February 2018 was, in beauty terms, a strange and welcome quiet — a month between the high-stakes January resolutions and the spring launch parade that begins in March. The Super Bowl on the 4th delivered a Justin Timberlake half-time show that the beauty press largely ignored. The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics opened on the 9th and ran through February 25, and the K-beauty conversation that had been quietly building for years got a fresh editorial push from the Korean broadcasts. Valentine’s Day fell on Wednesday the 14th, which felt anti-climactic. Beauty editorial through the back half of the month leaned into a deepening “clean beauty” conversation that we have mixed feelings about. We tested new launches, doubled down on the products that had earned their slots in January, and tried a couple of Korean acids the Olympics coverage had pushed into the editorial spotlight.
The Olympics K-beauty moment
The Pyeongchang Olympics created a quiet but real surge of interest in Korean skincare, and the brands we tested during the month delivered some of the strongest skincare we had used in months. Sulwhasoo‘s First Care Activating Serum was the prestige K-beauty product we revisited; the formula has not changed in years and remains one of the best treatment essences we have used. Amorepacific‘s Time Response Skin Renewal Cream came in the new gift assortment Sephora had built around the Olympic broadcast and earned a slot in the routine. The mid-tier K-beauty brands — Innisfree‘s Green Tea Seed Serum, Laneige‘s Water Sleeping Mask — were the entry points for the friends who had asked us to recommend a Korean routine. The mask conversation was particularly strong; the sheet-mask category had gone from K-beauty curiosity to mainstream Sephora category in three years.
Valentine’s Day red lip, finally simplified
The Valentine’s Day red-lip conversation returns every February, and 2018’s answer was the simplest one in years: Fenty Beauty Stunna Lip Paint in Uncensored, the universal red the brand had launched on December 26. We had been wearing it for six weeks by Valentine’s Day, and the formula’s holding power genuinely justified the eight-hour wear claim. The rest of the prestige red-lip canon held — MAC Ruby Woo, the NARS Audacious in Annabella, the Charlotte Tilbury Matte Revolution in Red Carpet Red — but the universal-red conversation had effectively been settled. Stunna was the answer. We ordered a backup tube on Valentine’s Day and bought one for a friend whose original had run out.
The “clean beauty” conversation, with caveats
February was the month “clean beauty” became the dominant marketing phrase across prestige skincare, and the editorial conversation around the term grew more skeptical by the week. Brands like Beautycounter, Tata Harper, and Drunk Elephant built marketing around an exclusion list of ingredients (silicones, sulfates, certain chemical filters) that had no consistent scientific definition. Our position by the end of the month was that “clean” was a marketing word, not a regulatory one, and that the actual quality of a skincare product was about formulation, percentages, and clinical evidence, not about whether it was on someone’s banned-ingredient list. That said, several products marketed as clean — Drunk Elephant in particular — were technically excellent. We were buying for the formula, not the label.
The late-winter skin reset
Late February is the month winter skin gets dry in the way that justifies switching every product to its richer version. We swapped a daytime moisturizer to a heavier formula — Augustinus Bader‘s The Cream had launched in the US in late 2017 at a $265 price point and was the prestige conversation of the month. We did not buy it (yet). The friend who did reported back that it was good but probably not better than the half-dozen other heavy creams she had tried at one-quarter the price. We instead swapped to Weleda Skin Food at the body for $20 a tube and called it solved. The prestige skincare market in February was overpromising on transformation. The boring effective formulas remained the right answer.
The lash conversation builds
The conversation around lashes — and specifically lash serums, lash extensions, and bond-style lash adhesives — was building through February. Latisse, the prescription lash-growth serum, was the conversation among editors with budget; Grande Cosmetics‘s GrandeLASH-MD was the over-the-counter alternative everyone was testing. We started a six-week trial of GrandeLASH-MD in the second week of February and committed to documenting the result honestly. The lash-extension conversation was simultaneously about whether to commit to maintenance, with most editors landing on “no” by the end of the month. The category was about to be reframed by Glossier’s Lash Slick mascara launch in spring; the lash conversation in early 2018 was a genuinely useful one to be having.
Closing
By the last week of February the routine had stabilized, the K-beauty serum had settled into morning rotation, the Stunna had earned permanent residence in the lipstick drawer, the lash serum trial was three weeks deep. March will bring the spring-equinox reset, the first Pat McGrath Mothership III previews, the Glossier Skin Tint launch we have been waiting for since November, and the start of the Met Gala buildup. We will see you on the first Tuesday of March.