February in beauty is the month we shake off the resolutions, accept that our skin will be cranky until April, and lean into the small joys: a velvet lipstick, a candle that smells expensive, a bath that lasts an hour. It is a short month and a romantic one, and even those of us spending Valentine’s curled up alone with a sheet mask are happy to think about lips and lashes again. February 2019 had a particular flavor — there was the early stir of Glossier Play rumors, an unmistakable shift toward shinier eyes, and a slow-burn obsession with one outrageously expensive jar of moisturizer that everyone seemed to be testing. We bought our daffodils at the bodega, lit a Diptyque, and got to work.
Red lips, but make them grown-up
Valentine’s Day is always good for the red-lip business, and February 2019 saw the conversation shift away from the bullet-matte liquid lipsticks of mid-decade and toward a softer, more cushioned finish. Charlotte Tilbury kept selling out of the cult-classic Matte Revolution lineup in shades like Walk of Shame and Red Carpet Red — the formulation that made matte feel like satin. Dior reissued the Rouge Dior tube in a cleaner, refillable format, which gave even the casual lipstick wearer a reason to upgrade. The note across editorial and Instagram was the same: stop trying to make a perfect cupid’s bow with a lip liner, just blot it on with your finger and live a little. We bought one good red, learned how to wear it under a coffee run, and called it a personality.
The glossy lid takes over
For a few seasons, eye makeup had been about smoke, shimmer, and matte palettes the size of a paperback. February 2019 was the moment a different idea — the slick, almost wet, single-shade glossy lid — moved from runway to weekend brunch. Pat McGrath Labs had been the most influential evangelist of the look, and the brand’s Lust gloss sometimes got pressed onto eyelids over a single warm shadow for the most expensive five-second look in the room. Tom Ford Beauty‘s eye colors with a lacquered finish had been quietly building this for two seasons, and now they were getting properly photographed. The trick was knowing when to stop — one sheer wash of color, no liner, and a comb through the brows. The whole face suddenly looked like it had had a really good night’s sleep.
The Augustinus Bader question
If there was one product whose name we kept hearing whispered across bathroom counters in February, it was Augustinus Bader‘s now-mythic blue-and-white tube of The Cream. At a price point that made our Drunk Elephant habit look thrifty, it had quietly become a status object on the level of an Hermès anything. The brand’s TFC8 patent and the German biomedical credentials gave the thing a quasi-pharmaceutical aura that captured a particular 2019 mood: people were tired of marketing language, and they wanted something that sounded like it came from a lab. Was it worth it? The Sephora-faithful in our group were skeptical. The clients who could already afford a once-yearly facial in a private suite were converted. The truth was probably somewhere in between, but the conversation it sparked — about whether luxury skincare actually delivers more than its mid-tier competitors — defined the month.
The lash serum quietly going mainstream
For years lash serums lived in a strange grey area — prescription Latisse on one side, sketchy Amazon vials on the other, and not much in between. By February 2019, that had started to change. RapidLash had become the drugstore standard your dermatologist actually didn’t roll their eyes at, and the prestige tier was filling out with options that looked clinical without requiring a script. RevitaLash‘s Advanced conditioner kept showing up in beauty editor cabinets, and the conversation around eyelashes shifted from extensions and falsies — which had peaked culturally in 2017 — to slowly growing your own. Two months of nightly application, a slightly itchy week somewhere in the middle, and by spring our mascara work suddenly looked twice as effective. Patience as a beauty trend, finally.
Bath culture, candle culture
February in a US winter is no joke, and self-care kept tilting toward the bath. Aesop had become the apartment-warming gift of the year, with the Resurrection Hand Wash tucked next to the kitchen sink in roughly every Manhattan share. Diptyque‘s Baies candle stayed the unofficial currency of “I made an effort.” On the body care side, Nécessaire had launched at the end of 2018 and was shaping the year-ahead conversation: the body, finally, deserved a real serum and an editorial-grade box. We ran the bath, lit the candle, slathered on a body oil, and called it Sunday. The category that had felt slept-on for years was finally getting the treatment.
What we are watching as February closes: the very specific tease coming out of Glossier headquarters, where Emily Weiss has been hinting at a sister color brand for months — the kind of slow-drip launch only Glossier knows how to run. We are watching whether prestige skincare’s pivot toward “scientific” packaging keeps gaining ground. We are watching brand collaborations in mass and prestige — there’s a Khloe Kardashian and BECCA project landing this spring — and we are quietly hoping for a really good Pat McGrath palette to break the winter. We will see you on the first Tuesday of March.