July is, as a rule, the month when the beauty industry takes a breath. The big launches usually wait for September, the festival economy takes care of most of June’s energy, and the Independence Day weekend buys everyone a few days of permission to put down their phones. July 2020 was different. Most of us were not at a friend’s lake house. Most of us were not at a fireworks show. We were on our porches, on our roofs, in our small backyards, and we were thinking about skin — our own and other people’s. The biggest single launch of the year landed at the very end of the month, and the rest of the conversation arranged itself around it. Here is what kept us company through what was, for a lot of us, the strangest July of our adult lives.
Fenty Skin lands at the end of the month
Rihanna had been teasing the line on Instagram for almost a year, and on July 31 it finally arrived. Fenty Skin launched as a tightly edited three-step routine: a milky cleanser, a toner-essence hybrid called Fat Water, and a tinted moisturizing sunscreen called Hydra Vizor. The pitch was that you did not need an eight-step Korean routine to get there — three thoughtful products from Fenty would do the work of fifteen, and the formulas were built around fragrance-free, refillable, post-scrub-culture skincare. We are reasonably sceptical of “less is more” pitches that come from brands selling things, but on first impression Fenty Skin held up. The Hydra Vizor SPF 30 in particular was the standout — a tinted mineral-and-chemical hybrid that sat well on a wider range of skin tones than the average drugstore tinted sunscreen, and that did not pill under makeup the way most chemical sunscreens still do. We bought it. We are still using it. The launch was also, as we noted last month, the first prestige skincare line from a Black woman to launch at this scale, and that mattered.
Sun protection finally came correct
Fenty Skin did not arrive in a vacuum. The category-wide sunscreen reform that we had been writing about since 2013 had a particularly strong July. Supergoop‘s Unseen Sunscreen had quietly become the makeup-primer-replacement for an entire generation. EltaMD UV Clear, the dermatologist-recommended workhorse, was now sold out at every reputable retailer about half the time. Tatcha had launched a tinted SPF earlier in the year that finally did the elusive thing — providing meaningful UV protection without that grey cast — and by July it was a fixture in our routine. The shared thread was that 2020 was the year sunscreen genuinely became the most important thing on our face every morning, and no one was bothered if it was the only thing.
Hair turned to bonds and to broccoli
The damage from May and June’s at-home hair experiments showed up in July, and the category responded. Olaplex had a wildly strong summer — No. 3 Hair Perfector was selling at a pace that the supply chain had not planned for, and the rumors of a No. 8 launching later in the year had begun to circulate. The brand benefitted from the basic truth that bond-repair was the only thing actually walking back the damage from box dye. Briogeo‘s Don’t Despair Repair Mask was the cult deep conditioner everyone in our group chat suddenly seemed to own. And on the very different end of the conversation, “broccoli oil” — the cold-pressed broccoli seed oil that gives hair a non-greasy shine — went from obscure ingredient to the thing the editorial press kept putting in shopping round-ups. Kérastase‘s heavier oil-based stylers were having their day too, particularly for the people whose hair had not seen scissors since February.
Pat McGrath gives us something to look forward to
If anyone had a particular case for keeping a deep eyeshadow palette in heavy rotation in July 2020 we would love to hear it, but Pat McGrath had been so good for so long that we kept buying her work anyway. Pat McGrath Labs dropped the Mothership VI in mid-2020 — sometimes called the “Midnight Sun” edition — and it sat on the dresser as a small, daily proof that beauty as artistic discipline was still a thing. The pigment, the formulation, the packaging — the bar was as high as it had ever been. We did not wear the looks anywhere this month. We made them on Sunday afternoons and washed them off, and they were one of the small joys of a month that did not have many.
The minimalist body care quiet revolution
July is also when our shower routine gets its summer overhaul, and the brands we kept reaching for were the ones that had quietly built a reputation as grown-up versions of what most of us grew up with. Necessaire‘s body wash — the one with niacinamide, panthenol, and a distinctly herbaceous fragrance — became the bathroom-counter status object of the summer. Davines hair products, sold in sustainable-feeling minimal bottles, were the bathroom-counter status object the year before, and were now actually deserving the praise. Drunk Elephant‘s body offerings continued to expand. The brief was simple: less plastic, less fragrance, ingredient lists you could read out loud, and a price point that was uncomfortable for the drugstore but that was also defensible if you used the bottle for six months. We are not opposed to it.
August is going to be more of the same: Fenty Skin’s first six weeks of reviews coming in, the first whispers of who was actually going to launch a holiday gift set this year, and a continuing slow simmer of the conversation we started in June about Black-owned beauty and what an industry overhaul actually looks like in practice. Selena Gomez teased a beauty line for September; we were watching that closely. Until then, we will see you on the first Tuesday of August.