December is the year-end blur. The first two weeks are pure gift-buying triage, the third is travel and family and someone’s holiday party every other night, and the last is the strange suspended-animation week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when nobody knows what day it is and the bathroom counter has half-finished new gifts mixed in with the workhorses we have been using for twelve months. By the first Tuesday of December 2013 we already had the New Year’s Eve makeup look mentally sketched, the year-in-review tabs open in the browser, and a quiet sense of which 2013 launches were going to make our personal best-of list. Below, what we kept reaching for as the year closed.
The metallic eye finally arrived
The conversation had been building since October — every November party-makeup column had teased it — and December 2013 was the month the metallic eye fully landed. The interpretation was specific: a wash of warm gold or rose-gold pigment across the lid, blended outward with a fluffy brush, a clean lash line of black liner kept thin and tight, and almost nothing else on the face. M·A·C’s Pigment in Old Gold and Rose Gold were the editor references for the look. Urban Decay’s Eyeshadow in Half Baked, the original metallic gold from the 24/7 line, kept its position as the most-used single shadow across our friend group’s NYE Instagram posts.
The technique conversation actually delivered for once. The trick was to set the lid with a cream base before applying the pigment — the cream gave the metallic something to grip, and the result lasted six hours instead of three. Marc Jacobs Beauty’s See-Quins eyeshadow stick was the launch-of-the-quarter for this exact use case, a chubby pencil that delivered enough shimmer to count as the cream base, finishing power, and color in one product.
NYE makeup got two definitive looks
The 2013 NYE makeup conversation forked. One direction was the metallic eye paired with a bare nude lip — the editorial-leaning option. The other direction was a high-gloss cool red lip paired with a clean liner — the classic option. NARS’s Cruella, the brand’s iconic red, kept its lead position in the cool-red conversation, finishing the year as the lipstick most often photographed on red carpets and in fashion-magazine party-issue coverage. The drugstore version of the same conversation was L’Oréal Paris’s Colour Riche Extraordinaire in Rouge Mystère, a glossy red with the staying power that the new lipstick-balm hybrids had finally figured out by the end of 2013.
The advice that kept coming up across every December how-to was simple: pick one feature, commit to it, and keep the rest of the face clean. NYE is not the night to layer four products and three trends. It is the night to do one thing well.
Year-end best-of lists got smarter
The year-end best-of column genre had matured considerably by 2013. The lists in Into the Gloss and the major fashion magazines were no longer just the brands the publication had advertised relationships with — there was real ranking happening, real testing, real consensus on what had defined the year. The launches that came up most consistently across our reading: the Hourglass Ambient Lighting Powder, the Living Proof Perfect Hair Day Dry Shampoo, the Marc Jacobs Beauty Highliner gel eye crayon, the Bioderma Sensibio H2O.
The honorable-mentions section of every list mattered too. The brands that had launched quietly during the year — Tata Harper had broken into more retailers, RMS Beauty had seeded a clean-makeup conversation that would dominate 2014, the early Korean cushion compacts had finally reached US prestige editor radar — were the ones to watch for the year ahead. The 2014 forecast was already half-written by mid-December.
Last-minute gifting got a hero category
The last-minute beauty-gifting category in late December resolved around three reliable winners. Diptyque’s candle library — Baies for the predictable winner, Figuier for the more interesting choice, Feu de Bois for the woodsmoke-fan friend — was the universal answer for anyone who needed a thirty-five-to-seventy-dollar gift that actually carried weight. Kiehl’s Creme de Corps in the holiday-illustrated bottle was the family-gathering body-lotion gift that worked for any age relative. Fresh’s Sugar Lip Treatment in the Rosé tint was the under-twenty-five-dollar stocking stuffer of the year, and one of us bought five of them on December 22 to round out the wrapping pile.
Skincare reset on the New Year’s Eve countdown
The post-Christmas, pre-New-Year’s-Eve skincare reset had become a real ritual by 2013. The advice in every column: a sheet mask on December 30, a clay mask on December 31 morning, a vitamin-C serum the morning of, and accept that whatever you were going to do for skincare in 2014 was not going to start until January 6 anyway. The masks that landed most consistently were Tony Moly I’m Real Pomegranate (the cheek-perking option), GlamGlow’s Youthmud (the prestige clay), and Sephora Collection’s own paper-mask line, which had launched earlier in the year as the affordable answer to the K-beauty mask explosion.
What we’re watching for January
January is the resolution-skincare month, the bare-makeup month, the no-spending-the-first-two-weeks month. We were watching the cushion-compact category that had been threatening to land all year — the rumor was strong that a major Western prestige brand had something queued for the first quarter. We were also watching the SPF reformulations that had been spreading through the prestige tier all fall, and the under-thirty-dollar hero serum category that the magazines kept insisting was about to crack open. We will see you on the first Tuesday of January 2014, with a year-in-review and a fresh start.