April arrived this year with a feeling we hadn’t quite had in a long time: cautious, measured, but real optimism. After a winter of doomscrolling, sourdough, and skincare-as-coping, the air felt warmer in more than one sense. Vaccines were rolling out to wider age brackets across the US, brunch reservations were creeping back onto the calendar, and the bathroom counter started to look a little different. After a winter where the whole point of skincare was to feel something good before bed, we suddenly wanted blush again. We wanted lipstick under a mask, even if no one would see it. We wanted a face that looked like it had somewhere to go. The collective beauty mood for April 2021 felt like rummaging through a drawer we hadn’t opened in a year and being surprised at how much we’d missed it.
The blush that broke TikTok
If there was one product that defined the month — and arguably the season — it was the Rare Beauty Soft Pinch Liquid Blush. Selena Gomez’s brand had been quietly building since launching in September 2020, but spring 2021 was when the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush went truly viral. TikTok creators kept posting the same demo: a tiny dot of pigment, blended out with fingers, somehow looking like a four-hour walk in cool air. The shades — Joy, Hope, Bliss — sold out at Sephora in cycles, came back, sold out again. What made it work was less the marketing and more the formula: a thin, watery liquid that locked in fast and gave a flush rather than a stripe. It was the first product in a long time where we trusted the internet’s enthusiasm immediately. Selena Gomez’s positioning as a mental-health-conscious, no-touched-up-photos founder also gave the brand a credibility that felt rare in a celebrity beauty crowd that had become very, very crowded by 2021.
K-beauty crosses over for real
For years, K-beauty in the US meant 10-step routines, sheet masks, and a few cult heroes — but spring 2021 was when a new wave of Korean skincare brands found their American audience through TikTok rather than department-store buyers. Beauty of Joseon was suddenly everywhere, with the Glow Deep Serum turning up in nearly every shelfie video, and Round Lab’s Dokdo Toner was a close second. What was new was the price-point conversation. Skincare creators who’d spent 2019 explaining $90 vitamin C serums spent April 2021 explaining $17 alternatives that performed comparably. The Inkey List rode the same wave from its UK base, expanding deeper into Sephora US shelves with its single-ingredient ethos and its Hyaluronic Acid Serum as the gateway purchase. The era of skincare as a luxury good was, if not over, sharing the stage.
The skinification of body care
The other shift we kept noticing was that the language of face care had moved south. Bodies, we were told, deserved serums. Bodies deserved retinol. Bodies deserved sunscreen with active ingredients. Nécessaire had been making this argument since 2018, but in spring 2021 the Body Serum hit something like critical mass — niacinamide, peptides, vitamin C, but for shoulders and decolletage, in pump packaging that fit on the bathroom counter without apology. Glossier rounded out its Body Hero line in the same season, and a generation that had spent 2020 reading ingredient labels for face creams started doing the same for body lotions. We also saw an uptick in body-care creators specifically — accounts dedicated to chest care, knee care, and the back of the upper arms in a way that would have read as parody three years earlier. The pivot felt like another consequence of the past year: when you’ve been at home in soft clothes for twelve months, the skin you actually pay attention to changes, and a body-serum routine becomes its own kind of small dressing-up.
The drugstore hero shift
April 2021 also marked the moment e.l.f. Cosmetics stopped feeling like a budget alternative and started feeling like a peer. The brand had been the quiet runaway story of the previous twelve months, and by spring it was no longer a hedge — it was a first choice. The Camo CC Cream was the breakthrough — a medium-coverage tinted base in a credible shade range that landed at $14 and held its own in side-by-side videos against $50 alternatives. The brand’s TikTok account, run with a fluency that more expensive brands couldn’t seem to manufacture, kept the conversation going. We saw Maybelline’s Sky High mascara still going strong from its November 2020 launch, with its flexible bristle wand and bamboo extract that felt almost out of place on a $10 product. The drugstore aisle was no longer where you settled — it was where you sometimes found the better thing.
Pat McGrath, still setting the standard
At the prestige end of the counter, Pat McGrath Labs kept doing what no one else could quite do, which is treat a launch like a couture release. The Mothership VII palette landed earlier in the year and was still selling through April, with its mix of warm gilded neutrals and a single deep-violet anchor making it the eye palette of the season. The conversation around Pat McGrath remained different from any other prestige line — buyers planned around drops, restocks were events, and the brand traded on a mythology that no Black Friday discount could touch. The brand also continued its move into skincare-adjacent categories, with the Skin Fetish foundation and the lip-fetish balms enjoying their own quiet sellouts through the spring. In a year where so much of the industry was racing for the lowest viable price, it was a useful reminder that there’s still a market for things made for their own sake — and a market for the language of red-carpet glamour, even when the closest most of us had got to a red carpet was a Zoom dinner.
What we are watching for May
May, we expect, will be the month where SPF starts to dominate every conversation again, with the now-annual round of mineral-versus-chemical sunscreen explainers and the inevitable wave of new launches timed to Memorial Day weekend. We’re paying close attention to whether the Rare Beauty momentum extends to other formats — the rest of the complexion line, the lip products, the eye shadows — or whether April was a singular moment driven by one viral SKU. We’re watching for the first credible Hailey Bieber beauty news, even though the actual Rhode launch is still a year out, and we’re keeping our radar tuned for whatever the next celebrity-led brand turns out to be, since 2021 is shaping up to be the year that question gets answered three or four more times. We’re tracking the slow build of body care from a niche to a mainstream conversation. And we’ll be watching what the second wave of TikTok-driven K-beauty looks like once Beauty of Joseon and Round Lab have moved from indie to mainstream and the next generation of small Korean labs has its turn. We will see you on the first Tuesday of May.
Shop the edit
- e.l.f. Power Grip Primer — a gripping primer to keep festival makeup put.
- La Roche-Posay Anthelios SPF 60 — the melt-in daily sunscreen.
- The Ordinary Niacinamide 10% + Zinc — an indie clean-active mainstay.
- Maybelline Sky High Mascara — festival-ready lengthening lashes.
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