August is the month when summer breaks. The light shifts, the produce in our kitchen changes, and we start asking ourselves whether we will get back to a yoga studio by the end of the year. In 2020 the questions were different and bigger, but the small private rituals were doing the same work they always do. We were testing the new Fenty Skin pieces in earnest, watching with no small amount of sadness as a couple of brands we had grown up with quietly wound down, and noticing the way the makeup conversation was tipping further toward minimal-skin-finish formulations than at any point in the last decade. Here is what was on our counter in August 2020.
Fenty Skin gets a four-week review
A month into using Fenty Skin, our impressions had hardened. The Hydra Vizor SPF 30 was the keeper. The cleanser, Total Cleans’r, did its job without drama. Fat Water — the toner-essence — was the surprise: a sticky-fresh hybrid that slotted nicely between cleanser and serum, and that genuinely improved how our skincare layered after it. None of the formulas knocked anything else out of our routine, but they did not embarrass themselves either, which for a celebrity-fronted skincare line at this scale is rarer than it should be. The bigger story, though, was that Fenty Beauty was now operating across two of the highest-stakes prestige categories — colour cosmetics and skincare — at the same time, and was doing both well. That is not a normal thing for a celebrity brand to manage.
Two quiet exits: Glossier Play and Marc Jacobs Beauty
August was also a goodbye month. Glossier Play — the experimental colour cosmetics sub-brand the company had launched only seventeen months earlier — was officially being wound down. The line had been built around glittery, high-pigment products that were a real swing for a brand whose original DNA was more about your-skin-but-better, and the year of “we are not going anywhere and do not need glitter eyeliner” was not a kind year for it. Around the same time, Sephora shelves quietly stopped restocking Marc Jacobs Beauty — Marc Jacobs’s eponymous colour line had been losing momentum for two years, and the parent company appeared to have decided 2020 was the year to call it. Both exits felt like part of a larger contraction: the prestige cosmetics market was shrinking, and the brands that had been most dependent on bold lipstick, party-eye, and event-driven product cycles were the ones taking the hit.
Clean-makeup grows up: Kosas and Ilia
The other side of that contraction was a category having a very strong year. Skin-finish makeup — tinted moisturizers, glowy-skin formulas, lightweight foundations that read as nothing from a normal viewing distance — had been gaining ground since 2018, and 2020 finally pushed it to the front of the conversation. Kosas Tinted Face Oil was the formulation that turned a lot of the holdouts. The Tinted Face Oil was the closest thing the prestige category had to a blank-canvas product — buildable, dewy, and ingredient-list-readable. Ilia‘s Super Serum Skin Tint was the parallel cult favorite, and at this point the only real argument among our friends was which of the two to keep on permanent rotation. Both brands had been built around the idea that the line between makeup and skincare should be permeable, and 2020 was the year the larger market caught up with that thesis.
The Augustinus Bader cream takes off
If 2020 had a single skincare buzz product among the people who could afford one, it was Augustinus Bader‘s The Cream. The brand had launched in 2018, but the late-2019 fashion-press anointing finally compounded over the spring, and by August it was sold out at most retailers. The pitch — a moisturizer formulated around stem-cell technology developed by a German biomedical professor — was the kind of pitch that ought to make you suspicious, but the product was genuinely effective. We were not sure that effectiveness was worth the price tag. We were sure that a lot of our friends were buying it anyway. The brand was the most visible example yet of the science-narrative-meets-luxury-skincare positioning that was going to define the next several years of prestige skincare.
Hair colour, take two
Salons were partially reopened in most US cities by August, and the conversation about hair was now less about the box-dye experiments of May and more about the repair work needed to walk them back. Olaplex remained the bond-repair backbone, and Davines kept showing up as the bathroom-counter ritual. Briogeo had a particularly strong August with the Don’t Despair, Repair Deep Conditioning Mask, which was the deep conditioner that finally got through to the friend group’s holdouts. For everyone whose roots had been a personal project for three months, it was a relief to be allowed to outsource something again.
September is going to be loud. Selena Gomez has confirmed Rare Beauty for September 3rd at Sephora, the first big tier-one celebrity launch since Fenty Skin and the first one with an explicit mental-health focus woven into the brand identity. NYFW Spring 2021 will be a digital-only event, and we are interested to see how brands handle the fall season’s runway-show economy when the runway is on a screen. We will see you on the first Tuesday of September.