November 2017 was the month the holiday push happened all at once. The Sephora Beauty Insider holiday event landed in mid-month, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday beauty sales sprawled across the entire week of Thanksgiving, and the gift-set displays at Bergdorf, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks all looked like the same exact assortment had been flown in by the same fleet of trucks (largely because it had been). The cultural mood of November was a mix of holiday excitement and a quieter recognition that 2017 had been a heavy year — the #MeToo movement had emerged in October and reframed the entire conversation around female-led brands and the women who built them. Beauty editorial in November was wrestling with that. The product story was straightforward: which gifts were worth giving, and which were not. The cultural story was harder, and we are still processing it.
The Sephora holiday event, dissected
The Sephora Beauty Insider holiday event ran in two waves — Rouge tier first (15% off everything), then VIB and Insider tiers a week later. The strongest buys we made: a back-up pump of Fenty Beauty Pro Filt’r foundation, the full Drunk Elephant Littles set (the brand’s mini-bottle multipack — a smart way to test the line), the Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk advent calendar, and a single Tom Ford lipstick we had been eyeing all fall. The event delivered what it promised — a real discount on prestige beauty for one week — and the assortment was particularly strong this year because the post-Fenty market reset had pushed brands to release stronger Q4 launches than usual. We spent more than we planned. We saved more than the discount on principle. The math works out roughly even most years.
Black Friday at the drugstore
The Black Friday beauty conversation has shifted, in the last three years, from prestige to drugstore. CVS, Walgreens, and Target all ran serious beauty discounts the week of Thanksgiving — buy-one-get-one on most cosmetics, fifty percent off on selected hair-care lines, twenty percent off the entire CeraVe aisle. The drugstore had quietly become the smartest place to spend the Black Friday beauty budget. We loaded up on backup mascaras, the L’Oréal Voluminous Lash Paradise (still our pick of the year), the new Fit Me forty-shade range Maybelline launched in October, and three tubes of CeraVe Moisturizing Cream. Total spent: less than $80. The beauty industry has not figured out yet whether to celebrate or panic about the drugstore’s claim on Q4. Honestly we are not sure either, but we are voting with our cart.
The female-founded brands gift list
The conversation in November beauty press, for understandable reasons, kept returning to female-founded brands and the women who run them. Our gift list, accordingly, leaned in that direction this year. Glossier‘s pink balm dotcom and Boy Brow remained the easiest under-$30 gift in beauty for the friend on the list whose taste you do not entirely know. Tatcha‘s gift sets — built around founder Vicky Tsai’s specific aesthetic vocabulary — earned the second-tier slot. Fenty Beauty released a holiday collection mid-November that we bought twice (once for a sister, once for a niece). Sunday Riley‘s holiday set, anchored by Good Genes, was the prestige answer for the friend with serious taste in skincare. The list is not exhaustive but it is intentional, which felt like the right energy for the year.
The candle, redux
Holiday-season candles were the thing every gift was about in November. Diptyque‘s Sapin candle remained our default pine fragrance — the actual scent of a Christmas tree without the literal aspect — and the brand’s holiday collection (this year designed by an artist named Olympia Le-Tan) was the prettiest packaging in any prestige house. Byredo‘s woody-spicy holiday candle was the gift to give the friend who already had a Diptyque. Boy Smells — the small Los Angeles fragrance house that has spent the year building a quiet cult following — produced a soft cinnamon-leather candle (Cinderose) that we bought for our mother and now want for ourselves. The candle gift in 2017 was either a Diptyque or a quirky-niche, and we leaned quirky-niche this year. The recipient list approved.
The hair-care gifting category, finally interesting
Hair-care had historically been a difficult gifting category because everyone’s hair has different needs, but the rise of multi-product sets had quietly fixed the problem. Olaplex‘s holiday box (No. 0, No. 3, and a small bonus) was the universal answer for color-treated hair. Oribe‘s holiday gift set included the Dry Texturizing Spray and a small Gold Lust shampoo — the prestige hair gift to give without a needs-assessment conversation first. Living Proof‘s Perfect Hair Day kit was the third-tier answer at a $40 price point. The gifting math made sense for the first time in years; we bought three Olaplex sets and called the hair-care gifting list closed.
Closing
By the last week of November the gift list was 90% done, the Sephora event purchases had arrived, the Black Friday haul had been organized into the right closet, and the candle for our own home (a Diptyque Sapin, naturally) was lit in the entryway. December is going to bring the New Year’s Eve makeup conversation, the year-end best-of we have been drafting since November, and one final stretch of gifting. We will see you on the first Tuesday of December, and on the third Tuesday for the winter jewellery roundup, where we have been lining up Foundrae and Kataoka pieces all month.