November in any other year would have been the month of the holiday party gear-up — the search-engine traffic for “smoky eye holiday” goes vertical the second week of the month, the lipstick economy comes back to life, and the bathroom counter starts to look like a small department store. November 2020 was a different shape. We had voted, watched the slow returns, breathed, voted again with our wallets, and started thinking — for the first real time since March — about what we were genuinely going to enjoy in the next six months. We were not going to a holiday party. We were going to make small home-based versions of the same evenings, and the small purchases we made this month reflected that. Here is the November 2020 picture.
Ariana Grande’s R.E.M. fragrance launches
The first big fragrance launch of the holiday cycle landed in early November when Ariana Grande‘s R.E.M. fragrance hit shelves. R.E.M. — named for the song from her Sweetener album — was a vanilla-led, gourmand-leaning, salted-caramel-and-lavender pitch that read as the most assertively cosy of any celebrity fragrance launch we had seen in years. The packaging — an iridescent purple bottle, a small alien-creature stopper — was unapologetically character-driven, and the formulation actually held up. We did not buy R.E.M. ourselves but we acquired roughly nine sample vials of it through normal beauty-blogger channels, and the half-life on a wrist test was meaningfully better than most celebrity launches. It was a smart, season-appropriate launch.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday go fully digital
Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2020 were the most online versions of those events ever staged, and the beauty category was a meaningful share of the cyber spend. Sephora ran a Beauty Insider event the week before. Ulta‘s 21 Days of Beauty had crammed itself into a tighter, deeper-discount window. The biggest single-product event was the Dyson Airwrap restocks — the styling tool had been almost permanently sold out for two years, and the Black Friday restock cleared in under three hours. The other big winner of the cyber week was the prestige skincare gift set: Augustinus Bader‘s Cream gift bundle was the prestige gift everyone we knew bought for themselves and called a present. The merchandise we kept hearing about, on repeat, on every beauty-friend group chat, was the Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Magic gift set.
Comfort scents: candles, cardamom, vanilla
If R.E.M. was the loudest scent of the month, the quieter scent story was the absolute saturation of the comfort-fragrance category. Candles were the way most of us actually wore fragrance this year, and the November landscape was thick with them. Diptyque‘s holiday collection — the gold-leaf candles, the pine-and-cinnamon Sapin, the Volutes incense — was the prestige set. Boy Smells Hinoki Fantôme and the limited-edition Holiday Saint set were the indie crowd’s favorites. Maison Louis Marie‘s No. 04 Bois de Balincourt continued to be the affordable-luxe candle that everyone in our group chats was sending each other. We made a small list. We bought four candles for ourselves and three as gifts. It was a gentle moment.
Vitamin C reaches saturation
The active-ingredient conversation that had been moving through the year — niacinamide in spring, slugging in summer, barrier-care in fall — turned in November to vitamin C. Every prestige line had a vitamin C serum on the November “what to gift” lists, and the formulations were, finally, meaningfully different from each other. Drunk Elephant‘s C-Firma Fresh Day Serum kept the prestige flagship slot. SkinCeuticals‘s C E Ferulic remained the dermatologist-recommended gold standard. The Ordinary had at least seven distinct vitamin C formulations on shelf at this point, which was both impressive and slightly silly. The category had reached the stage of maturity where the conversation was no longer “should you use vitamin C” but “which vitamin C, in what concentration, in what carrier, alongside what else.”
The beauty advent calendar finally arrives in the US
The beauty advent calendar had been a UK staple for almost a decade by November 2020. American retailers — slow on the uptake — finally went all in this year. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Beauty Universe advent calendar had been the most-aggressive American launch we had seen and it sold out in days. Sephora’s house advent calendar at three different price points became a real merchandising story. The format made sense: a thirty-dollar daily-discovery gift that gave the recipient something small to look forward to in a month when most of the bigger pleasures had been postponed. We expect the advent calendar will be a permanent feature of the US holiday cycle going forward.
December is going to be the year-in-review month. We are starting to think about which products genuinely rewrote our routines this year — Fenty Skin’s Hydra Vizor, the Olaplex bond conversation, the Augustinus Bader buzz, and Rare Beauty’s Soft Pinch Liquid Blush are all candidates — and which ones were the genuine pleasure of a difficult year. December’s post will be a year-in-review. This will be our last regular post before the year wraps. We are also keeping a quiet eye on a Drunk Elephant launch teased for early 2021 and on the rumored Olaplex No. 8 launch that has been hinted at since late summer. We will see you on the first Tuesday of December.