January 2018 opened with two specific cultural moments — the Time’s Up movement launching on January 1, and the Golden Globes the following weekend, where the entire room wore black in a coordinated stand against sexual harassment. The beauty looks of the night were quieter than any awards ceremony in recent memory — minimal eye, deep red or nude lip, hair pulled back in something close to severity. The look read as a deliberate choice to let the dress code speak for itself, and it set the tone for the year. Beauty editorial through the rest of January was about resolution and reset, which the new-year cycle always invites, but with a heavier undertone than usual. We were doing dry January, evaluating our skincare, ordering the new Fenty Mattemoiselle Lipstick collection that had launched on the 5th, and watching the prestige industry continue to scramble in the wake of last year’s Fenty effect.
The Golden Globes black-dress beauty
The January 7 Globes was a coordinated black-dress night, and the makeup looks reflected the shift in tone. Reese Witherspoon and Allison Janney opted for a deep berry lip with otherwise minimal makeup. Saoirse Ronan went pale with a graphic clean brow. The conversation in the beauty press the morning after was about which artists had executed the cleanest version of “no-makeup makeup” — the answer was usually the artist working with someone who already had great skin, but the trend that emerged was real. MAC‘s Pat McGrath-collaboration Mothership-style palettes had been used backstage for several looks; Pat McGrath‘s LUST glosses were on every red-carpet artist’s tray. The beauty conversation in 2018 was already going to be quieter and more deliberate than 2017. The Globes set the standard for the year.
Fenty Mattemoiselle and the Q1 momentum
On January 5, Fenty Beauty launched the Mattemoiselle Lipstick collection — fourteen shades of long-wear matte lipstick at a $19 price point, ranging from a wearable nude through a punchy fuchsia to a stomach-churning purple-black. The launch confirmed that Fenty’s first-quarter strategy was going to be relentless — controlled press release, no advance leak, sell-out within hours, restock within days. We bought three shades — a wearable rose-pink, a deeper berry, the punchy fuchsia for a single occasion — and everything held the full eight-hour wear the brand promised. The pricing was the quiet shock of the launch. At $19 per shade, the Mattemoiselle line had effectively repositioned prestige lipstick as a category that was about to face a serious value-tier reckoning. The MAC and NARS lipstick prices we had paid for years now read differently.
Dry January and the active-ingredient deep dive
Dry January in 2018 was not just about alcohol — it was the month every beauty editor used to do a real audit on the active-ingredient routine. We pulled out every product, checked the ingredient list, and committed to a smaller routine: Sunday Riley Good Genes four nights a week, Drunk Elephant T.L.C. Framboos two, a SkinCeuticals retinol the alternate two, vitamin C every morning under SPF, the new The Ordinary Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 as the layering serum across all of them. Total cost of the daily routine: under $30/month if you average across all the products. The conversation about what actually does the work in skincare had matured to a point where the average informed consumer knew more about formulation than the average sales associate. The new year skincare conversation was not about adding products — it was about subtracting.
The Glossier January teases
Glossier‘s Phase Three was beginning to take shape through January, with hints in the brand’s Instagram about a forthcoming mascara — Lash Slick, the brand’s first eye-makeup foray beyond the Boy Brow gel — and a teaser about an expanded color cosmetics range that would land later in the year. The brand’s New York pop-up had stabilized into a permanent SoHo showroom, and the lines outside the door had gone from novelty to fixture. Glossier’s particular gift for the year was beginning to shift — from trend-setter to platform. We were watching the brand’s expansion thoughtfully and ordering a backup Boy Brow because the original had run out.
Hair, the post-holiday recovery
Hair in January is always about damage repair from the holiday party season, and the routines we settled on this year leaned harder on bond-building than any previous year. Olaplex No. 3 went from a once-a-week treatment to a twice-a-week one for the first three weeks of January. The new Olaplex No. 0 — the brand’s pre-treatment booster designed to be used immediately before the No. 3 — had been launched in late 2017 and we had just received our first bottle. The combined treatment delivered a real difference in hair quality after two weeks. We also added Oribe‘s Gold Lust Repair & Restore conditioner, which is one of the most expensive conditioners we own and which earns its place. The hair-care category in early 2018 felt like it had reached a maturity point where consumers were finally willing to pay prestige prices for prestige formulas, and the brands that had done the technical work in 2017 were now reaping the consumer trust.
Closing
By the last week of January the routine had settled, the dry-January goals had been mostly hit, the bathroom counter was the smallest we had run it in over a year, and three new Mattemoiselle shades had earned permanent slots in the lipstick drawer. February will bring the Super Bowl on the 4th, the Pyeongchang Olympics opening on the 9th, Valentine’s Day, and the long stretch of late-winter beauty editorial that always overpromises on transformation. We will see you on the first Tuesday of February.