By the time June arrived, the season had a name attached to it: the so-called “hot vax summer” everyone had been forecasting since spring was now in full swing. Outdoor dining was loud again, weddings that had been postponed for fourteen months were back on calendars, and a generation that had spent the previous summer in flip-flops and gym shorts was suddenly buying sandals with straps. June 2021 in beauty felt less about any single product and more about a general thaw — fragrances were being worn on actual skin in actual rooms, blush was being applied for actual people, and the bathroom counter looked, for the first time in a long time, like a place you got ready in rather than a place you tried to forget about.
Fragrance comes back in
The category that had been quietest through 2020 was suddenly the loudest. People were buying perfume again, both because they had places to wear it and because the long stretch of staying home had given them time to think harder about what they actually liked. Glossier‘s Glossier You had been a sleeper hit since 2017, but in June 2021 it returned to the top of best-of lists, with creators describing it the way they once described coffee shop ambient sound — comforting, ambient, unmistakably a thing. At the higher end, Byredo was watching its niche perfumes go mainstream, and the appetite for clean and natural fragrance kept growing alongside the appetite for the very-much-not-clean classic chypres. The “skin scent” category — small, intimate, almost like a lotion that happens to smell beautiful — defined the summer.
Glossy lip everything
If matte lipstick had defined 2015 and a stained-bitten-lip look defined the early Glossier era, June 2021 belonged to the lip oil. Kosas‘ Wet Lip Oil Gloss was selling out across launches, with creators stacking it over their Soft Pinch Liquid Blush and Westman Atelier base for what was effectively the official summer 2021 face. The shift made sense in context: people had spent a year with masks on, lips dry, lipstick smudging onto fabric. A non-sticky, non-drying gloss that made the mouth look slightly bee-stung was exactly the right counter-product for a season of un-masking. We saw the same idea echo through Pat McGrath’s lip-fetish range and a quiet revival of older formulas from the early 2010s like Clarins Instant Light Natural Lip Perfector, suddenly back in feed.
The Olaplex IPO is now public
The trade-press whisper of May became confirmed reading material in June: Olaplex was officially preparing to go public, with bankers in place and an autumn target. The brand’s continued domination of bond-building treatments — No. 3 at home, No. 8 mask, the salon-only steps still done at the chair — gave it the kind of single-category dominance that public markets reward. What we found more interesting than the IPO itself was what it suggested about the next five years of beauty investment. Haircare had been the underweight category for a decade. Olaplex was making the case that a single-formulator brand with a strong scientific story could be valued like a tech company. Whether other haircare names follow — and we’d watch K18 closely on this front — would be the real test of whether the listing was a one-off or a category reset.
The retail aisle starts to look different
One year after Aurora James’ 15 Percent Pledge had asked retailers to commit shelf space to Black-owned brands, the impact was starting to show in beauty. Sephora’s signing of the pledge in early 2020 and Ulta’s signing in February of this year were now visible — endcaps with Black-owned brands at every store we walked into, expanded distribution for names like UOMA Beauty and Danessa Myricks Beauty, and a noticeable rebalancing in the photography and merchandising of beauty halls. The Yummy Skin Blurring Balm Powder in particular had become a must-have among makeup artists and creators. There was still plenty of work to do, but June 2021 was the first time we walked into a beauty hall and the shelf looked materially different from how it had two years ago.
Body oil takes its turn
The body-care arc that started in spring with serums shifted in June to oils. Nécessaire‘s Body Oil and the Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream were both having their second viral moment of the year, with creators applying them post-shower and walking out the door rather than rubbing them in over twenty minutes the way you might with a face oil. The Brazilian-beauty wave that Sol de Janeiro had carried for a decade was suddenly being treated as canonical reference for what summer skincare could feel like — sweet, slightly camp, unapologetically pleasure-first. Augustinus Bader‘s body oil entry continued to do its quiet luxury work, while Glossier‘s Body Hero line was finally getting the attention the brand had wanted for it. The category was no longer being treated as the after-thought aisle of beauty.
By the back end of the month, brands were already teasing summer-edition launches and limited drops timed to the Fourth of July weekend. We saw a noticeable uptick in pool-friendly waterproof formulas, longwear bronzer sticks, and a wave of post-sun repair products positioned somewhere between aftersun lotion and prestige skincare. The skin-first ethos that had defined 2020 was starting to layer naturally over the colour-first energy of 2021, and the pinnacle product of the season was the one that managed both jobs at once.
What we are watching for July
July, we expect, will be a month dominated by sun, sweat, and the realities of summer skin. We’re watching for the first wave of post-Memorial-Day-weekend sunscreen reformulations, for the back-half-of-summer fragrance launches that always seem to drop just before fall planning kicks in, and for whatever fresh wrinkle the body-care conversation takes next. We’re also watching the Olaplex listing roadshow, the next big TikTok beauty story, and any signs of what Glossier — quieter than usual through the spring — might do in the second half of the year. We’ll keep an eye on July’s Sephora Beauty Insider Sale to see which products move fastest, since that always tells us more about what people actually want than the launch press releases do. We will see you on the first Tuesday of July.
Shop the edit
- e.l.f. Stay All Night Setting Spray — keeps summer makeup in place through the heat.
- Supergoop! Glow Stick SPF 50 — easy on-the-go SPF reapplication.
- Color Wow Dream Coat — anti-humidity protection for summer hair.
- Sol de Janeiro Cheirosa 62 Mist — a warm-weather scent layer.
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