March is the month when winter loses its argument and beauty starts thinking about light again — lighter textures, lighter color, lighter formulas at every step of the routine. By the first Tuesday of March 2013 we were already swapping out the heavy winter night cream we had been leaning on since November, putting away the mulled-wine lipstick we wore to V-Day, and digging through our makeup bags for the corals and peaches we had not seen since September. There is a specific energy to the bathroom-counter shuffle of early March, and it carried us all the way through Paris Fashion Week and into the first whispers of festival season. Below, what we kept reaching for.
Coral came back, with manners this time
Coral lipstick had a complicated few years. Done wrong, it could read very 2007 — too orange, too matte, too much. By March 2013 the formulas had quietly grown up. The winning shades had a touch of pink underneath the orange, a sheer-to-medium finish rather than full opaque, and worked across more skin tones than the corals of half a decade earlier. NARS Niagara, a soft warm coral with a satin finish, was the under-the-radar workhorse — the one people kept reordering once they had tried it once. M·A·C’s Vegas Volt was the brighter, more committed sister, the lipstick to wear to brunch in the first warm weekend of the year.
The pivot was specifically a reaction to the deep reds that had dominated late 2012 and early 2013. By March we were tired of looking at our own faces in the mirror and seeing the same wine-toned mouth, and a coral was the easiest visible signal that we had moved on. The drugstore caught up fast — by the end of the month, every CVS lipstick wall had a fresh row of corals blocking the matte pinks they had pushed in the fall.
Hourglass quietly became a cult brand
The Ambient Lighting Powder from Hourglass had launched at the end of 2012 and by March 2013 it was a different kind of phenomenon — not a product you read about in a launch press release, but a product that someone you trusted texted you a photo of from inside Sephora with the caption “you have to try this.” The premise was simple and the execution was meticulous: a powder that mimicked flattering interior lighting on the skin rather than adding a separate highlight, finishing the face into a soft-focus version of itself instead of stacking another product on top.
The shade everyone we knew was reaching for was Diffused Light, a warm beige with the slightest pink lift, applied with a fluffy brush across the cheekbones and bridge of the nose at the very end of a routine. It was the powder that taught a generation of US makeup-bag people that finishing powders did not have to be the matte, talc-y, cake-the-lines-around-your-eyes thing they had been brought up on. By spring 2013 it was the gift other beauty editors gave each other.
Paris Fashion Week beauty: clean, controlled, never overworked
Paris ran late February into early March in 2013, and the consensus across the runway slideshows we marathon-scrolled in mid-March was a tighter, more controlled beauty than the New York shows had served the month before. Where NYFW Fall 2013 had played with graphic eyes and matte mouths, Paris went for skin so quiet it almost disappeared, a barely-there flush of warmth at the temple, and a very specific lip — natural pink, glossy in the center, blotted at the edges. It was the look the rest of the year would borrow from at every photoshoot and red carpet.
The brand most often name-checked in the backstage notes was M·A·C, which was sponsoring something like half the shows that season; the artist whose name kept coming up was Pat McGrath, whose work backstage at Lanvin and Prada that season was the reference look every makeup artist screenshot for the rest of the spring. None of it was easy to replicate at home with the lighting in our actual bathrooms, but we tried.
Brows finally got a proper US category
The other story we were tracking — slower, quieter, but increasingly impossible to ignore — was the rise of the brow specialist as a real category at US retail. Anastasia Beverly Hills had been the West Coast eyebrow secret for a decade by the time March 2013 rolled around, but the brand was crossing into national attention through Sephora distribution that year. The Brow Wiz pencil, sold in shade ranges that finally accommodated dark hair without going ashy, was the gateway product — and the conversation around it shifted brow grooming from “something you maybe did every six weeks at a salon” to “something you spent four minutes on every morning at home.”
The other contender was Benefit, whose Brow Bar concept inside Macy’s and standalone Sephora locations was the lower-effort, more drop-in version of the same conversation. Their Brow Zings kit was unrivaled at the price point, and the in-store wax-and-shape was the affordable way to hand the eyebrow problem to a professional once a month and have the rest of your face suddenly read more polished without doing anything else differently.
The spring serum swap actually worked
March is when most of the people we know finally retire the heavy winter serum and switch to something with a lighter texture, and 2013 was the first year the swap had genuinely good options at every price tier. Caudalie’s Vinosource Moisturizing Sorbet was the fluffy gel-cream we kept hearing about in skincare-nerd corners of the internet, light enough for warmer weather but not so weightless it left the morning makeup sliding around. Kiehl’s still owned the affordable-prestige tier with their Ultra Facial Cream, the navy-blue tub that had been a bathroom standard since long before this conversation got SEO-friendly hashtags.
What was new in March 2013 specifically was a willingness to layer. The era of one cream doing every job was ending. People were starting to apply a hydrating serum first, a separate moisturizer second, and an SPF on top — three steps where two had been fine for years — and the early-spring weather rewarded them for it.
What we’re watching for April
April brings festival season and Coachella, which means the music-festival makeup look — face glitter, braided hair, a flower crown if the photographer asks — is about to dominate Pinterest for six weeks whether we participate or not. We were curious how 2013 would play it. We were also watching the SPF conversation, which was already shifting away from the heavy mineral white-cast formulas of a few years earlier toward sheerer, more wearable daily-use options. And we were keeping a close ear on the Korean cushion compact category — every editor we knew was fielding the same anonymous tip that a Western prestige house was about to introduce one within the year. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April.