August this year carried a particular kind of summer-end energy. The Tokyo Olympics had wrapped, kids were heading back to school in person for the first time in eighteen months, the heat in much of the US was relentless, and the beauty industry was quietly readying its fall messaging. The first cooler-weather fragrance launches had appeared, the back-to-school colour palette pivoted toward a slightly richer earth-tone, and the relentless minimalism of the spring was making room for a few more declarative pieces. August 2021 was a transitional month in beauty, and the products that did well in it were the ones that anticipated the September turn without abandoning the July lightness.
The Olaplex S-1 lands
August was the month Olaplex formally filed its S-1 with the SEC, putting the haircare brand publicly on the road to a fall listing. The filing read like the most thorough due-diligence document any beauty brand had produced in years — disclosed margins, customer-cohort data, a candid section on the brand’s reliance on a small number of professional distributors. For category watchers, the filing was a primer on what a public-ready beauty brand actually looked like in 2021, and the implications stretched well beyond Olaplex itself. Brands that had spent the previous decade telling consumer-friendly stories were now being measured against operating-margin numbers, and the gap between the two languages was wider than the marketing pages had suggested.
The fragrance fall preview
August has always been when the major fragrance houses start setting up the fall calendar, and 2021 was no exception. We saw early teasers from Maison Margiela’s Replica line, with a new amber-leaning entry positioned as the late-summer-into-autumn pivot. Byredo was already preparing its holiday limited editions, and at the more accessible end Glossier‘s second fragrance, You Doux, was being talked about as a softer, sleepier sibling to the original. The conversation around fragrance had stayed loud since June, and the difference in August was that the language got more specific — people had moved from “I’m wearing perfume again” to having opinions about which type of warm-weather scent translated to fall and which didn’t.
Back-to-school skincare
Late August always brings a back-to-school skincare conversation, and 2021’s was specifically about transition. The barrier-damaged skin from a long mask-summer of sweat-and-friction needed help, and brands knew it. CeraVe‘s now-mainstream popularity continued to grow on TikTok, with the Hydrating Cleanser and the Moisturizing Cream serving as the affordable foundation of a routine that creators framed as a reset from a hard summer. Laneige‘s Lip Sleeping Mask continued its years-long Sephora reign, and was joined this month by a wave of barrier-repair creams and ceramide-led treatments. The industry’s pivot from active-heavy to barrier-first was now nearly complete, and August was the month it became conventional wisdom.
The rare-beauty-of-the-month
If the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush had defined April, August belonged to Rare Beauty‘s Lip Soufflé Matte Cream Lipstick, which had been quietly expanding its colour range and was now showing up on the same TikTok creators who’d carried the blush to virality. The brand’s strategy had become legible: launch a small set of formulas, expand them slowly, refuse to flood the calendar with newness for newness’s sake. It was a discipline more brands would have done well to copy through the fall, and we expected to see a Rare Beauty mascara or a Rare Beauty foundation join the lineup in 2022 if the Soft Pinch and Lip Soufflé tracks held.
The skincare-industrial-complex meets TikTok dermatology
One of August’s more subtle shifts was the increased presence of dermatologists with serious followings on TikTok. Doctors like Shereene Idriss, Muneeb Shah, and Mamina Turegano were translating the ingredient-list literacy that had been the territory of skincare creators into evidence-led recommendations, and brands were noticing. The “Dr. recommended” claim had quietly become more meaningful than the “celebrity used” claim through 2021, and August was the month it tipped. We saw a steady stream of sponsored content tagged with credentialled handles, and a corresponding shift in product copy toward references to peer-reviewed studies rather than generic “clinically tested” language. CeraVe‘s entire 2021 trajectory — affordable, dermatologist-backed, ubiquitous on TikTok — became the template a lot of other brands suddenly wanted to copy.
Charlotte Tilbury’s Pillow Talk universe
Late August saw Charlotte Tilbury continue to extend the Pillow Talk franchise that had defined the brand’s late-2010s era. Pillow Talk Intense, the deeper version of the original signature lipstick, was getting a sustained second wind, and the matching blush, eye palette, and lip oils that had been added to the line over the previous two years were now what the brand seemed to be marketing more than its original Magic Cream and base products. The brand had clearly figured out that one defining product, extended carefully across formats, was a sturdier business than a constant stream of new-for-news’s-sake launches — a lesson Rare Beauty seemed to be applying simultaneously, and one we expected to see imitated through fall.
The brand’s push into skincare with the Magic Serum Crystal Elixir, launched earlier in the year, was also showing up more often on counter-and-credit-card videos in August, suggesting the cross-category extension of a complexion-makeup brand into prestige skincare was starting to land in a way it hadn’t for some of its peers. Whether this turns into a sustained skincare business or stays as a hero-product extension is one of the open questions we’re carrying into fall.
What we are watching for September
September is the year’s hinge month for fashion and beauty alike, and 2021’s NYFW is shaping up to be the first proper in-person fashion-week return. We’re watching for what the runway shows do to the autumn beauty conversation, since two seasons of Zoom showings have left a lot of pent-up creative energy. We’re watching the actual Olaplex listing date and price, expected late September. And we’re watching to see whether the post-summer skin-tint and tinted-SPF momentum carries into the cooler months or whether it gives way to the heavier complexion products of fall. We will see you on the first Tuesday of September.
Shop the edit
- Maybelline Instant Age Rewind Concealer — a drugstore concealer staple.
- Black Girl Sunscreen SPF 30 — a no-white-cast daily sunscreen.
- CeraVe Foaming Facial Cleanser — a back-to-routine cleanse.
- e.l.f. Instant Lift Brow Pencil — an easy everyday brow.
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