February has always been the strangest beauty month — the colour stories of holiday have packed up, the spring launches are still a week or two from landing on shelves, and the calendar tries to compensate by slathering Valentine’s pink on everything in sight. February 2021 had all of that plus the unmistakable feeling of a year about to start moving again. Vaccines were beginning to roll out, the inauguration looks were still in our group chats, and there was a tentative readiness on the conversation around lipstick that had been missing since March of the previous year. We started the month by clearing out half-finished bottles and finishing the moisturisers that had been carrying us through winter, then went looking for the one or two new things actually worth bringing home.
Ulta signed the 15 Percent Pledge and the industry’s quiet reckoning kept widening
Mid-February brought the kind of corporate news that usually moves slowly until it doesn’t: Ulta Beauty signed the 15 Percent Pledge, the commitment started by Aurora James in May 2020 asking major retailers to dedicate at least fifteen percent of their shelf space to Black-owned brands. Sephora had signed within weeks of the pledge launching; Ulta took longer, and the news landed with both relief and the obvious follow-up question of what year-over-year reporting would actually look like. The retailer paired the announcement with a set of new in-store and online programs, including expanded merchandising for brands like Mented Cosmetics, The Lip Bar and Pattern Beauty. We bought a few things we’d had on lists for months — the news was a useful nudge — and made a note to come back later in the year and see who actually got the floor space. The 2021 conversation around inclusivity was sharpening from a launch-driven one into a procurement one, and it was overdue.
Rare Beauty Soft Pinch was the blush every TikTok kept showing us
Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty had launched the previous September with its full lineup at Sephora, but the product that broke through to everyone we knew — including the people who don’t normally pay attention to celebrity beauty drops — was the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush. February was when the TikTok demonstrations got truly difficult to scroll past: a single dot on each cheek, blended with a fingertip, ridiculously pigmented, and somehow exactly the flush a normal under-thirties face wanted in the middle of a long pandemic winter. Joy and Hope (the warm peach and warm coral) were the two we kept seeing in the videos, and both were sold out at Sephora through most of the month. The ergonomic packaging — designed in collaboration with Selena’s discussion of dexterity and accessibility — kept getting flagged in the reviews as something that mattered beyond just being pretty. This was the first viral product of 2021, and the formula deserved it.
Pat McGrath kept dropping things and we kept buying them
The Pat McGrath drop calendar in early 2021 didn’t follow a predictable cadence — the brand operated like an artist’s studio dropping editions rather than a retailer chasing a quarterly window — and we’d come to expect that something interesting would land in any given month. Pat McGrath Labs kept the Mothership palette family at the centre of the lineup, with the Sublime Bronze Seduction and Subliminal palettes doing most of the daily work for us, and the brand’s lipsticks — particularly the MatteTrance line — got picked up again as the social conversation around full lip colour returned. The MatteTrance lipstick in 1995 (a reddened brown that’s been one of our forever colours) felt like the right choice for finally taking off the lounge-clothes face. The brand was also one of the few in the prestige category that wasn’t pivoting hard towards skincare in 2021 — Pat McGrath Labs stayed unapologetically about colour, and we appreciated that the year wasn’t going to bury makeup entirely.
Glossier was quietly recalibrating, but the Cloud Paints still earned their counter space
February also brought the first Glossier news of 2021 — the brand confirmed earlier corporate restructuring around its Play sub-brand (already discontinued in 2020) and was leaner heading into the year. The retail experiment looked different too: with stores still operating under restrictions, Glossier leaned harder into ecommerce and refined the product list rather than expanding it. The Cloud Paint in Dusk and Beam stayed the products we’d never replaced, and Boy Brow was still the brow product we’d never bothered to replace either. February was also when we noticed several of the longstanding “internet brands” of the late 2010s — Glossier, Drunk Elephant, Milk — settling into the kind of mature catalogue position that meant fewer breakthrough drops and more steady availability. There was something quietly reassuring about that for products you’d been buying for half a decade.
The Valentine’s Day pink, and a real lipstick again
February’s other reliable beat is Valentine’s Day pink — every brand puts out a limited-edition rose-coloured something — and the 2021 entries were softer and more wearable than past years had been, perhaps because nobody was selling for big nights out. Bobbi Brown‘s Crushed Lip Color in Bare and Pale Pink leaned into the no-makeup pink that was the year’s defining mood, and Charlotte Tilbury’s Pillow Talk Original (which we are never going to stop talking about) kept its place. We also reached for NARS‘s Audacious Lipstick in Anna and Anita — fuller-pigment colours we’d been ignoring for nine months — and remembered why we used to keep them on the counter. Vaccine appointments were rolling in for some of us, restaurants were testing limited capacity in many states, and the muscle memory of putting on a real lip was returning. We weren’t in a celebratory mood yet, but we were in a “starting to make plans” mood, and February’s beauty beat reflected exactly that.
March is going to bring spring NYFW conversations, the early-year retail report cards, and the next round of skincare launches getting trial sizes onto pre-orders. We will see you on the first Tuesday of March.