October had the strongest beauty news cycle of the year. Glossier confirmed its long-rumored expansion into Sephora, the Halloween makeup tutorials on TikTok started landing on the first weekend of the month, and the rest of the industry settled into the autumn rhythm we had been waiting for: retinol back in the rotation, peptides everywhere, and a proper case for thicker creams now that the air had turned dry. We spent the first two weeks of the month resetting our routines, the next two scrolling through costume looks, and these are the products and conversations we kept circling back to.
Glossier confirms its Sephora deal
The biggest news of the month landed October 18: Glossier announced it would launch at Sephora in early 2023, a hundred-store rollout in North America and a pivot away from the direct-to-consumer model that had defined the brand for nearly a decade. The decision wasn’t a surprise to anyone watching — Glossier had laid off a third of its corporate staff in January, and the case for retail distribution had been getting louder all year — but the cultural significance was real. The brand that had taught a generation that direct-to-consumer was the future was now publicly admitting that physical retail had won.
For consumers, the practical news was that products like Boy Brow, Cloud Paint, and the Balm Dotcom were about to be shoppable in the same trip as everything else. For the rest of the industry, the announcement was a thesis statement: even the most successful direct-to-consumer beauty brands needed Sephora’s foot traffic to scale into the next phase. We expected to see two or three more digital-native brands make similar announcements through 2023.
Lip oil overtakes lip gloss
The lip-product category had been arguing about its identity for two years — gloss, balm, treatment, plumper — and October was the month lip oil settled the question. Dior‘s Addict Lip Glow Oil was the runaway viral product of the season, photographed in close-up by every TikTok creator with a ring light. Clarins‘s long-running Lip Comfort Oil — the original of the category from 2017 — was suddenly back in heavy rotation, helped by a re-release of the line. Tower 28 launched LipSoftie tinted treatment, which threaded the needle between balm and oil and sold through several SKUs through the back half of October.
The technical reason lip oil had won was straightforward: the formulas had improved enough that they finally delivered the dewy, plumped finish of a gloss without the sticky, hair-magnet drawbacks. The cultural reason was that they photographed beautifully. Either way, by the end of October every lip drawer we knew had at least one of the three.
The clean-girl aesthetic peaks
The slicked-back-bun, dewy-skin, gold-hoop look that TikTok had been calling the “clean girl” aesthetic hit its peak through October. The look had been building all of 2022, but the autumn version was when it became unavoidable: a tight low bun, glossy skin courtesy of the Rhode Glazing Fluid or the Refy Brow Sculpt, brushed-up brows, a touch of cream blush. It was a look engineered for the TikTok front-camera and for the smartphone era of beauty consumption — minimal, repeatable, and recognizably the same person under any lighting.
The aesthetic had its critics, and the discourse around its racial politics — particularly around what kinds of slicked-back hair were celebrated and what kinds were not — rolled through the cultural conversation in October. Beauty journalists picked it up; the brands that had benefited most from it (Refy, Gisou, Rhode, Summer Fridays) mostly stayed out of it. We were watching to see whether the look would hold into Q1 2023 or whether the next mood would replace it; our bet was that the clean-girl base would persist but the styling tropes around it would evolve.
Retinol and peptide season
October is always the month we re-introduce retinol after a summer of UV exposure, and 2022’s version of the conversation was unusually refined. The category had matured beyond “tretinoin or nothing.” Encapsulated retinol formulas from Shani Darden‘s Retinol Reform and Sunday Riley‘s A+ High-Dose were doing the work for the prestige category. The Ordinary‘s Retinal 0.2% kept claiming the entry-level tier. And the new conversation around bakuchiol and copper peptides — particularly Medik8‘s Liquid Peptides and the resurfaced Niod Copper Amino Isolate Serum — was giving people who couldn’t tolerate retinol a real alternative.
What had finally changed was the routine logic. Where 2018’s retinol conversation had been “use it every other night,” 2022’s was “build a peptide-and-niacinamide base, slot retinol in two or three times a week, and treat the whole stack as one routine.” The improved tolerability meant fewer skincare flare-ups and a cleaner-looking November ahead.
Halloween makeup is a TikTok event now
The Halloween-makeup conversation had migrated almost entirely to TikTok by 2022, and the look that dominated was a Wednesday Addams homage that ran a week before the Netflix series even premiered (the show launched November 23, but Tim Burton’s promotional rollout had begun in October). Stylists and creators spent the last week of October replicating Wednesday’s pale skin, dark lip, and Velma-coded braids, and brands rushed to position their existing products into the trend. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk Intense was the costume’s lipstick of record. MAC‘s Diva and Cyber were close runners-up.
The wider Halloween picture was that the costume-makeup category had completed its journey from “a few tubs of greasepaint at the drugstore” to a serious commercial moment for prestige brands. Sephora’s Halloween section ran for the entire month. NYX Professional Makeup released a dedicated Halloween-themed collection. The cultural premium on the holiday had risen, and the beauty industry had decisively followed.
October left us with a clear picture of what the rest of the year was going to do: retail distribution was eating direct-to-consumer, lip oil was the lip product, the clean-girl aesthetic was running out the clock on its peak, and the autumn skincare calendar had been replaced by a year-round, layered regimen. We will see you on the first Tuesday of November.
Shop the edit
- Urban Decay All Nighter Setting Spray — long-wear hold for Halloween looks.
- NYX Epic Ink Liner — a precise liquid liner.
- CeraVe Resurfacing Retinol Serum — an Allure-favorite skincare hero.
- Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask — an easy holiday-gift win.
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