February in beauty is a long, glamorous corridor. We had three full weeks of awards-season carpets, the Spring 2016 collections rolling through New York Fashion Week, and a Valentine’s Day that the city seemed to be staging in full pink-light mode for the first time in years. Our bathroom counter responded in kind: more brushes than usual, a renewed appetite for liner and mascara, and a small civilian army of mini hand creams travelling with us through subway tunnels and step-and-repeats. February 2016 was the month the pivot we sensed in January became visible on the press line — every actress on a January red carpet had walked out of the hair-and-makeup chair looking like a printed Tatler editorial; by the Grammys mid-month the brief had quietly reset to glow. The pivot mattered because it was no longer about a single editor’s preference; the colourists, brow artists, hair leads and skin specialists working in tandem on each press tour had gotten on the same page about what 2016 was going to look like, and the rest of us — at home, at the bathroom mirror — were going to take our cues from them. We pulled out our notebooks, sharpened the pencils, and set up shop for a month of paying attention.
Glow as a press-line policy
By the Grammys on the fifteenth and the Oscars two weeks later, the dewy mandate was no longer a forecast — it was the assignment for half the makeup artists working the talent. Cushion compacts had crossed over from K-beauty curiosity to Sephora aisle-end real estate, and we lined our bag with the Lancôme Miracle Cushion alongside a more recent acquisition, the Dior Diorskin Forever Cushion. Charlotte Tilbury Magic Cream came out of every editor’s tote — at this point a moisturiser writers had been quietly buying for twelve months — and the Wonderglow primer underneath it earned its overuse. Our February takeaway: the conversation around foundation had reorganised around hydration. Coverage was something you added on top, optional, not the foundational decision.
Brows as architecture
Sept 2015’s Glossier Boy Brow launch was, by February, a re-purchase. Three of us in the group chat were on our second tube. The wax-gel formula in three shades — Blond, Brown, Black — was the antidote to the over-defined Instagram brow that had defined late 2015, and we wore it with nothing else on our brows for weeks at a stretch. Anastasia Beverly Hills‘s Brow Wiz still had its cult fans, particularly anyone who needed serious gap-filling, and the Dipbrow Pomade was still the hardware on every IG-MUA’s table. The conversation, though, was migrating: from drawn-on definition to brushed-up softness. Our February lesson was that the brow read like a thermometer for whatever was happening on the rest of the face. Sharp brow, sharp face. Fluffy brow, dewy face. The drugstore caught up too: Maybelline Brow Drama and L’Oreal Brow Stylist Plumper landed at meaningful prices, and any reader unwilling to spend more than fifteen dollars on a brow product had reasonable answers in their corner pharmacy.
Lip-kit ricochet and the rise of velvet matte
The matte-liquid silhouette was now a category. Kylie Cosmetics restocked twice in February alone, both sellouts within minutes, and the legacy houses started telegraphing their answers. MAC Retro Matte Liquid Lipcolour was the everyday workhorse our friends across editorial had landed on; the Quite the Standout shade in particular looked good on every undertone the makeup counter pointed it at. Drug-store dupes proliferated: Maybelline Color Sensational Vivid Matte Liquid started to land on shelves through the month, a meaningful price drop for the same finish. A small revisionist countercurrent came from Tom Ford, whose Lips & Boys mini-bullets returned for the Valentine’s calendar in a set everyone seemed to gift each other; the bullet format felt, by mid-month, almost retro. February’s lesson: the matte liquid had won the daily, but the bullet was about to feel newly desirable for being different.
Backstage at NYFW Spring 2016
NYFW ran February 11 to 18, and the early word out of backstage was a recurring vocabulary: bare lash, glossy lid, healthy skin, sleek wet hair. The runway had been telegraphing the dewy turn since the Resort presentations, and now, set against the previous September’s full-look armour, the lightness landed properly. We took the first Tuesday of the month to read the trend reports out of Vogue and Allure, and what kept showing up was the simplest possible look executed with surgical product choices: skin tint over moisturiser, a single dab of cream blush on the apple, mascara only on the upper lash. The NARS Pure Radiant Tinted Moisturizer made it onto more than a few backstage tables. Our note for the month: Spring 2016 was going to be a bare-canvas spring, and the brands that had skin-tint formulas already in market were going to do well through April.
The hand-cream parade
February meant gloves on, gloves off, gloves on, all day. The cuticles took the brunt and so did the back of the hand, where the steam-radiator dryness left fine, papery cracks that no quick lotion was going to repair. We rotated three formulas through the month: the small Aesop Resurrection Aromatique that lived in every desk drawer in our group of friends, a tube of Chanel La Crème Main from the December gifting that we kept reaching for at dinner, and the L’Occitane Shea Butter Hand Cream pots that we have repurchased every winter since college. February was when we admitted, finally, that the hand cream was a more reliable indicator of who took beauty seriously than any lipstick.
What we are watching in March
March is the month winter finally cracks and the Spring 2016 collections start hitting US stores, so we are watching every department-store floor for the first wave of warm-weather skincare drops, lighter-weight foundation reformulations, and the colour-cosmetics expansions that Glossier has been telegraphing for half a year. Awards season closes with the Oscars on the twenty-eighth, which is going to set the tone for spring red-carpet beauty for the rest of the year — we will be watching for the makeup artists who keep running the dewy brief and the few who go in the opposite direction with a cleaner matte. We will see you on the first Tuesday of March.