December always asks us to look both directions: forward to New Year’s Eve and backward across the twelve months we are about to close out. This year, the back-look was unusually rich. Hailey Bieber’s Rhode redefined what a celebrity skincare launch could be. Olaplex No. 9 reset the bond-builder conversation. Dyson rolled out the Airstrait. Tom Ford joined Estée Lauder in a $2.8 billion deal announced in mid-November. And the cleansing balm finally had its mainstream moment. We spent December packing all of that into a year-end thesis while also figuring out the makeup we wanted to wear on New Year’s Eve, and these are the launches and ideas that defined the close of 2022.
The five launches that defined 2022
If we had to compress a year of beauty into five products, this is what we would pick. Rhode‘s Peptide Glazing Fluid took the dewy-skin conversation and turned it into a category-defining product. Olaplex No. 9 Bond Protector was the year’s biggest haircare launch. The K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask, K18‘s breakthrough product, finally crossed over from professional to consumer use through 2022. The Pat McGrath Mothership IX Huetopian Dream palette redefined what eyeshadow could do at a luxury price point. And the Dior Addict Lip Glow Oil was the lip product that came to define an entire category.
The pattern across the five was that 2022 was a year of category resets. Skincare, haircare, makeup, lip — each had its breakout product that other brands would spend 2023 chasing. The bigger pattern was that none of them came from truly new brands; all five were either celebrity-backed or established names betting on innovation. The era of the truly indie debut from a single founder appeared, at least for now, to be giving way to celebrity capital and incumbent muscle.
Tom Ford’s $2.8 billion deal closes the year
The biggest corporate news of the year arrived in the second week of November and was still being processed through December: Estée Lauder Companies agreed to acquire Tom Ford in a $2.8 billion deal that included Tom Ford Beauty (which Lauder had operated under license since 2006) plus Tom Ford’s fashion and accessories business. The acquisition was the largest in Lauder’s history and confirmed the conglomerate’s bet that owning luxury houses outright was the safer path to growth than relying on licensing arrangements.
For consumers, the practical change was nothing in the short term — Tom Ford Beauty’s products were already developed and distributed by Lauder. The longer-term question was whether the brand’s identity could survive Tom Ford’s eventual departure as a creative director. Lauder had handled similar transitions at La Mer and Bobbi Brown with mixed results. We were watching to see who would be named to lead the fashion side, since the answer would tell us how seriously the brand intended to remain a fashion house in addition to a beauty business.
The cleansing balm finally has its moment
The cleansing balm category had been waiting for a breakthrough year for a decade — the format had been a Korean and Japanese staple since the 2000s, and brands like Then I Met You and Banila Co had been making the case in the US since the late 2010s — but 2022 was the year cleansing balm finally hit mainstream prestige. Elemis‘s Pro-Collagen Cleansing Balm became the year’s quiet hero, helped by sustained TikTok coverage. EltaMD, Augustinus Bader, and even drugstore brands launched cleansing-balm SKUs through the year.
What changed was the consumer understanding of double cleansing. By the end of 2022, “balm first, gel cleanser second” had become a mainstream skincare instruction rather than a niche K-beauty technique. Anyone wearing makeup or sunscreen — which was, finally, almost everyone — needed a balm to break it down before a water-based cleanse could do its work. The category was going to grow significantly through 2023.
New Year’s Eve makeup: glitter, gloss, bold lip
The end-of-year makeup conversation pulled in three directions. The first was a return of proper glitter: Pat McGrath Labs‘s Skin Fetish Highlighter in Bronze Venus and Half Magic Beauty’s Glitter Magic eyeshadows kept landing on best-of lists. The second was the dewy-gloss face, anchored by the Rhode Glazing Fluid plus a high-shine lip oil. The third was the bold red lip, a direct continuation of the NYFW Spring 2023 message — MAC Ruby Woo, Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk Intense, and Nars Mariage all reappeared in our rotation.
For us, the December-NYE move was hybridizing all three: the Rhode-glazed base, a glitter accent on the inner corner only, and the bold lip as the focal point. It was the kind of look that translated cleanly from the holiday party to the photograph — and 2022 was unmistakably a year in which makeup had become a performance for the camera before the room.
The year-end skin reset
Every December we run the same protocol: stop everything for a week, reassess what is working, and rebuild the routine for January. 2022’s reset benefited from a year’s worth of new launches we wanted to test in isolation. The Rhode Glazing Fluid earned a permanent slot. The Nue Co.‘s Topical-C kept its place in the rotation. The K18 hair mask was now a non-negotiable weekly. And after a year of testing every new vitamin C launch in the category, the formula we kept reaching for was still SkinCeuticals‘s C E Ferulic — proof that twenty-year-old hero products are sometimes hero products for a reason.
What we left behind: any retinol stronger than 0.5% (we had been over-actived for the second half of the year), most fragrance-heavy products, and the third moisturizer in the routine that we had been testing because the category demanded it. Going into 2023 with a leaner stack and a clearer sense of which actives were doing the work felt like the right way to close out a year of constant launches.
2022 was a year of category resets, celebrity capital, and bigger-than-expected M&A. The five products we kept reaching for proved that innovation can come from anywhere — celebrity, incumbent, indie, mass — but that the bar for staying in the rotation is the same as it has ever been: it has to actually work. We will see you on the first Tuesday of January, ready to argue about what 2023 has in store.
Shop the edit
- Maybelline SuperStay Vinyl Ink — a high-shine NYE lip.
- La Roche-Posay 10% Pure Vitamin C Serum — a year-end brightening hero.
- Tree Hut Shea Sugar Scrub — a gift-ready body scrub.
- e.l.f. Bite-Size Eyeshadow Palette — a mini palette for NYE eyes.
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