September 2020 was a strange variant of the September we knew. The kids who had a school year were doing it from a kitchen table. The fashion month that should have been a chaos of Manhattan town cars and back-to-back shows was being played out on Instagram Live, on Zoom, on tightly edited five-minute videos uploaded the day after the supposed show. We mostly stayed in. The light started doing the September thing — turning gold in the late afternoon — and our routines tilted from “summer skin” to “fall reset.” The launch of the year arrived on the third, on schedule, and we kept thinking about it for the rest of the month. Here is the September 2020 picture.
Rare Beauty arrives
Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez’s long-teased makeup line, launched at Sephora on September 3rd, with sixty-four products in six categories spanning complexion, eyes, lips, brows, and tools. What made it different from any other big celebrity launch we had seen was the mental-health framing built into the brand identity from day one. Gomez had been transparent about her own mental-health journey for years, and the brand committed at launch to one percent of every sale going to a Rare Impact Fund supporting mental-health services. The product itself was strong — the Liquid Touch Weightless Foundation, the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush, the Lip Soufflé Matte Lip Cream all stood up to scrutiny — but the bigger story was how convincingly the mission and the merchandise lined up. We bought the blush. We bought the foundation. We expect Rare to be one of the most-watched brands of the next two years.
NYFW goes digital
New York Fashion Week Spring 2021 was held entirely digitally, and the beauty implications were genuinely interesting. The backstage-look conversation that drove our September fashion-month coverage every year — what hair-and-makeup teams were doing for which house, what unexpected pencil-liner moment was about to launch a thousand drugstore copies — barely existed. What we got instead were highly stylized lookbook videos, with cosmetics styled within an inch of their lives but rarely with a meaningful trend signal underneath. The takeaway, for anyone trying to read the spring 2021 makeup conversation, was that the industry had decided 2020 was not the year to be assertive about anything new. The clearest beauty trend coming out of the fashion-month digital screen was simply: skin, brows, lips, no event, no liner.
Westman Atelier arrives properly
The other launch we paid serious attention to in September was actually a launch from late 2018 that had only fully arrived in the broader conversation this year: Westman Atelier, the colour cosmetics line from celebrity makeup artist Gucci Westman. Westman’s pitch was prestige-cosmetics-as-an-extension-of-skincare, with cream blushes and bronzers built around clean ingredient lists, and the brand had quietly grown a following in the editorial press through 2019 and into the spring of 2020. The Vital Skincare Complexion Drops became the formula our makeup-artist friends were reaching for on Zoom — light coverage, real glow, and texture that played well with cream products. We were watching the brand widen its retail footprint and starting to think of Westman Atelier as the prestige version of the Kosas-Ilia conversation we had last month.
Skincare turns to barrier
The September skincare conversation had moved decisively toward “barrier health.” Two years of acid-led actives — glycolics, salicylics, retinols at home — had left a measurable share of users with compromised skin barriers, and the brands that did the simplest, most boring formulations were the ones suddenly in vogue. CeraVe Moisturizing Cream, the unglamorous tub from the drugstore aisle, was now genuinely the cult favorite that prestige editors were name-checking in print. Aquaphor went into rotation as a slugging product after the slugging trend hit TikTok in late summer. Tatcha‘s The Dewy Skin Cream was the prestige version of the same idea — heavy, occlusive, no acid-led actives — and it kept selling. The acid-stack era was not over, but it was getting calibrated.
Eye makeup adapts to the masked face
The mask wearing that had reshaped the lipstick category in May had now started reshaping the eye makeup category. With most of the lower face hidden in public, the eye was the only part of our makeup that anyone other than us was going to see, and the conversation moved up. Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Eye Quad got a rotation refresh. Liner — felt-tip, gel, kohl — saw a small revival, particularly in graphic-but-not-dramatic shapes that read on a video call. MAC‘s navy and oxblood liners had a moment that was several years overdue. We were not nostalgic for the days of waiting in line for the lipstick counter at Sephora, exactly, but the small, low-stakes treat of buying a single new eyeliner felt right for the month.
October is going to be the month when 2020 starts to look at itself. Allure’s Best of Beauty list will land. Holiday gift sets will start hitting Sephora and Ulta about three weeks earlier than the usual cycle, because brands had read the room and decided everyone was going to start their gift shopping the day after Halloween. Election anxiety is going to make every wellness-and-self-care product on every shelf sell. Our friend Anna sent over a small list of October launches she had heard about from friends in the industry — nothing locked, but it does look like a busy month. We are looking forward to it. We will see you on the first Tuesday of October.