As barbershops, hair salons, nail salons and beauty parlors shuttered due to the pandemic, our grooming behaviors didn't simply relax — they became more ingenious. Taking a leaf out of our grandparents' natural remedy books — or, more likely, YouTube beauty tutorials — we started experimenting with facial mask recipes, at-home waxes, DIY hairstyles and braids.
One of the pandemic's biggest online beauty trends, "Quarantine nails," saw people posting their creative attempts at nail art, from rainbow manicures (also known as Skittles nails) to pastel gradients with shaped almond tips. Lockdown also heralded the return of the buzzcut (see top), with men, women and celebrities reaching for the clippers to shave their locks. Needless to say, many of these efforts (and sometimes terrible outcomes) were documented on Twitter and Instagram. TikTok also became a popular destination for trending beauty products, parodies, tutorials and hacks.
Lipstick, on the other hand, had a pretty poor 2020. Often obliged to hide the lower half of our faces behind coverings, we ditched the bright colors in favor of a natural lip that wouldn't smudge our masks, relegating lipstick to the bottom of our makeup drawers. Why bother, when no one could see us smile anyway?
In the U.S, lipstick sales saw a bigger drop than any other type of cosmetic, according to consulting firm McKinsey, with Amazon seeing a 15% decline in sales (compared with a 5% increase for eye cosmetics). In the four weeks leading up to April 11, lipstick prices on the platform also fell by 28% — the steepest dip of any beauty segment.
It may not be an entirely new trend, but genderless beauty took a major leap forward in 2020.
In July, YouTuber and influencer Patrick Starrr launched his long-awaited brand One/Size, a genderless product range that includes everything from eye shadow to makeup wipes. That same month, MAC Cosmetics announced Lay Zhang, member of South Korean-Chinese boyband Exo, as its new global ambassador.
The "fox eye" was perhaps the most regrettable "beauty" fad of this long, weird year.
It began trending on social media back in April, and continued growing in popularity until August, when people started realizing that using makeup to emulate the lifted "almond-shaped" eyes of celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Megan Fox — or, as it was pointed out, people of Asian origin — was not cool, but rather a glaring case of cultural appropriation.
When cosmetic clinics reopened in the U.S. in summer, a number of surgeons reported higher demand for Botox, fillers and various other plastic surgery procedures. A study of Google data, published in the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery journal, found that — after an initial drop in interest in March and April — the volume of searches for a variety of cosmetic procedures was higher in June and July than it had been in the months before the pandemic. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, meanwhile, reported that almost two-thirds of the clinics it surveyed had experienced an increase in virtual consultations.
There are many reasons why interest in cosmetic procedures may have boomed: more downtime to recover at home, masks helping to hide the immediate signs of treatments and, of course, Zoom.
Celebrity beauty lines are nothing new. They're almost mandatory for those who have been in the entertainment business long enough.
But stars' skincare and makeup ranges are now increasingly values-driven, whether that's about the ingredients used or the diversity of who they cater to. And with COVID-19 making in-person promotion and in-store unveilings practically impossible, 2020 felt like the year when marketeers started focusing not only on the celebs, but also what they stand for.
