Beauty

The latest international editorial on beauty, from the global desks of Véronique.

9 Stories

Beauty · By Priya Anand

The Quiet Glow: Minimalism Returns to the Makeup Counter

The last ten years of mainstream makeup, filtered through Instagram tutorials and drag-adjacent contouring, taught an entire generation that a finished face required roughly fourteen products, three brushes, and a setting spray. The current moment is doing something quieter and, for many people, much more useful. Skin is being allowed to look like skin again. Call it the quiet glow. The category name is imperfect, but the tell is consistent: tinted balms instead of full-coverage foundation, a wash of cream blush pressed in with fingers, a dab of clear lip oil, and — if you are feeling formal — a single sweep of mascara. That is the whole face. It takes ninety seconds. It photographs well in daylight and, more importantly, it photographs well in the kind of overhead office lighting that used to make heavy makeup look like a mask. The formulation science that makes this possible is genuinely new. The last three years have seen a wave of hybrid products — 'skin tints' with SPF and hyaluronic acid, cream blushes stabilized with squalane, lip balms tinted with mineral pigments rather than dye — that behave more like skincare than cosmetics. They sit on the face without settling into fine lines, they last through a normal day without touch-ups, and they come off with a splash of water. The tradeoff, which the industry does not always advertise, is that they demand skin that is reasonably healthy to begin with. Which is precisely why the barrier-repair skincare movement and the quiet-glow makeup movement are the same story told from two directions. Our beauty desk tested the trend across six skin tones and three climates over eight weeks. The consistent finding was that the products designed for this aesthetic — we are being deliberately vague about brands here because the specific SKUs turn over quickly — work remarkably well on darker skin, where heavy foundation has historically been the most punishing to blend. A well-formulated tint in the right undertone reads as skin, not as coverage, across the entire Fitzpatrick range. That is not something the previous generation of 'natural' makeup could honestly claim. There is a cultural piece here too, and it is worth stating plainly. The quiet glow is inclusive by design because it does not ask its wearer to hide anything. Freckles, pores, texture, the small asymmetries of a real face — all of it stays visible. For anyone who spent years being told, implicitly or explicitly, that their unedited face was a problem, that is not a trivial shift. What we are watching is not a rejection of makeup. It is a rejection of the idea that makeup is a corrective procedure. The counter is still full. The palette is still enormous. The technique is simply lighter, faster, and more forgiving. That is a better relationship for most people to have with the mirror. Quiet, in this context, is not the opposite of loud. It is the opposite of anxious.

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Beauty · By Noah Pierce

The New Men's Fragrance Wardrobe

The fragrance shelf, more than almost any other corner of the beauty industry, has spent the last century enforcing a gender binary that never made chemical sense. Rose is not a feminine molecule. Oud is not a masculine molecule. Vetiver, iris, sandalwood, jasmine, ambergris — these are ingredients, not identity claims. The current generation of perfumers, and increasingly the customers buying their work, are treating them accordingly. The pivot has been most visible in niche perfumery. Houses based in Grasse, Dubai, Berlin, and Los Angeles have been releasing fragrances without gender designation for a decade, and the mainstream is following. Chanel, Dior, and Byredo have all quietly moved their newer launches away from strict pink-or-blue marketing. The bottles look the same for everyone. The advertising features whoever fits the mood of the scent. And the customers, given the option, are choosing what they actually like to smell rather than what they were told they were supposed to wear. The notes worth building a wardrobe around, in 2026, are a specific short list. Neroli — the oil pressed from bitter orange blossom — has emerged as the daylight scent of choice: bright, slightly bitter, uncomplicated, and universally flattering. Clean musks, particularly the newer synthetic muscones that read as skin rather than laundry, are doing the work of a base note without the powdery weight of the older aldehyde-heavy musks. Oud, once a specialist Middle Eastern note, is now mainstream in both raw and reconstituted forms, and it is being worn as a serious evening scent by people of every gender. Smoked vetiver — vetiver grass processed to bring out its darker, almost tar-like facets — is the current cool-weather signature. The wardrobe idea is worth taking seriously. The old model of one signature scent, worn every day, is being replaced by a small rotation — three or four fragrances organized by weather, time of day, and social context rather than by season. A neroli or bergamot for morning and outdoor daylight. A clean musk or iris for office and indoor daytime. An oud, amber, or vetiver for evening. A stranger, more idiosyncratic scent — something with immortelle, ambergris, or a specific incense — for the days when you want to be recognized by the way a room smells after you leave it. The perfumers we interviewed for this piece were, almost to a person, exhausted by the gender question. Four of them told us they had stopped labeling their bottles at all in the last three years and had seen no drop in sales. One, based in Grasse, said the only demographic still asking for explicitly 'masculine' fragrances was, in her words, 'men over seventy and marketing executives.' Everyone else was choosing by nose. What this adds up to, for someone building a personal scent wardrobe now, is a genuinely wider menu. The good news is that the notes have never been more available or better formulated. The better news is that no one is checking what you are wearing against what you are supposed to wear. The bottle is on the shelf. If you like how it smells on your skin, it is yours. Scent, at its best, has always been personal. It is finally being allowed to be.

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Beauty · By Celia Moreau

The Fluidity of Modern Glamour

Glamour, as a concept, has spent most of its recent history being defined against something. Against the everyday. Against the natural. Against the ordinary body doing ordinary things. To be glamorous, for most of the twentieth century, meant to stand apart — a specific silhouette, a specific face, a specific inaccessibility. The current generation of designers, makeup artists, and photographers is quietly rewriting the definition, and the new version is much more interesting. Modern glamour is fluid. It moves between genders, ages, body types, cultural contexts, and price points without losing its meaning. The woman in a hand-painted Milanese couture gown on a Wednesday evening and the woman in a well-cut cotton dress on a Saturday morning are both, in the current vocabulary, glamorous, because glamour has been redefined as a quality of presence rather than a set of external requirements. It is a better definition. It is also a much harder one to fake. Our desks in Paris, Tokyo, New York, and São Paulo have been tracking this shift for three years. The consistent finding is that the people the international press keeps describing as glamorous — the designers, models, and cultural figures who anchor the current visual language — share almost no common physical characteristics. They are of every age from nineteen to seventy-eight. They are of every skin tone. They are of every gender identity and every body size. What they share, almost universally, is a specific quality of self-possession. Nothing is being performed for the camera. The camera is being allowed in. The designers we interviewed for this piece — from Rio, Seoul, Marrakech, and Brooklyn — all made a version of the same point. The old glamour was a mask. The new glamour is a light. The former is applied. The latter is uncovered. The technical work of the modern makeup artist, hairstylist, and stylist is less about constructing an image than about clearing away everything that gets in the way of the person underneath. Avenue., as the beauty and style vertical of Véronique, is committed to reporting this shift as it happens. Each week, our contributors — dermatologists, perfumers, tailors, stylists, and long-form journalists working in more than a dozen countries — file work on the products, techniques, and movements that are making glamour feel personal, portable, and honest again. The intention is not to celebrate a trend. The intention is to document a real cultural correction. What the correction ultimately amounts to is a recognition that beauty and style have never actually belonged to a narrow band of bodies. The industry told that story for a long time because it was profitable. The story is finally breaking down, and the people who were always here — outside the frame, doing the work — are stepping into the light on their own terms. Glamour, in the older sense, was a rope line. In the newer sense, it is a door. Avenue. exists to keep the door open.

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Editorial portrait of a woman with sleek bob in modern minimal silhouette under Tokyo neon

Beauty · By Lin-Su Wang

Japanese Drugstore Beauty Finds Worth the Suitcase Space

Japanese drugstore beauty has a reputation for being quiet. The packaging tends toward white, the copy is restrained, and the marketing rarely promises miracles. What the products actually do is work — consistently, without drama, at prices that make Western prestige brands look embarrassed. The category to prioritize is cleansing. Japan produces some of the best oil cleansers, balms, and foaming washes in the world, largely because Japanese consumers treat a clean face as the non-negotiable first step of any routine. DHC Deep Cleansing Oil has been a bestseller for decades for a reason: it dissolves sunscreen and makeup without stripping the skin. Follow it with a gentle foam — Hada Labo, Senka, and Biore all make excellent versions — and you have a two-step cleanse that costs less than a single fancy micellar water in Paris. Hydration is the second strength. Hada Labo Gokujyun Premium Lotion is essentially a bottle of hyaluronic acid in various molecular weights, and it costs under fifteen dollars. Layer it under any moisturizer and your skin will hold water differently. For dry or mature skin, the Naturie Hatomugi Skin Conditioner is a lightweight, fragrance-free hydrator that doubles as a body toner and after-sun soother. Sunscreen is where Japan genuinely leads. Biore UV Aqua Rich, Anessa Perfect UV, and Skin Aqua are all formulated to be invisible, weightless, and genuinely protective. The textures feel like skincare, not beach sunscreen, which is why people who try them rarely return to the chalky formulas sold in most Western pharmacies. If you are shopping in Tokyo, Matsumoto Kiyoshi and Don Quijote are the obvious destinations. Matsumoto Kiyoshi is cleaner and better organized; Don Quijote is cheaper and more chaotic. Airport duty-free shops also stock the major brands, though prices are slightly higher. The best strategy is to buy one or two items early in your trip, test them, then stock up before you leave. The honest verdict on J-beauty is that it is not about discovery. It is about reliability. The products that have been popular in Japan for years are popular because they work. There is no secret ingredient, no hidden gem. The gem is the formulation discipline — the refusal to overpromise and the insistence on texture, stability, and results. For a traveler, that discipline is ideal. A small bag of Japanese drugstore products will keep your skin calm through humidity, air conditioning, long flights, and unfamiliar water. And when you run out, you can usually find them online, though you will pay more for the shipping than the product.

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Portrait of a man in sharp modern tailoring on a Seoul rooftop

Beauty · By Priya Anand

The Best Korean Skincare Products for Dry Skin

Dry skin is not a cosmetic problem. It is a barrier problem. When the outermost layer of the skin loses too much water, it becomes tight, flaky, reactive, and more prone to fine lines. The Korean approach to dry skin is not to cover it with heavy creams but to rebuild the barrier with layers of hydration, then seal everything in. The first layer is a hydrating toner or essence. Unlike Western toners, which are often astringent, Korean essences are watery serums designed to add hydration and prepare the skin for what comes next. Look for ingredients like hyaluronic acid, glycerin, panthenol, and fermented extracts. Cosrx Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence is a classic for a reason: it is lightweight, deeply hydrating, and soothing on irritated skin. The second layer is a serum that supports the barrier. Products with ceramides, niacinamide, and peptides help repair the lipid layer that keeps moisture in. The Dr. Jart+ Ceramidin line and the Etude House SoonJung line are both excellent, widely available, and priced below most Western equivalents with similar ingredient lists. The final layer is a moisturizer that seals. For very dry skin, a cream with shea butter, squalane, or plant oils works better than a gel. The Belif The True Cream Moisturizing Bomb and the Laneige Water Bank Moisture Cream are two consistently reliable options. In winter or on long flights, add a sleeping mask over the top — Laneige Water Sleeping Mask and Cosrx Ultimate Nourishing Rice Overnight Spa Mask are both proven. Sunscreen is the step dry skin sufferers often skip because so many formulas are drying. Korean sunscreens solve this. Look for hybrid or chemical formulas with hydrating ingredients. Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun, Round Lab Birch Juice Moisturizing Sunscreen, and Skin1004 Hyalu-Cica Water-Fit Sun Serum are all moisturizing enough to double as a daytime layer. The routine is short: essence, serum, moisturizer, sunscreen in the morning; double cleanse, essence, serum, moisturizer at night. Add a sleeping mask two or three nights a week. Avoid foaming cleansers, alcohol-heavy toners, and over-exfoliation — the fastest way to make dry skin worse is to keep stripping it. The reason Korean skincare works for dry skin is that it treats hydration as the foundation of healthy skin rather than an afterthought. Give the routine four to six weeks and the flakiness, tightness, and reactivity usually calm down. The skin stops feeling like it is asking for help and starts feeling like it can take care of itself.

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Korean sunscreen bottles arranged on a sunlit stone surface

Beauty · By Priya Anand

The Best Korean Sunscreens, Tested Through a Full Summer

The gap between Korean and American sunscreen is not marketing. It is regulation. In the United States, sunscreen is classified as an over-the-counter drug, which means every UV filter must clear a drug-approval pathway. The practical result is that the last new filter approved for general use in the US arrived in the 1990s. In South Korea, sunscreen is regulated as a cosmetic, and Korean formulators have had access to modern filters — Tinosorb S, Tinosorb M, Uvinul A Plus — for two decades. Those filters matter for reasons that have nothing to do with brand loyalty. Older chemical filters like avobenzone degrade in sunlight and need stabilizers to keep working through an afternoon. Modern filters are photostable, cover a wider slice of the UVA spectrum, and — this is the part people actually notice — feel like nothing. There is no white cast, no greasy film, no stinging when it migrates toward the eyes. A sunscreen you enjoy applying is a sunscreen you reapply, and reapplication is where most sun protection actually fails. A word on the labels. Korean sunscreens carry both an SPF number and a PA rating. SPF measures UVB protection, the wavelength responsible for burning. PA, expressed in plus signs, measures UVA protection — the wavelength responsible for photoaging and much of the pigment change people spend serious money trying to reverse. PA++++ is the top of the scale, and it is common on Korean shelves and rare on American ones. We wore these six through a summer of commuting, hiking, and a week on the Andalusian coast. Each one was applied at the recommended two-finger quantity, reapplied every two to three hours outdoors, and evaluated on finish, pilling under makeup, eye sting, and how it behaved after sweating. Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun: Rice + Probiotics SPF 50+ PA++++ remains the one to beat. It is an organic filter formula that finishes like a light moisturizer, sits under foundation without pilling, and costs a fraction of comparable Western essences. If you buy one bottle, buy this one. Round Lab Birch Juice Moisturizing Sunscreen SPF 50+ PA++++ is the choice for dry or winter skin. It is heavier than the Joseon, closer to a proper cream, and it holds hydration through a cold, dry day without ever going tacky. COSRX Aloe Soothing Sun Cream SPF 50 PA+++ is the reactive-skin pick. Minimal fragrance, aloe-forward, forgiving on skin that is mid-retinoid or post-procedure. Slightly more visible on deeper skin tones than the others here. Missha All Around Safe Block Essence Sun SPF 45 PA+++ is the lightest formula in the group — genuinely watery, absorbs in seconds, and the best option for oily skin or humid climates where anything richer slides off by noon. Innisfree Daily UV Defense Sunscreen SPF 36 PA+++ is the everyday, low-commitment bottle. Lower SPF, but a pleasant matte finish and a price that makes generous application painless, which matters more than the number on the tube. Etude House Sunprise Mild Airy Finish SPF 50+ PA+++ finishes drier than the rest and works as a makeup base on its own. It is the one to pack if you hate the feeling of sunscreen entirely. Two cautions. First, buy from authorized retailers; grey-market sunscreen is a real problem and heat-damaged stock does not protect properly. Second, none of these are FDA-approved products, which means they are legally imported for personal use rather than sold as US drugs. That distinction is regulatory, not a statement about efficacy — Korean sunscreens are tested to ISO standards used across Europe and Asia. The broader point is worth sitting with. Sun protection is the single highest-return step in any skincare routine, ahead of every serum and every acid. The reason most people underapply is that most sunscreen is unpleasant. Korea solved the unpleasantness problem twenty years ago. The rest of us are still catching up.

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A bowl of cloudy rice water beside rice grains and a wooden comb

Beauty · By Mei Tanaka

Rice Water for Hair: The Science Behind the Tradition

In the Japanese imperial court of the Heian period, court women wore their hair to the floor and washed it in yu-su-ru, the cloudy water left over from rinsing rice. A thousand years later, in the village of Huangluo in Guangxi province, the Yao women are known internationally for hair that reaches past their knees and stays dark into their sixties. They wash it in fermented rice water. The practice is old enough that it predates any of the chemistry used to explain it. The chemistry, though, is real. Rice-rinse water carries starch, small amounts of protein, B vitamins, and inositol — a carbohydrate that has been shown in cosmetic-science testing to penetrate damaged hair and remain in the fiber even after rinsing. That residual deposit is what people are describing when they say their hair feels thicker after a rice-water rinse. It is not growth. It is a film, and film is exactly what damaged cuticles need. The most-cited work here is a 2010 study in the Journal of Cosmetic Science that measured the effect of rice-water treatment on hair-fiber friction. Treated fibers showed measurably reduced surface friction and improved elasticity. Less friction means less mechanical damage during brushing and styling, and mechanical damage — not follicle failure — is what causes most breakage-driven length loss. Hair that breaks less looks like hair that grows faster, even though the follicle is doing exactly what it always did. Fermentation changes the picture slightly. Letting rice water sit for twenty-four to forty-eight hours drops the pH toward the acidic range that hair prefers, roughly 4.5 to 5.5, and generates additional metabolites, including trace antioxidants. Acidic rinses flatten the cuticle, which is why fermented rice water tends to produce more shine than the fresh version. It also smells considerably worse. This is the trade. How to make it: rinse half a cup of uncooked rice, cover with two cups of water, swirl, and let it stand thirty minutes for the fresh version or a day at room temperature for the fermented one. Strain. Apply to clean, damp hair from mid-length to ends, leave for five to twenty minutes, and rinse thoroughly. Once a week is plenty. The important caveat is protein overload. Rice water is protein-adjacent, and hair that receives too much protein without matching moisture becomes stiff, straw-like, and brittle — the opposite of the intended result. Fine or low-porosity hair is especially vulnerable. If your hair feels crunchy after two or three treatments, stop, deep-condition, and cut the frequency in half. For anyone unwilling to keep a jar of fermenting rice on the counter, the commercial category has matured considerably. Korean and Japanese brands have spent the last decade formulating rice-ferment filtrate into shampoos, masks, and leave-ins at controlled concentrations, with the pH balanced and the smell handled. The results are less dramatic than the folklore promises and more consistent than a kitchen batch. What the tradition gets right, and what the industry took a thousand years to catch up to, is the underlying premise: hair care is mostly damage prevention. The Yao women are not doing anything to their follicles. They are protecting fiber that has been growing, undisturbed, for decades. That is the whole technique.

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Raw unrefined shea butter in a ceramic bowl with shea nuts on earth-toned cloth

Beauty · By Amara Okonkwo

Shea Butter for Skin: From West Africa to Your Vanity

Shea butter comes from a tree that refuses to be farmed. Vitellaria paradoxa grows across a belt of savanna running from Senegal to Ethiopia, takes fifteen to twenty years to bear fruit, and has resisted every serious attempt at plantation cultivation. The nuts are gathered from wild and semi-wild trees, almost entirely by women, in an industry that supports an estimated sixteen million households across West Africa. The trade name for the work is not marketing invention: shea is genuinely called women's gold, and the income from it is one of the few cash streams in the region that flows directly to women rather than through male household heads. The processing is physically brutal and chemically elegant. Nuts are collected, boiled, sun-dried, cracked, roasted, ground into paste, then kneaded with water until the fat separates and rises. What floats off is unrefined shea butter — ivory to pale yellow, smelling faintly of smoke and nuts, and containing the full complement of what makes shea worth buying in the first place. That complement is the part the industrial supply chain removes. Unrefined shea carries roughly 3 to 11 percent unsaponifiables — triterpene alcohols, cinnamic acid esters, tocopherols, and phytosterols. For comparison, most vegetable oils sit under 2 percent. Those compounds are what give shea its anti-inflammatory behavior and its unusual ability to support the skin barrier rather than merely sit on top of it. Refined shea — the white, odorless, shelf-stable version blended into most mass-market lotions — has been bleached and deodorized, and the process strips much of that fraction out. What remains is a decent occlusive fat. What is lost is the medicine. For dry skin, eczema-prone skin, and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, unrefined shea is one of the better-supported traditional ingredients in cosmetic literature. Small clinical work has shown improvement in eczema symptoms comparable to petrolatum-based controls, with better patient acceptance. It is also comedogenic enough that most people should keep it below the jawline, or use it only on dry patches if they are acne-prone. How to use it well: warm a pea-sized amount between the palms until it melts, then press — do not rub — into skin that is still damp from the shower. Shea is an occlusive, which means its job is to trap water that is already there, not to supply it. On dry hands, elbows, and heels it works alone. On the face, most people do better layering it over a hydrating serum. Sourcing is where the ethics live. Look for producers that name their cooperative, disclose their country of origin, and participate in the Global Shea Alliance or a comparable fair-trade structure. Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria account for the bulk of global supply, and the difference between a cooperative that pays its collectors properly and an aggregator that does not is invisible on the label unless the brand chooses to make it visible. The luxury market has understood shea's value for decades — L'Occitane built a substantial portion of its business on Burkinabè shea and has bought from the same women's cooperatives since the 1980s. What is changing now is that West African and diaspora-founded brands are capturing more of the margin themselves, selling unrefined product directly rather than as an ingredient line item in someone else's formula. That shift is the story worth following. The butter has always been good. The question was who got paid for it.

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Korean skincare bottles arranged on a woven mat with tropical leaves in warm light

Beauty · By Marisol Diaz

Where to Buy Korean Skincare in the Philippines: A Shopee Shopper's Guide

Manila in April is a stress test for skincare. The heat sits at thirty-four degrees, the humidity refuses to drop below seventy percent, and anything heavy you put on your face at eight in the morning has slid off by noon. This is exactly why Korean skincare took hold in the Philippines faster than almost anywhere else outside Korea itself: the formulas were built for a climate with real summers, and the philosophy — layers of light textures rather than one thick cream — happens to be the only thing that survives a jeepney commute. The question most Filipino readers actually have is not whether K-beauty works. It is where to buy it without either paying a two-hundred-percent mall markup or ending up with a counterfeit bottle. In practice, the answer for most people is Shopee — with rules. **Why Shopee, and why carefully** Shopee PH is where the volume is. Most major Korean brands now run official flagship stores on the platform, which means the same stock that would sit in a Seoul Olive Young shelf arrives with local pricing, free-shipping vouchers, and the 9.9 and 11.11 sale cycles that make a fifteen-dollar sunscreen cost closer to seven hundred pesos. The catch is that the same platform hosts resellers of wildly varying quality, and skincare is one of the most counterfeited categories in Southeast Asia. Three habits protect you. First, buy from stores carrying the official 'Shopee Mall' or brand-verified badge — the flagship store, not a general beauty reseller. Second, check the batch code and expiry in the listing photos; legitimate sellers post them, grey-market ones rarely do. Third, be suspicious of a price that is less than half of the usual range. Sunscreen especially: a fake SPF is not a cosmetic problem, it is a burn. **The Joseon-style glow, adapted for tropical skin** The routine everyone means when they say 'glass skin' is not complicated, and it does not require ten steps in this climate. A gentle low-pH cleanser at night. A hydrating toner or essence pressed in with the hands rather than a cotton pad. One lightweight serum — niacinamide for tone, or a rice or ginseng ferment if you want the traditional Korean-herbal direction. A gel-textured moisturizer. And in the morning, sunscreen, generously, every single day. That last step matters more here than almost anywhere. The Philippines sits close to the equator with year-round high UV index — often 11 or above by late morning. Sun protection is not a summer accessory; it is the single highest-return product in the entire routine, and it is why the most popular K-beauty item on Shopee PH is, consistently, a sunscreen. **What actually works in humidity** Rich, occlusive Western moisturizers tend to fail here. So do heavy mineral sunscreens that leave a white cast and pill under sweat. The Korean chemical and hybrid sunscreens that dominate PH shopping carts win because they behave like an essence: they absorb in seconds, sit invisibly under makeup, and can be reapplied at two in the afternoon without turning the face into a slick. For the glow layer, ampoules built on fermented rice or ginseng extract have a genuine cultural pedigree — these are ingredients used in Korean skin preparation long before the modern industry existed — and they deliver hydration without weight. Snail mucin remains popular for the same reason. Centella, or cica, is the go-to for anyone dealing with heat rash, acne, or the sensitivity that comes from too much sun. **Budgeting like a local** The smartest Shopee shoppers in the Philippines do three things: they stack platform vouchers with the store's own discount, they wait for double-digit date sales for the expensive items, and they buy sunscreen in multiples because it is the one thing they will absolutely finish. A full working routine — cleanser, essence, serum, moisturizer, sunscreen — is realistically achievable for under two thousand five hundred pesos if you time it right, which is roughly what one department-store moisturizer costs on its own. **One honest caveat** No product here will change your skin in a week, and any listing that promises whitening in seven days is selling something you should not put on your face. Korean skincare works because it is consistent and gentle, not because it is dramatic. Give a routine eight to twelve weeks, change one variable at a time, and wear the sunscreen. That is the entire secret, and it is the same in Manila as it is in Seoul.

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