May was the month every long lead in the beauty calendar came due at once. The Met Gala on May 6 with the “Garden of Time” theme. Bella Hadid’s Orebella fragrance launching on May 1. Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1 dropping May 16. Cannes opening on May 14. Beyoncé’s Cécred haircare line stepping out of its initial drop and into wide-distribution mode. Each of these moments delivered a beauty conversation that lasted at least a week on its own; stacked together they made May the month where you saw the rest of the year’s content calendar in miniature. The unifying thread, if there was one, was that beauty’s biggest stories were no longer about “the next big launch” but about brands finding new ways to anchor their products in cultural moments customers actually cared about.
The Met Gala leaned into Garden of Time as makeup
The 2024 Met Gala theme — the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibition with a “Garden of Time” dress code — gave makeup artists a wider creative remit than the celebrity-portrait themes of recent years. The result was easily the most interesting beauty Met Gala in a decade. Zendaya, in two looks by Law Roach, brought a layered floral story on the carpet and a more austere Galliano-era Givenchy moment after. Pat McGrath continued her run of viral red-carpet finishes. The night’s most influential look, frankly, was Tyla in vintage Balmain with sand-cast skin and a near-invisible lip — a controlled minimalism that was about to seed a thousand “Tyla beauty” tutorials. Charlotte Tilbury was again the makeup brand that showed up in the most carpet content; the Pillow Talk shade family had become reliable shorthand for “polished red carpet glow.”
Bella Hadid’s Orebella reframed fragrance
Bella Hadid had been signaling for a year that her brand would be a fragrance project, not another lip line, and on May 1 Orebella finally launched at Ulta with three “essence” scents — bio-based, skin-friendly, marketed explicitly to people whose skin had reacted to traditional perfume in the past. The category framing — fragrance for sensitive skin, with hyaluronic acid in the formula — was either a marketing exercise or a real reformulation depending on whom you asked. We tried Window2Soul and found it surprisingly long-wearing for a low-alcohol formula. The packaging was beautiful and the in-store displays at Ulta were the most prominent celebrity-brand placement we’ve seen all year. The takeaway: the indie-perfume conversation had been waiting for a celebrity entry point at mass-prestige price, and Orebella found it.
Bridgerton Season 3 brought Regency-coded beauty back
Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1 dropped on Netflix on May 16, and the beauty conversation that followed was sharper than the prior seasons’ content. Penelope Featherington’s makeover episode kicked off a full week of “soft-glam Regency” tutorials. Daphne Wynter’s bronde balayage seeded the at-home toner search-volume the next two weekends. Anchoring a lot of it: a pivot back to coral-pink lip stains and rosy cream blushes, deep-blush eyeshadow palettes, the kind of cheek-and-lip flush that read as both vintage and TikTok-modern. Rare Beauty‘s Soft Pinch Liquid Blush — already cult for two years — became newly relevant in shades like Encourage and Believe. The takeaway: streaming-driven beauty trends were the single most reliable predictor of mass-market lip color of the moment.
Beyoncé’s Cécred expanded out of soft launch
Beyoncé’s haircare line Cécred had launched in February to muted-by-her-standards initial response. By May, with restocks landing and the second wave of editorial reviews coming in, the consensus had warmed considerably. The Restoring Hair & Edge Drops were the breakout — a treatment formulated for the kind of fragile-hairline care that haircare conversations had been underserving for years. Reviews from Black women in particular had gotten genuinely strong on the deep conditioner and the hair oil. The takeaway: the celebrity haircare category had been crowded for a decade, but Cécred carved out specific clinical claims for textured hair that hadn’t been the center of any major launch.
Cannes turned Cannes into a beauty event
Cannes Film Festival opened May 14 and ran through the end of the month, and for the second year running it functioned as the European houses’ answer to the New York-skewing Met Gala. Chanel Beauty signed bigger ambassador moments at Cannes than at any of the four other major film events this spring; Dior Beauty’s Lip Glow and Forever Skin Glow looks anchored half the after-party content. Shiseido dominated the Japanese-actress carpet looks. The takeaway: red carpet beauty was no longer one event a year but a rolling six-month tournament from January through Cannes, and houses with diversified ambassador rosters won the cumulative narrative.
What we are watching in June
Pride Month brings the usual wave of capsule launches and we’ll be looking for the brands whose Pride product genuinely supports queer organizations versus the brands using rainbow packaging as a vibe. Cannes wraps in late May but its press cycle bleeds into June. We’re watching Glossier‘s next launch — the brand has stayed quiet enough that something substantive feels overdue. And we’re watching the summer-skincare conversation we’d been promising ourselves: the SPF reformulation arms race, the body-glow shift from oil to spray, the long-tail of the Rhode Pocket Blush reaching its first restock. We will see you on the first Tuesday of June.
Shop the edit
- e.l.f. Halo Glow Liquid Filter — for a lit-from-within complexion.
- e.l.f. Halo Glow Blush Beauty Wand — an easy soft-petal cheek wash.
- EltaMD UV Clear SPF 46 — the lightweight daily facial sunscreen.
- Olaplex No. 3 Hair Perfector — pre-summer bond repair.
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