The first Tuesday of January 2014 was a New Year’s Day hangover that doubled as the first official day of the year, and the bathroom counter felt the strain. The end-of-2013 best-of lists were still being passed around, the holiday-gift makeup we had received a week earlier was still in its wrapping, and the resolution-skincare plan everyone had texted each other on December 31 was already getting tested by the mid-Atlantic dry-radiator winter. We were starting 2014 with a strong opinion about what we wanted from our routine — fewer steps, smarter ingredients, less new-thing-this-week — and ended the first week with three new products on the counter anyway. Below, what we were reaching for.
Naked 3 finally landed in widespread distribution
The Naked 3 palette from Urban Decay had launched in early December 2013 and had been functionally impossible to buy through the holidays. By the first week of January 2014 it was finally restocked at every Sephora, Ulta, and online retailer. The pivot was the palette’s signature: where Naked 1 had been warm browns and Naked 2 had been cool gunmetals, Naked 3 was a full sweep of pink-leaning rose-gold neutrals, twelve shades from a soft champagne pink at one end to a deep burgundy-brown at the other. The wear-everywhere shade was Limit, a slightly-warm matte mauve that worked as a transition shade for almost any look you wanted to build.
The technique conversation pivoted with it. Where the Naked 2 had been the gunmetal smoky-eye palette of late 2013 holiday parties, Naked 3 read softer, more daytime, more day-to-night flexible. By mid-January the rose-gold eye look was the editorial reference for resolution-makeup minimalism, and almost every working-woman fashion column in the year’s first issue cycle had a how-to with the same palette numbers in the same order.
CC cream replaced BB cream as the in-conversation product
The BB cream wave we covered a year earlier in January 2013 had completed its retail penetration, and by January 2014 the conversation had pivoted toward the next iteration: the CC cream — “color correcting” — which promised to even out the redness and uneven pigmentation that BB creams had only blurred. The drugstore answer was L’Oréal Paris’s Magic CC Cream Anti-Redness, which had launched late 2013 and was on its first widespread restock cycle in January. The prestige answer was Smashbox’s Camera Ready CC Cream, in the brand’s recognizable photo-studio packaging, at the Sephora aisle.
What we noticed by mid-January was that the format itself was solving an actual problem the BB cream had not — anyone with mild redness, post-acne marks, or unevenness was getting a more usable result without going up to a real foundation. The category was solidly in the bathroom-counter rotation by the end of the month.
Resolution skincare went minimal
The January 2014 skincare conversation was unusually disciplined. After a 2013 that had been about layering — vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, separate moisturizer, separate SPF — the year-opening editorial coverage was largely about cutting the routine down. The argument was simple: most people were using too many products, the steps were not synergistic, and consistency mattered more than ingredient stacking. The brand most often name-checked in this minimalism conversation was CeraVe, the dermatologist-developed drugstore line that had spent 2013 quietly building credibility through editor recommendations.
The three-product CeraVe routine — the Hydrating Facial Cleanser, the Moisturizing Cream in the giant tub, and the AM Facial Moisturizing Lotion with SPF 30 — was the editor reference for minimal-routine skincare in January 2014, and the under-fifty-dollars-for-the-set price point made it the resolution-skincare buy of the year. The prestige-tier alternative for anyone willing to pay department-store money for the same idea was La Mer’s smaller-routine edit, which the brand was pushing aggressively in its early-2014 campaigns.
The matte-lipstick revival started
The lipstick conversation pivoted hard in January 2014 toward true matte finishes. After several years of glossy and balm-finish lipsticks dominating, the editorial coverage of the new year leaned into the dry-finish, flat-color, lasts-six-hours formulas that had been too uncompromising for most consumers a few years earlier. The launch that everyone was waiting for was M·A·C’s growing matte range; the workhorse from 2013 that kept the rotation alive was Diva, the deep red-brown matte that had made it through Met Gala 2013 and was heading into a second life as the daytime equivalent of a serious red.
The drugstore matte conversation took longer to mature, but Maybelline’s Color Sensational Creamy Matte line was the early answer, and by the end of January was taking up real shelf space at every drugstore.
Hair-oil routines crossed into US drugstore distribution
The hair-oil category had been growing at the prestige tier for several years — Kérastase’s Elixir Ultime had been the salon-shelf reference since the mid-2000s — but January 2014 was the month the drugstore tier finally caught up. L’Oréal Paris’s Total Repair 5 Damage-Erasing Balm sat at the right price for a daily-use hair treatment; Garnier’s Fructis Marvelous Oil was launching with heavy promotional weight.
The technique advice that bounced through every January column was specific: a single drop on the mid-lengths after towel-drying, a second drop on the ends, never on the scalp, never more than two drops total. By the end of the month half the people we knew had a small bottle of hair oil somewhere in the bathroom that had not been there two months earlier.
What we’re watching for February
February 2014 will bring NYFW Fall 2014 in the second week, V-Day red-lipstick coverage as always, and an early conversation around the cushion-compact category that had been building all of 2013 and finally seemed about to actually arrive at the US prestige tier. We were also watching the K-beauty conversation, which had outgrown the Tony Moly sheet-mask phase and was about to become a much bigger story through 2014. We will see you on the first Tuesday of February.