March arrived in that exact way it always does — a long stretch of grey, then suddenly a Tuesday where the sun stayed out past six and the whole counter rearranged itself. Heavy serum bottles slid to the back. A barely-tinted SPF, a pink balm, and the lipstick we had been hoarding since New York Fashion Week all moved to the front. The post-Oscars haze had not entirely worn off either; we were still thinking about the on-stage Best Picture mix-up, still scrolling through the makeup looks from that night, still pulling references from Emma Stone’s frosted lid and Viola Davis’s burgundy lip. March is the month every beauty closet quietly resets. We pulled out cushion compacts that had been buried under winter foundations, ordered the new Pat McGrath Labs teaser, and spent a week deciding which Calvin Klein Pre-Fall lipstick we wanted to try. Spring 2017 in beauty had a tone — minimal, glossed, slightly tired in a chic way — and we were absolutely committed to it.
The skin-finish reset that defined the month
The single biggest conversation in our group chat all month was about the new “filter” category — products that were neither foundation nor primer, but a third thing that fixed the way light bounced off your face. Charlotte Tilbury had pushed Hollywood Flawless Filter into Sephora the previous fall, and by March the Q1 momentum had turned it into one of those things you simply could not get from your local store. We saw it pop up on every Instagram beauty editor’s feed, mixed into moisturizer, dabbed on the high points, used as a primer under a thin BB. The shade range was still narrow and we said so out loud, but the formula itself — that particular glow that did not look wet — was what every brand was about to chase. By the end of March a half-dozen drugstore strobing creams had shown up in our Walgreens basket as we tried to figure out which of them was getting closest. The answer, as it turned out, was none of them yet, but the chase itself was the point.
Calvin Klein, Raf Simons, and the new American minimalism
February 10 had handed us one of the more important fashion moments of the decade — Raf Simons’s debut at Calvin Klein, his first American collection, with its red-white-and-blue tinged plaids and a soundtrack we had played on repeat for two weeks. By March that mood had quietly migrated to the makeup bag. Skin was matte but not flat. Lip color leaned slightly off — a brown-pink, a burgundy that read almost neutral in daylight. We pulled out the NARS Audacious in Anita and the Bobbi Brown Velvet Lip Color in Plum Brandy and rotated them all month. The point was not the color exactly; the point was the restraint. After two years of contour and strobe stacked on top of itself, the new American minimalism was about subtraction — one strong feature, everything else clean. By the second week of March we had put away every highlighter that was not a liquid, packed the brown contour kit into a drawer, and started layering a single cream blush from cheek to lid for the daytime version of the look.
The Pat McGrath drop economy
Two years after Pat McGrath had launched her own line by selling out a single gold pigment in six minutes, the model for the brand had become its own genre. Pat McGrath Labs teased the next palette at the start of the month and we spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon refreshing the cart page, talking ourselves out of the second one in case it was less essential than the first one (it was not). The conversation around her work in March cycled through the Spring 2017 backstage looks, the way her chrome lid pigment had landed on the Versace runway in Milan, and how the limited-quantity drop had taught the entire prestige industry to reframe a launch as an event. By the end of the month we had paid for the new Mothership palette the moment it surfaced and we were watching every other major artist brand try to figure out how to do something similar without simply copying it. MAC had its own collaborations queued for spring, and we were paying close attention.
Coachella prep starts now
Mid-March is the official start of Coachella content season, and 2017 felt particularly loaded — the festival was the first since the inauguration in January and the women’s marches that had followed, and the early lookbooks coming out of festival-adjacent brands had a quieter, less glittery edge than the previous two years. We were not going, but the products that came out of festival press kits always told us something about where the rest of the year was heading. Urban Decay had a collection of Heavy Metal glitter liners that landed at Sephora and disappeared inside a week. Benefit Cosmetics had been teasing a brow product overhaul for months, and the first wave of replacement formulas surfaced just as the Coachella prep content started rolling. We bought one of each, kept the festival glitter for a Saturday night out instead, and started building a brow routine we could actually live with for the next ten years instead of ten weekends.
Drugstore had something to say in March
The other big story of the month was that drugstore beauty had stopped pretending to be a discount aisle. Tarte’s Shape Tape had walked out of Tarte’s own digital store and into a mainstream conversation that had nothing to do with prestige; we watched a non-beauty friend buy three at Ulta in March because she had seen the YouTube video. Maybelline had a strobing cream sitting next to the foundation pumps that looked almost identical to a $40 Becca product, and the L’Oréal Paris Infallible Pro-Glow line was doing the long-wear-but-dewy thing two seasons before most prestige lines caught up. We bought all three, lined them up on the bathroom counter with their prestige twins, and did a side-by-side. The drugstore versions were not always better — but at $9.99 each, they did not need to be. They needed to be 80 percent there, and they were.
Closing
By the last week of March the closet was stripped down — one cushion, one Filter-style glow drop, a single Mothership palette that was about to ship, two lipsticks, a new brow gel, and a glitter liner we were saving for the first warm Saturday. April is going to be the month the new Pat McGrath palette actually arrives, the month the festival makeup officially moves from speculation to evidence, and the month the new strobing creams either prove themselves or quietly retire. We are going to be testing every one of them. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April.