October 2023 was the most consequential single fashion-news month in years. Phoebe Philo finally launched her own brand on October 30 after a six-year wait since her departure from Céline, and the launch carried the kind of cultural weight that defines an entire fashion cycle. Around it, October’s usual beauty calendar continued: Allure Best of Beauty published, Sephora’s Holiday Savings event opened in early November ramped up through October, Halloween makeup tutorials took over TikTok, and the wider beauty mood pivoted from summer to the autumn-into-holiday investment cycle. These are the launches and ideas that defined October.
Phoebe Philo finally launches
The most-anticipated fashion launch of the year arrived on October 30: Phoebe Philo‘s eponymous brand, six years after her departure from Céline. The Edit A1 collection went on sale on her own e-commerce site with no physical retail, no advance editorial coverage, and a deliberately scarce release strategy — the brand’s hero pieces sold through within hours of launch.
The launch’s significance was both practical and cultural. Practically, Philo’s old Céline customer base (the women who had built their entire wardrobes around her 2008-2018 work) now had the closest thing they would ever get to a continuation of that line. Culturally, the launch was the most-definitive endorsement of the “quiet luxury” thesis that had emerged through 2023 — Philo’s vocabulary had always been the reference for this aesthetic, and her return validated everyone (Khaite, The Row, Loro Piana) who had been operating in her shadow for years. We expected the launch to set the bar for what indie-prestige fashion looked like for the next decade.
Allure Best of Beauty 2023
Allure‘s annual Best of Beauty awards published in early October, and the 2023 list was unusually rich. The headline winners: Rare Beauty‘s Soft Pinch Liquid Blush won cream blush for the fourth consecutive year. The Pat McGrath Skin Fetish Highlighter took home Best Highlighter. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk Big Lip Plumpgasm won lip plumper. Naturium‘s Phyto-Glow Lip Balm carried the clean-beauty pick again. The K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask won professional hair-treatment.
The bigger pattern in the list was a continued tilt toward indie-prestige brands that had reached mainstream-prestige scale. The list was also more skincare-heavy than it had been in years past — a reflection of where consumer spending had moved. Allure was, in effect, calling 2023 as a year of skincare-over-makeup spending, indie-over-legacy brand growth, and product-quality-over-marketing-hype as the dominant award-winning pattern.
Halloween on TikTok
The Halloween-makeup conversation in October 2023 was dominated by two looks. The first was Barbie-coded — pink-everything carrying forward from July’s cultural moment. The second was the Wednesday Addams influence (continuing from 2022) blended with this year’s gothic-coquette aesthetic — pale skin, blood-red lip, defined brow, ribbon-and-lace accents. MAC‘s Diva lipstick continued its multi-year Halloween dominance. NYX Professional Makeup ran a dedicated Halloween program. Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pillow Talk Intense was the costume-makeup lipstick of record.
The wider Halloween story was that the holiday had completed its transition into a properly prestige-beauty moment over the previous five years. Where Halloween makeup had been a drugstore-only category in the mid-2010s, it was now a serious October calendar event for every prestige brand. Sephora’s Halloween section ran all month. Ulta did the same. The category was small in absolute revenue terms but significant for cultural relevance, and the brands had figured out how to play.
The coquette aesthetic peaks
The “coquette” aesthetic that had been building through the year — bows, pearls, ribbons, pink-tinged makeup, a soft-femme styling — reached its peak through October. The look fed off the same cultural sources as the Barbiecore summer (a generation of women claiming performative femininity as their own) but ran longer and got more refined. Rare Beauty‘s Soft Pinch Liquid Blush in Joy and Worthy did the heavy lifting on the makeup side. Merit‘s Flush Balm provided the prestige alternative.
The styling logic carried forward from the spring “balletcore” and summer “tomato girl” looks but with a softer, more delicate finish. Hair-styling moved toward soft buns with ribbons, brushed-out waves, and the “coquette ponytail” (low ponytail with a satin bow tied at the base). We expected the aesthetic to bleed into Q1 2024 and to soften gradually into a less-overt pink-and-bow vocabulary by spring.
Sephora Holiday Savings opens early
Sephora‘s Holiday Savings event opened on October 27, the earliest start date in the program’s history. The tiered structure remained the same (Rouge first, VIB second, Insider third), but the calendar had moved decisively earlier than it had been even a year before. The strategic implication was that beauty’s Black Friday now sat firmly in late October, with Black Friday itself a secondary moment.
The smart-shopper plays through October were straightforward: stack a hero skincare product (Augustinus Bader, SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic, the Pat McGrath Mothership palettes), buy holiday gifts during the Rouge window before stock thinned, and skip the back-half-of-November rush. The category had trained customers to shop in two distinct windows, and 2023’s Sephora event was the most efficient yet.
October closed with the Phoebe Philo launch as the season’s defining single moment and a tighter, more-mature beauty conversation around the products that actually mattered. Allure’s awards confirmed where the category had landed. Halloween had completed its prestige-beauty transition. Coquette was at its peak. And Sephora had moved Black Friday decisively into late October. 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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