The traditional shape of a December beauty post is the year-in-review. We are doing that. The shape of 2020 made the exercise easier in some ways and harder in others — easier because there were fewer launches to choose from than usual and the ones that mattered actually mattered, harder because so much of the year happened in our small private bathrooms that the ranking-by-cultural-impact frame the industry usually uses did not quite apply. So this is less a top-ten list than a sketch of the year as a year — a list of moments and products that genuinely defined our routines, and that we expect to keep around in 2021.
The year skincare ate makeup
If 2020 had a single throughline it was the steady, structural shift of beauty spending from colour cosmetics to skincare. Makeup launches collapsed. Lipstick had its single worst year in modern industry memory. Skincare bills, by contrast, ran the other way — the average prestige skincare basket grew, the brands that did barrier-supportive simple formulations had a real year, and the launches that landed (Fenty Skin in July, Rare Beauty in September) tilted heavily toward skin-finish products that read as adjacent to skincare rather than as makeup proper. The skin-as-makeup conversation that had been building since 2018 finally tipped, and 2020 was the year. Within the prestige skincare category, three names defined the year: Fenty Skin‘s Hydra Vizor, Augustinus Bader‘s The Cream, and the steady drumbeat of Drunk Elephant‘s C-Firma Fresh.
The bond-repair year, and Olaplex No. 8
Olaplex had the strongest commercial year of any independent beauty brand we tracked. No. 3 Hair Perfector ran out of stock at every major retailer multiple times. The No. 8 Bond Intense Moisture Mask launched in the second half of the year and immediately hit the same rotation as No. 3. The brand’s case was simple: chemical bond repair was the only real answer to the year of at-home hair experimentation, and the formulations actually worked. Olaplex is going to file for an IPO at some point in the next twelve to eighteen months at the rate this is going, and we would not bet against it.
The reckoning that the industry could not skip
The most important beauty-industry story of 2020 was not a launch. It was the spring and summer reckoning over racism in beauty — the launches of the 15 Percent Pledge by Aurora James and Pull Up for Change by Sharon Chuter. Sephora signed the 15 Percent Pledge first, and we expect Ulta and the other major retailers to follow over the coming year. The conversation about Black-owned beauty went from “an editorial niche” to a real merchandising commitment, and the brands we kept reaching for at the end of the year — Fenty Beauty, Pat McGrath Labs, UOMA Beauty, Rare Beauty — were the brands that came correct on either ownership or mission or both.
The year of the very specific small purchase
The tone of the year was small private rituals — a forty-dollar candle, a fifteen-dollar lip balm, a seventy-dollar serum, a hundred-dollar at-home device — and the brands that did the very-specific small purchase well had a strong year. Necessaire‘s body care was the example we kept coming back to. Aesop hand balm. Maison Louis Marie No. 04. Boy Smells candles. The small purchase that elevated the daily routine was the unit of the year, and the brands that built around that unit were the ones we trusted.
The launches that did not happen
It is worth noting the absences as well. Marc Jacobs Beauty was effectively wound down by year-end, ending a meaningful seven-year run in prestige cosmetics that had introduced the world to a particular Marc-Jacobs-y maximalism in colour. Glossier Play, the experimental colour sub-brand, was officially discontinued. Becca, Estée Lauder’s glow-focused acquisition, was being deprioritized in the parent company’s portfolio review. The party-makeup-driven brands that depended on event culture were the ones that took the year hardest. We expect at least one more big mid-tier prestige cosmetics brand to be reorganized or sold in the next twelve months.
NYE looks at home
The year-end look question — “what do we do for our makeup on December 31st” — had the easiest answer of any New Year’s Eve we had ever covered. Most of us were not going anywhere. The makeup we were doing was either nothing, or something genuinely creative for the camera. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk Eye Quad and a spritz of Maison Louis Marie No. 04 was the Zoom-ready answer. Pat McGrath Labs Mothership VI was for the people doing actual artistic work. The point was that what we put on our faces this New Year’s Eve, more than any year we could remember, was for ourselves.
2021 will, we hope, be a kinder year. The launches we are watching: a rumored Glossier body line, a Pat McGrath Labs Mothership VII, a steady expansion of Rare Beauty, and the first wave of brands launching post-Pull-Up Black-owned collaborations with the major retailers. We will see you on the first Tuesday of January 2021. Be good to your skin and to each other.