June is the month US beauty exhales. The Memorial Day weekend rush is over, the wedding season is in full swing but stops being novel, and the bathroom counter quietly reorganizes itself around lighter products and the looming-but-not-yet-here back-to-school launches in August. By the first Tuesday of June 2013 we had already finished one bottle of brightening serum, swapped to a sheerer sunscreen, and started thinking about the body-care category we had ignored all winter. Below, what we kept reaching for in the first proper week of US summer.
Sheer sunscreen finally won
The story we flagged at the end of May became the dominant skincare conversation of June. The white-cast mineral SPF formulas of the late 2000s — the ones that left a chalky cast on anyone with skin darker than “publishing-house pale” — had finally been displaced by genuinely usable daily-wear sunscreens. Supergoop’s Unseen Sunscreen had not launched yet (that arrived in 2017), but the founding products in the line were already on Sephora shelves and were the gateway for a lot of women who had previously hated wearing SPF every day. EltaMD UV Clear, the dermatologist-recommended workhorse we mentioned in May, was still hard to find in June — the moment it landed on a shelf it left it.
The drugstore conversation pivoted fast. Neutrogena’s expanding Ultra Sheer line was getting more shelf space than the year before; CeraVe was starting to show up in the sunscreen aisle for the first time, and the price-to-formula math was finally good enough that “wear sunscreen every day” stopped being a luxury-conversation aspiration and started being a thing the average twenty-five-year-old actually did.
Self-tanner moved past the orange-palms problem
Self-tanner formulas had been improving for years, and June 2013 was the month most of the people we knew finally trusted them again. St. Tropez’s Self Tan Bronzing Mousse was the prestige reference — the one editors recommended without hedging, the one that worked on the most skin types, the one with the green-to-brown color guide that meant you could see where you had applied it before it developed. Jergens’s Natural Glow Daily Moisturizer was the gradual-build option for anyone who wanted to ease into summer color without a single dramatic application, and it had become one of the highest-volume products in the category by mid-month.
The technique conversation got better, too. The combination of an exfoliating prep, a tanning mitt for application, and a separate barely-tinted hand wash for the morning after had become standard advice — and by following it most people genuinely could get away with a self-tan in 2013 in a way that even just two summers earlier would have been embarrassing.
Gel manicures crossed into normal-people territory
Gel polish — the in-salon, cured-under-UV-light, lasts-fourteen-days alternative to traditional polish — had been a salon specialty since the 2010 launch of CND Shellac. By June 2013 it was no longer a specialty. The premium pedicure place near our office had a Shellac menu, the strip-mall salon next to the dry cleaner had a different brand on the same wall. OPI’s GelColor was the wide-distribution alternative, and the available shade ranges across both systems had finally caught up to what regular polish offered.
The downside conversation was already building underneath the success. Soaking the hardened gel off in pure acetone every two weeks was wrecking nail beds; the UV-light exposure was getting flagged by dermatologists. We were watching the at-home alternatives that would inevitably arrive — but they had not arrived yet in June 2013, and the in-salon gel was carrying the summer for everyone we knew.
Body care stopped being an afterthought
The body-care aisle had been a dead zone for prestige brands for years — the assumption being that face was where the money was, and body was the drugstore’s territory. June 2013 was when that started genuinely shifting. Necessaire did not exist yet (that brand launched 2018), but the conditions for it were being set. French Girl had been quietly available at Anthropologie for a year and was getting traction with editors in early summer. The category was still mostly drugstore — Dove’s sugar scrub had taken on cult status, and at every Memorial Day pool party we attended someone made a case for it — but the prestige body-care boom that would dominate the late 2010s was visible from June 2013 if you were paying attention.
Pride month set a quieter beauty conversation
June being Pride month meant the bolder makeup conversations got more room than usual at retail and on social. The 2013 version was less corporate-pink-washing than what would dominate later years and more genuine experimentation: bright neon eyeliners, glitter applied generously, the occasional rainbow lip that made people stop and ask. Urban Decay’s 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencil range had the brightest, most saturated colors at retail — the Electric Palette would not arrive until 2014 — and editors were quietly stockpiling Lucky in turquoise, Frenemy in pink, and the original Stash in metallic green. The look was easy to wear and impossible to ignore.
What we’re watching for July
July is the slowest month for new beauty launches but the busiest for testing what we already own under hot, humid, heat-of-summer conditions. We were watching the dry-shampoo wars that were clearly building — Batiste had become the drugstore default, but the prestige tier had not yet decided whether dry shampoo was a styling product or a hair-health product. We were also watching the deodorant conversation, which was about to pivot toward natural and aluminum-free options. We will see you on the first Tuesday of July.