October 2020 in beauty was three things at once: a moment of taking stock, a moment of leaning hard into self-care because the news was relentless, and a moment of stocking up on the gift sets that the major retailers had moved up by almost a month because everyone had decided they were going to start their holiday shopping the day after Halloween. The election was four weeks out and most of us were watching too much cable news. The smaller, slower private rituals — a longer skincare routine, a candle that smelled like an actual season, a Saturday afternoon spent rebuilding our Sephora wishlist — were the things keeping us grounded. Here is the picture of a tense, full month.
Allure’s Best of Beauty 2020 lands
The annual Allure Best of Beauty list dropped at the start of the month and was, perhaps inevitably, leaning toward minimalism. The headline winners were the workhorses, the unfussy, the things you keep in your medicine cabinet for two years. CeraVe‘s Hydrating Cleanser took skincare honors. Olaplex No. 3 took repair-treatment honors. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Magic Cream took moisturizer-of-the-year honors despite having been on shelves since 2013, which felt right for a year that rewarded products that had been quietly proving themselves for a long time. The list, taken as a whole, read as the Allure editorial team’s unwillingness to chase a hype cycle that had effectively been broken by a year of staying home, and we appreciated that.
Holiday gift sets land in early October
The retail calendar that was supposed to bring holiday gift sets to Ulta and Sephora the first week of November had been moved up by almost three weeks. The reasoning was twofold: shipping carriers were forecasting a ten-day delivery window for gift orders by mid-November, and the brands knew the Black Friday and Cyber Monday cycle was going to compress and shift heavily online. The gift-set drop was earlier, larger, and more interesting than usual, with smaller indie brands finally getting the marquee positions. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk gift sets were on every “what to buy” list. Olaplex bundled No. 3 with No. 6 and No. 7 in a set that was sold out within ten days. Necessaire‘s body-care gift sets were quietly the gift that the editor friends started messaging each other about.
Wellness and election-anxiety self-care
Wellness purchasing went vertical in October. The data we were seeing from beauty retailers had stress-related categories — adaptogen-driven supplements, magnesium body products, sleep-aid creams, anything labeled “calm” — selling at three to five times the normal rate. The pitch made itself: nobody was sleeping, nobody was relaxed, and a forty-dollar bottle of magnesium body lotion was a small enough purchase to feel like a coping mechanism. We are sceptical of much of the wellness category’s effectiveness claims, but the bottle of Necessaire body oil that we kept on the bedside table did, in fact, smell wonderful and make the routine of going to bed more pleasant, and we are not going to pretend that has no value.
Halloween makeup goes virtual
For the second year of “is this party actually happening” Halloween was largely virtual, which meant that Halloween makeup as a category was being taken seriously by editors as makeup-creative-discipline rather than as costume-prep. The looks circulating on Instagram in the second half of October were among the most interesting we had seen all year — cinematic, painterly, technically ambitious — and they were being created entirely for video. MAC‘s pigment-pot range and Charlotte Tilbury‘s Eyes To Mesmerise creams were both having a quiet moment as the format-of-choice for these home-studio looks. We did not personally do a full Halloween look this year, but we admired the work from a respectful distance.
Indie skincare keeps moving up the conversation
The indie skincare conversation that we had been tracking through the year hit a particularly strong October. Naturium, the new direct-to-consumer line from Susan Yara of the Mixed Makeup channel, had been gaining heat all summer and broke through wider in October — single-ingredient products at drugstore prices but with a clean ingredient deck. Suntegrity‘s 5-in-1 Tinted Sunscreen was the cult product among the friends who had been deep in clean beauty for a few years. Youth to the People‘s Superberry Hydrate + Glow Dream Mask was the buzzy purchase. The shared thread was that consumers had been doing more research about ingredient lists, formulation, and brand transparency than at any point we could remember, and the brands that came correct on those expectations were winning.
November is going to be all gift-shopping, all the time. The election will be over by the time the November post goes up, for better or for worse. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are going to be the most heavily online versions of those events ever staged. Ariana Grande’s R.E.M. fragrance is teased for early November. We will see you on the first Tuesday of November. We are also keeping a quiet eye on Drunk Elephant’s holiday set drops, on Sephora’s expanded Black-owned beauty edit that took the corner spot in the storefront this month, and on the steady rise of K-beauty inflected newcomers like Beauty of Joseon and Round Lab in the indie chat groups we read every week. Take care of yourselves out there.