March opened the windows. The Oscars closed out the previous Sunday in a Hollywood that finally looked like 2016 — wet hair on Brie Larson, glow on Cate Blanchett, a softened brow everywhere — and the rest of the month delivered the daylight, the spring break group chats, and the first Spring 2016 ready-to-wear deliveries showing up at the department stores. The bathroom-counter math reorganised again. Out went the heaviest balms; in came the gel cleansers, the SPF, the lighter foundations, the Sephora Spring Bonus haul we had pre-loaded into our checkout the moment the email arrived. We pulled on a lighter coat, painted a single coat of tinted moisturiser, and admitted out loud that we were ready for spring.
The post-Oscar afterglow brief
Brie Larson’s wet-hair-and-glowy-skin Oscar look on the night of February 28 turned out to be a cipher for the month. Hollywood makeup artists posted their kit photos on Instagram on Monday morning, and the recurring vocabulary repeated: a single thin layer of Charlotte Tilbury Magic Cream, a cream blush dabbed on the apple of the cheek, two coats of mascara on the upper lashes only, and lip gloss instead of lipstick. The brief had been democratising fast since the Grammys; by mid-March our group chat had migrated bodily into it. We started reaching for the Glossier Cloud Paint we kept hearing was about to launch — though the actual cream-blush-in-tube would not arrive until early April — and in the meantime made do with the NARS The Multiple in Orgasm, which had been on our counter since 2014 and finally felt new again. The lesson of the post-Oscar afterglow: a face built around hydration reads more current than a face built around colour.
Daylight saving and the SPF rebrand
Daylight saving fell on March 13, and that one extra hour of evening light was the closing argument for SPF year-round. The category had been quietly reformulating for two years and we were happily replacing every December-purchased moisturiser with a daylight-friendly version. Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen would not arrive until 2017 — so this March we lived on the brand’s Defence Refresh Setting Mist and on EltaMD UV Clear, the dermatologist-aisle staple that finally felt at home in editorial closets. Korean SPFs got more easy to find through US online retailers: Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence kept popping up in our group’s recommendation threads. March’s takeaway: the year-round-SPF conversation had shifted from preachy to default.
Pat McGrath, prestige pigment, and gold
The most-talked-about counter on the prestige floor in March was the next drop from Pat McGrath Labs. The brand had launched the previous September with Gold 001, sold it out in seconds, and was now trickling out follow-on capsules — Skin Fetish 002 had landed earlier in 2016 — and reframing what “prestige” meant in a category that had been mostly ceded to lipstick brands and contour-palette dupes. The pigment kits arrived in elaborate packaging that read collectible, not consumable. We did not all buy them but we read every Instagram swatch the night they dropped. The McGrath effect on the rest of the prestige category was already visible: editor-led brands were retooling their kit photography and their packaging-density to look more like drops and less like permanent counter assortments.
Pixi, Glow Tonic, and the acid mainstream
The biggest growth story on Target shelves through March was, improbably, a tonic from a London brand. Pixi‘s Glow Tonic — a five-percent glycolic that had been a UK cult buy for years — was now dominating beauty TikTok-precursor culture on YouTube and selling out at Target with regularity. We were already long-time users; the stop-and-stare moment in March was watching it move from “the bottle our British friends imported” to “the cream-tinted product on the new-arrivals end-cap.” Around it the broader exfoliating-acid category caught up: we stayed in Drunk Elephant and Paula’s Choice territory for our serums but were running through Glow Tonic faster than any other bottle on the shelf. The takeaway: the home-use acid had won, and the readers we know who were still doing scrubs had read enough to switch.
Spring break travel kits
The third week of March was reliably the spring-break travel rush, and our group chat traded packing lists in real time. The good travel kit had a single hero moisturiser doubling as a balm for everything from chapped knuckles to flyaways, a tube of MAC Lipglass for the in-flight pick-me-up, a sheet mask we could decant for the hotel bathroom, and a single mascara that survived chlorine without flaking. Tatcha‘s Camellia Cleansing Oil collapsed into a tiny refillable bottle, and the Maybelline Lash Sensational from the corner CVS handled the chlorine assignment without complaint. We packed light, we landed easy, and we came back with all twelve of our products instead of seven. The takeaway for March: the carry-on routine is the realer test of a beauty edit than the bathroom one.
Mascara, but lighter
The corollary of dewy skin was a softer eye, and mascara responded. We started reaching for fibre-and-natural-look formulas instead of the lash-extension-imitating tubings of the previous fall. Lancôme‘s Hypnose Drama still had its place for evening, but for daylight the assignment kept getting handed to Maybelline Great Lash, of all things — the pink-and-green tube your mother used in 1985 — for the readable mid-March no-makeup makeup look. The takeaway: 2016 was happily proving that a thirty-year-old drugstore tube could read fashion-current with the right context around it.
What we are watching in April
April brings the first Glossier Phase Two colour-cosmetics drop — Cloud Paint, the cream blush in a tube — at the very start of the month, and we are clearing space on the counter. We are also watching for the spring shift in fragrance, the first of the proper warm-weather laundry-day perfumes, and the inevitable wave of Coachella-prep coverage that will descend on every beauty title in the second half of April. Our own April plan: less foundation, more SPF, and a serious attempt to get the cream blush right before the festival looks make it noisy. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April.