February 2015 was, like every February, the month when New York Fashion Week and Valentine’s Day collided. The Fall 2015 shows ran the second week and laid out the year’s wardrobe direction; V-Day kept its annual red-lipstick press cycle; and the cushion-compact rumor mill — now firmly resolved into reality after the Lancôme launch — produced its next confirmed Western prestige entry. By the first Tuesday of the month we already had two new lipsticks in rotation, the Glossier Boy Brow that had finally arrived after the back-order, and a clearer sense of what 2015’s major beauty stories were going to be. Below, what we kept reaching for.
V-Day red consolidated around two lipsticks
The 2015 V-Day red conversation was the cleanest in a few years. The cool blue-red camp had effectively consolidated around two products: M·A·C’s Ruby Woo, still and forever the matte Snow-White reference; and NARS’s Audacious in Vera, the new prestige reference that had launched the previous May and was the easier-to-wear formula at a comparable price. The brick-leaning warm-red camp had pivoted toward Charlotte Tilbury’s K.I.S.S.I.N.G. in Bond Girl, which had become the editorial reference for a slightly grown-up Valentine’s lip in the months following the brand’s US launch.
The drugstore tier had finally caught up. Maybelline’s Color Sensational Creamy Matte in Red Revival was the editor-recommended under-eight-dollar option; Revlon’s Super Lustrous in Cherries in the Snow held its eternal classic-red-position.
NYFW Fall 2015: a deliberate quietness
The Fall 2015 shows in New York were the cleanest, quietest fashion-week beauty conversation in several seasons. The runway through-line was an intentional restraint — almost no visible foundation, a soft brushed-up brow that read undone, a clean lid with the tiniest hint of warm bronze, and a lip kept either entirely bare or in a single deep berry stain. The brand most often credited backstage was M·A·C; the makeup-artist consistently named was Pat McGrath at Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford.
The Marc Jacobs Fall 2015 show — Jacobs’s second post-Vuitton collection — was the most-photographed beauty moment of the season. The styling reverted to Jacobs’s long-standing love of strict tailoring, but the makeup work delivered the most influential brushed-up brow of the year, and the look ran across every major fashion magazine’s March issue.
Dior Cushion entered the US prestige category
The cushion-compact category got its second major Western entry in February 2015. Dior’s Diorskin Forever Perfect Cushion launched at US prestige in mid-February, with a sheer-finish formula that read more matte than the Lancôme Miracle Cushion’s dewy version. The shade range was wider than Lancôme’s launch had been, addressing the central complaint of the Lancôme rollout, and the early adopter coverage was warmly positive.
By the end of February, the cushion-compact category in the US had two real prestige options at meaningfully different finishes — Lancôme dewy, Dior matte — and the YSL launch confirmed for later in the year would round out the prestige Western field. The Korean origins were no longer the only conversation.
Glossier Boy Brow defined the brow conversation
The Glossier Boy Brow that had launched in mid-January 2015 was the brow product of the moment by February. The combination of the simple format (a small mascara-style wand with a gel-like fiber-fortified formula), the price (sixteen dollars), and the result (a polished-undone brow that did not require technique) had made it the breakout product of the year so far. By the end of February, Boy Brow was the most-referenced brow product in every editorial column and the most-photographed brow product on Instagram.
The prestige tier had to respond. Anastasia Beverly Hills’s Brow Wiz and Brow Definer kept their precision-tool positions, but the soft fluffy-brow look that Boy Brow had popularized was clearly going to define the year’s brow conversation. Several brands were rumored to be working on similar gel formulas for second-half 2015 launches.
Drunk Elephant’s Sephora launch reset the clean-skincare positioning
The other 2015 launch story brewing through February was the Sephora distribution of Drunk Elephant. The brand had been founded by Tiffany Masterson in 2013 and had been selling through small specialty channels through 2014; the Sephora distribution coming online in early 2015 represented a meaningful prestige-tier launch. The brand’s positioning was specifically anti-“clean beauty” — refusing the natural-and-essential-oils language that the category had been using — and instead arguing for a science-led, ingredient-vetted, “biocompatible” framework. The marketing was strong, and the products genuinely delivered.
What we’re watching for March
March 2015 brings the spring color collections, Paris Fashion Week wrapping the runway-coverage cycle, and what was expected to be the spring announcement of the YSL Cushion confirmation. We will see you on the first Tuesday of March.