January in New York meant flat winter light, dry radiator air, and a drugstore basket that felt heavier than any holiday haul we had brought home in December. The new year always invites a beauty inventory, and 2016 walked in with a particular set of receipts: contouring had reached its baroque peak the previous fall, the Kylie Cosmetics Lip Kit had restocked twice in five weeks and sold out twice in five minutes, and our skincare drawer had quietly reorganised itself around a handful of acid bottles and a single bonded-hair treatment that was now no longer salon-only. We spent the first week of January 2016 putting away tinsel and pulling a year-defining edit together in our heads — the products and the moods we knew we would carry into spring.
The slow pivot from sculpted to dewy
You could feel the contour conversation winding down on Instagram. The sharp triangular cheekbones and bronze-stripe noses that had defined late 2015 looked, on a January morning under a low ceiling of cloud, a little fatiguing. The replacement story was already moving in: skin that looked alive. We pulled out the Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Contour Wand for its lighter, creamier finish, and reached more often for a balm or a glow primer than for the chiselling powders we had used in November. Becca Cosmetics was on every counter we passed, and the Shimmering Skin Perfector liquid in Champagne Pop, which Becca had launched with Jaclyn Hill in summer 2015, was still selling like it had landed yesterday. There was a quiet, parallel current too: the strobe-cream conversation, which a handful of editors had been describing as “your highlighter, but make it a moisturiser.” We dabbed MAC Strobe Cream over our cheekbones with a light hand most mornings and watched the texture-first crowd warm to it. The takeaway for us in January was simple: 2016 wanted the high-points lit, not the cheekbones drawn.
Lip kit math and the sold-out economy
The first restock of the year came at the very end of January, and the conversation around it was as much about commerce as about colour. Three matte-liquid shades, a coordinating lip pencil, a website that kept buckling, and a sixty-second window had created a new kind of beauty event — one closer to a sneaker drop than a department-store launch. We did not buy a kit, but we paid attention. Drug-store dupes for Candy K and Dolce K were already crowding the ColourPop drop calendar, and ColourPop’s Ultra Matte liquids at six dollars apiece became the answer for everyone who wanted the look without refreshing a checkout page at noon. Our January takeaway: the matte-liquid silhouette was real, and it was here for the year.
Acid season, with a bonded-hair chaser
January is the month our skincare regime gets honest. We pared things down to glycolic at night, niacinamide in the morning, and a pea-sized dot of retinoid two evenings a week, and we let the cream cleansers do the heavy lifting on the cold-weather flakiness. The Ordinary, which would not arrive on US shelves until later in 2016, was still a rumour we kept hearing from our London friends — so this January we stayed in Paula’s Choice 2% BHA territory and reaching for the Drunk Elephant C-Firma serum on Sundays as a bright-up before the workweek. The bonded-hair conversation, meanwhile, had moved firmly into the consumer aisle: Olaplex No. 3 was now a fixture in our Sunday wash routine and the bleach-blonde friends in our group chat had turned evangelical about it. Our January 2016 lesson: you can simplify a routine without softening the actives.
Counter-resolutions: the products we refused to retire
For all the talk of starting fresh, January was the month we noticed which 2015 obsessions we actually loved enough to repurchase. A short list emerged on our bathroom counter. NARS Audacious lipstick, almost two years on from its 2014 launch, kept earning its place — Anna in particular was on rotation. Tatcha‘s Luminous Dewy Skin Mist, which had landed in the back half of 2015, made it into every January travel kit. Bumble and bumble Surf Spray was still our first answer for second-day hair after wool-hat days. The Glossier Phase One quartet — Milky Jelly Cleanser, Priming Moisturizer, Soothing Face Mist and Balm Dotcom — had quietly become the no-thinking-required morning lineup we packed into a weekender. And the under-fifteen-dollar holdouts kept holding: Maybelline Lash Sensational mascara, CeraVe Moisturizing Cream, and the Bioderma Sensibio H2O that finally became easy to find in US drugstores in 2015 after years of importing it from Paris pharmacies. Repurchase loyalty, we reminded ourselves, was the more reliable trend signal than launch-day frenzy.
Fragrance, quietly: the gourmand cool-down
Fragrance trended quieter in January than it had any right to. After a December dominated by oud-and-amber holiday gifting, our wrists wanted something less assertive in the elevator. We circled back to Byredo Gypsy Water for the dry-skin-on-cashmere season, and a couple of us reopened the bottle of Maison Margiela Replica By the Fireplace from December and admitted it earned its keep through the cold snap. The gourmand category — vanilla, praline, almond, smoked sugar — was clearly working its way back into the niche-fragrance conversation, and we expected at least two big launches in the genre by autumn.
What we are watching in February
February will bring the Spring 2016 ready-to-wear collections, the first proper red-carpet awards run, and a wave of Valentine’s-day pink that we will resist out of principle and then probably wear anyway. We are watching for the next move in dewy-skin formulas and for any hint that the powder-finish era is officially over — every brand is going to have a hydrating cushion, a glow drop, or a strobing balm in the lineup by mid-spring, and we want to see who lands first. We are also keeping an eye on Glossier‘s Phase Two color cosmetics rumblings; the brand has been telegraphing a colour expansion for months and the calendar is pointing at a spring drop. We will see you on the first Tuesday of February.