than one heavy one, finish with a glossy topcoat that did not yellow over a week, and accept that a deep manicure was going to chip first at the index finger and to plan around it. The new chip-prevention reference was OPI’s Plumping Volumizer plus their Top Coat together, which extended actual wear by a few days for almost everyone we talked to.
Holiday party makeup got Pinterest-ready
The party-makeup look that defined late November 2013 was a careful build of editorial-leaning pieces. The base was something hydrating and luminous — Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer or the new Marc Jacobs Beauty Re(marc)able foundation. The eye was a smoky champagne pulled outward toward the temple — the look that Urban Decay’s Naked 2 palette had been arming everyone with for months. The lip was a deep red, occasionally a brick, never a coral.
The Naked 2 palette specifically — the gunmetal-cool counterpart to the original Naked’s warm browns — had become the most-used eye palette in the country by November 2013. Half the editor faces in every party photo we saw used the same three shades from it. The technique advice that bounced through every magazine column was specific: apply Tease as the base wash, build YDK at the outer corner, deepen with Blackout in the crease, and avoid Booty Call until you really wanted shimmer at the inner corner.
Concealer got more serious
The under-eye conversation hit its annual November peak. Holiday party season plus shorter daylight plus too many drinks at after-work things meant the under-eye-circle product had to actually work. The launch that crystallized the conversation was Tarte’s Shape Tape — wait, that was 2016. In November 2013, the editor reference was NARS’s Radiant Creamy Concealer, which had launched earlier in the year and had become the workhorse. The shade range was strong by 2013 standards, the formula was forgiving rather than dry, and at thirty dollars it sat at the right price point for an actual restock.
The drugstore alternative for anyone not committing prestige money to under-eyes was Maybelline’s Instant Age Rewind Eraser, the funny-spongy-applicator concealer that had been a quiet workhorse for a few years and was finally getting the attention it deserved in November column write-ups. Eight dollars, available everywhere, the late-night-out backup that nobody admitted owning but most of us kept in a desk drawer.
Black Friday became a beauty event
The 2013 Black Friday weekend was the first year that beauty retailers played as hard at the discount as electronics traditionally had. Sephora ran a Friends & Family event at twenty percent off site-wide that weekend; Ulta stacked discounts on the prestige tier; the department-store beauty counters added gift-with-purchase tiers that were notably more aggressive than the previous year. The Cyber Monday landing was even more intense — the deep-prestige savings on Tom Ford and Hourglass that landed in the Sephora email inbox that Monday were the moment the holiday gift-buying calendar really kicked off.
The most-purchased item across our friend group that weekend was an Hourglass Ambient Lighting Edit palette that bundled three of the Ambient powders in a single travel-friendly compact. The discount put it inside the “real Christmas gift” range for a lot of people, and we knew of three different gift exchanges where the same palette was wrapped twice.
Hand cream finally got a moment
The unsexy-but-essential hand-cream category had a real moment in November 2013. The combination of dry indoor heat starting up and the constant hand-washing of holiday-cooking season made the once-a-year prestige hand-cream gift suddenly relevant. L’Occitane’s Shea Butter Hand Cream — the small green-and-cream tube — was the universal gift-aisle answer, and the shop windows on every Madison Avenue and SoHo block had it featured. The drugstore alternative was Aquaphor’s Healing Ointment, the ten-dollar tub that was technically not a hand cream but functioned as the most effective overnight gloves-on hand-recovery product on shelves.
What we’re watching for December
December is the year-end conversation — the best-of lists, the New Year’s Eve party makeup, the year-in-review pieces every magazine prepares for the holiday week. We were watching the 2014 launch tease that Marc Jacobs had quietly seeded — a fragrance was rumored — and we were waiting to see whether the Charlotte Tilbury US arrival, which had not been announced for a date but had been alluded to in every conversation since September, would actually land in 2014. We were also tracking the New Year’s Eve metallic-eye conversation, which had been building since October and looked likely to dominate the last week of the year. We will see you on the first Tuesday of December.