March arrived with the kind of weather that flatters everyone: low humidity, soft light, a cold snap one morning and seventy-degree sunshine the next. The bathroom counter was a record of that confusion — a tinted SPF next to a heavier night balm, a viral lip oil queued behind a brick-red lipstick we’d been holding onto since the holidays. Awards-season makeup had given way to “Oscars hangover” beauty: skin still glassy from Pat McGrath’s doll-finish moment at Maison Margiela in January, lips still flirting with the Vanity Fair party reds, but everything dialed down for a normal Tuesday. There was also a louder, more uncomfortable conversation in the air this month — about tweens at the Sephora skincare wall, about which products were being marketed at which age, about what aspirational beauty even means now. We tried to take all of it seriously while still buying lipstick.
The Oscars made the case for a real red lip
For two years the lip conversation had been all gloss, all liner-and-balm, all “your lips but better.” The 96th Academy Awards on March 10 broke the spell. Emma Stone walked the carpet in a pastel mint Louis Vuitton with a soft rose lip; Anya Taylor-Joy went pale-pink-and-vellum; and then half the after-party arrivals — Hailey Bieber at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party most famously — showed up in a serious satin red. Within forty-eight hours, every beauty editor and TikTok colorist was relitigating their lipstick drawer. Charlotte Tilbury was the brand the looks consistently pointed back to: a Matte Revolution in a true blue-red, layered over the obligatory Pillow Talk liner. MAC had been quietly seeding its Russian Red and Ruby Woo restocks on TikTok all winter, and by mid-March they were sold out in person at half the stores we visited. The takeaway: the no-makeup era of lip didn’t end, but it finally got a sibling.
Pat McGrath’s porcelain skin trickled down to drugstore aisles
You couldn’t open an app this month without scrolling past someone trying to recreate the Maison Margiela Artisanal Spring 2024 couture finish — porcelain-doll skin, glassy and inflectionless and just-barely-translucent. The official story, told by McGrath at the time, involved Skin Fetish Sublime Perfection foundation, white powder, and a lot of patience. The TikTok translation, predictably, was thriftier and lower-stakes. Pat McGrath Labs sold out of Skin Fetish Sublime Perfection in several shades by the second week of March; e.l.f. Halo Glow Liquid Filter and the Halo Glow Setting Powder became the budget version that actually delivered the same lit-from-within glaze. We watched friends who’d avoided full coverage for years pick up a foundation again, just to chase that porcelain effect. It wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t ageless, but it was the most influential ten minutes of runway makeup of the season.
The tween Sephora question got harder to ignore
By March, the conversation that had simmered all winter about ten-year-olds tearing through the Drunk Elephant wall at Sephora had moved out of TikTok and into actual brand statements. Drunk Elephant posted age guidance to its social channels noting that several of its higher-actives products weren’t formulated for under-12 skin. Dermatologists ran public-service explainers about the difference between exfoliating acids and gentle moisturizers. We don’t pretend to have a clean take on this — kids have always wanted what felt grown-up, and a sticker chart of Bronzing Drops on a sixth grader is not the moral crisis the headlines made it. But it changed the way we shopped this month. We came back to brands that had always positioned themselves for any age, with simple formulations: Cetaphil‘s gentle cleanser, CeraVe‘s Hydrating Cleanser, and any plain ceramide moisturizer. There’s an entire generation about to come up on skincare; we’d rather it start with a non-event than a regimen.
Hailey’s Rhode kept finding new white space
Rhode had been less a brand than a mood for almost two years — three products, infinite restocks, a phone case that became its own category. In March we started seeing real expansion hints. Rhode‘s Peptide Lip Tint had finally moved past Watermelon Slice and Espresso into Toast and Raspberry Jelly; the Pocket Blush was about to drop in April and the press kits had started circulating. The brand’s positioning — minimalist white packaging, single-product hero pieces, almost no celebrity-founder photoshoots — kept working in a market that was tired of overstacked launches. We could feel the conversation tilt toward Rhode and away from the lip-oil category Rhode itself had created. Summer Fridays still owned the mass-prestige balm slot with Lip Butter Balm, and that’s the one we kept reaching for when we wanted something that felt like skincare. But Rhode was the brand we wanted to watch most this spring.
The hair-care shelf rebuilt itself around bond repair
The hair-care aisle this month felt like it had finally absorbed the lesson Olaplex taught us almost a decade ago: bond repair isn’t a gimmick, and a real “treatment” is something you use over weeks, not once. Kérastase‘s Première line, anchored by the Filler Concentré, had a strong winter and kept compounding through March. K18 Leave-In was still the four-minute hero everyone reached for after a bleach session. Living Proof Triple Bond Complex, which had launched the prior summer, hit its stride in tutorials this month — the kind of product where stylists started filming with-and-without combs and the comments filled up with people asking where to buy. The takeaway: the bleach-and-tone cycle is brutal on hair, and the products best at addressing it are no longer optional.
What we are watching for April
April brings the Met Gala first Monday of May, which means April is when the beauty pre-game starts in earnest — colorists, dentists, facialists all running on overtime. We’ll be watching to see whether Hailey Bieber’s Pocket Blush actually lands in the way the teaser images promised, and whether the Drunk Elephant conversation cools or hardens into real category change at the retail level. We’re also watching Fenty Beauty‘s next launch cycle — Rihanna’s brand had a quiet winter and we’re due for a hero product reframe. Festival season starts at Coachella in mid-April, which means SPF, body glow, and the lip products that survive a desert weekend will dominate the discourse. Finally, we’d love to see one big mass-market brand take a stand on the under-13 skincare question with something more than a footnote; the parents we know are asking the question even when the kids aren’t. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April.
Shop the edit
- e.l.f. Camo CC Cream — the complexion hero behind the e.l.f. run.
- Maybelline SuperStay Matte Ink — a long-wear lip for awards-season polish.
- Glow Recipe Watermelon Dew Drops — a spring-launch glow serum.
- L’Oréal Paris Lumi Glotion — an easy lit-from-within base.
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