Tried and Tested Beauty has been our long-running home for honest beauty reviews — products that earned their place in the rotation, the brands that quietly outperform their marketing, and the routines that actually hold up day after day. We have been writing here since 2011, and the archive reflects the way US beauty has evolved across more than a decade of launches, reformulations, and shifts in how the country thinks about what it puts on its face.
What we cover
Skincare, makeup, hair, fragrance, body care, and the tools and rituals that round all of it out. We profile the people whose beauty practices we admire — through our long-running The A-List, Taking It to the Streets, My BFF, and My Current Obsession series — and we publish a monthly roundup of what was actually big in US beauty for that month, going back to January 2013. The roundups are deliberately specific to a moment in time: the products that defined a particular January or July, the launches that broke through, the techniques that crossed over.
Where we have grown
Beauty is still the centre of what we do, but the conversation we have always been part of — about what gets bought, given, and kept — never lived neatly inside the cosmetics aisle. Twice a year we publish a seasonal fashion roundup covering what the major US fashion houses showed for spring and fall, with a focus on what actually made it to retail rather than what only ever lived on the runway. And twice a year we publish a jewellery roundup focused on the small US independent makers we kept coming back to that season — the studios you find through editor recommendations and Instagram tagging rather than chain-store endcaps.
Together these three threads — beauty, fashion, jewellery — make up the broader picture of what we have been recommending and why. The links in every post go to the brand’s own site, and we never accept payment for placement.
Editorial standards
If a product does not earn its place, we say so. Reviews are based on real testing windows — never first impressions, never sponsored sentiment, never the same brand language a press release was written in. We use products for at least four weeks before writing about them in any depth, longer for skincare claims that need actual time to evaluate. When we recommend an independent jewellery studio or a small fashion brand, it is because someone we know is wearing the work and the maker has been paying their bills doing it for long enough to mean something. We never write about a product we have not personally tried, and we say so explicitly when we are speculating about something we have not yet been able to test.
Who we are
The site has been written by a small group of contributors over the years. Day-to-day editorial direction sits with Natalia, who joined as a beauty editor in 2011 and has been the consistent voice of the monthly roundups and the long-running series since. The reviews are first-person plural for a reason — most of what gets recommended here was tested by more than one person before it made it into a post.
Get in touch
For pitches, partnership inquiries, product samples, or reader questions, our contact page is the fastest route to us. We try to reply within a week.