March arrived this year with the strangest combination of hope and exhaustion. The first vaccine doses were reaching the wider population, the seasonal switchover was nudging us out of fleece sweatshirts, and the conversation around makeup, hair and skin started shifting from the quiet maintenance mode of the last twelve months into something that resembled actual planning. We weren’t in our pre-pandemic shape — nobody was — and the products that survived this transition were the ones that had real reasons to exist rather than just clever marketing. We started March by booking our first dermatology appointments in over a year, took inventory of what had actually held up through 2020, and gave ourselves permission to bring some colour back to the bathroom counter.
The skincare conversation finally pivoted from acids back to ceramides and peptides
The biggest meta-trend in skincare through Q1 2021 was the slow-moving rejection of the high-strength-actives era that had defined late-2010s skincare blogs. Dermatologists on TikTok and Instagram kept hammering the same message — we’d been over-exfoliating for several years, and the pandemic had aggravated everyone’s barriers — and the formulators we trusted started pivoting accordingly. Drunk Elephant, now in its first full year under Shiseido ownership, kept the Protini Polypeptide Cream as a flagship and we were grateful that the brand hadn’t been quietly diluted post-acquisition. The Ordinary‘s buffet (“Multi-Technology Peptide Serum”) was still the under-twenty-dollar entry point we recommended for someone wanting to get into peptides without committing to a forty-dollar bottle. The big-acid era wasn’t over — Paula’s Choice 2 percent BHA wasn’t going anywhere — but the centre of gravity had clearly shifted toward repair and away from resurfacing. We were happy with that.
Westman Atelier’s clean-prestige expansion finally felt like a real threat to the old guard
Gucci Westman’s namesake brand had launched in 2018 as a small clean-makeup line for a small group of professionals, and 2021 was the year it stopped being a niche reference and started showing up at the front of the Sephora makeup wall. Westman Atelier‘s Vital Skincare Complexion Drops and Lit Up Highlight Stick had become the products our editor friends kept lifting out of their kits — they’re the kind of formulas that look like very expensive skin in a way that the over-glossed 2018-era highlighters had stopped doing. We bought a Lit Up in Bahia and used it daily for the back half of March, and remembered what cream products done well actually look like. The brand was also one of the first to make “clean prestige” feel like a real category rather than a marketing term — the formulas earned the price tag and the philosophy didn’t get in the way of how they performed.
K-beauty’s TikTok-driven second wave kept widening at the affordable end
February’s K-beauty hits stayed hits in March, and a few new entrants joined them. Beauty of Joseon‘s Glow Replenishing Rice Milk and Revive Eye Serum continued their TikTok dominance, and we started seeing the brand’s Relief Sun mineral SPF popping up in the kind of “Holy Grail” videos that signal a product is about to become genuinely hard to keep in stock. COSRX‘s Snail 96 stayed in the rotation. Newer to the conversation was Anua‘s Heartleaf 77 Soothing Toner — the first heartleaf-extract product to break through to a wider US audience — and the brand built a meaningful early audience entirely off creators rather than retail. The interesting structural detail of this wave was the speed: it took maybe ninety days for a new K-beauty product to go from “creator finds it” to “out of stock at every reseller”, and that compression was reshaping how Sephora and Ulta were thinking about their international curation budgets.
Mineral SPF finally got formulations worth wearing every day
SPF in March 2021 was a different conversation than it had been even two years prior. The blue-tinted-ghost mineral formulas that had defined natural skincare since 2015 were being replaced by genuinely cosmetically elegant options, and we were stocking up. EltaMD‘s UV Clear remained the dermatologist-recommended workhorse on our list — niacinamide built into a 46 SPF, untinted but invisible — and was widely available again after months of pandemic-era stockouts. Supergoop!‘s Unseen Sunscreen had quietly become the SPF most of our group was wearing daily, and the Glow Stick had stayed in our handbags through winter for the times you wanted a quick hit of cushioned protection on the cheekbones. The takeaway was that 2021 was finally the year you could find a daily mineral SPF that didn’t feel like a punishment, and we were going to keep saying that until everyone we knew was wearing one.
Hair colour came roaring back — and so did the bonders
Salons reopening in many states meant a wave of overdue colour appointments through March, and the hair-bonder category that had been steadily building since 2014 was finally a mass conversation. Olaplex was the brand everyone associated with the category, and the at-home Nº 3 Hair Perfector was the product our hairdressers kept telling us to buy and actually use. K18 had emerged in 2020 with its Leave-In Molecular Repair Mask and was building visibility through the back end of last year; March 2021 was when the brand felt like it was about to genuinely scale. The two products were positioned as competitors but functioned somewhat differently — Olaplex repaired disulphide bonds, K18 reconnected polypeptide chains — and the technical conversation in our hairdresser group chats was getting more sophisticated than we’d ever seen it. The takeaway was simple: take the bonders seriously, especially if you’re going back to colour after a long break.
April will bring the first of the spring colour stories landing on counters, and we’re watching the launch calendars closely now that retail is starting to find its footing again. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April.