Browsing: Beauty Products / Best of Beauty

Every year, new research emerges, and the beauty industry makes certain shifts—so we update our standard along with it. When we first announced these guidelines in 2019, they included 15 ingredient categories. Seven years later, the list is down to 10—we’ve removed PEGs, formaldehyde, triclosan, microbeads, and hydroquinone because they are no longer used in…

The first Best of Beauty Awards ran in Allure in 1996. In the 30 years since, we’ve never wavered in our commitment to finding the products that don’t just do what they say they’ll do, they do it better than the rest. We test and test (and test) and consult a panel of expert judges—including…

Despite what you might have heard, aging is not a skin-care emergency. Your face does not need to be “fixed,” signs that time has inevitably marched on don’t need to be reversed, and doing absolutely nothing to address the many normal versions of mature skin is not neglectful. But because our skin—and our perception of…

We’ve come a long way from those first lip colors, which were made of crushed stones combined with wax, but the gratification we get from finding a signature shade explains a lot about why our forebears bothered experimenting with flowers, berries, and even beetles and fish scales in their quest to tint and add shine…

We all have our own version of the dream nail-care routine: It might be monthly gels with a revolving door of designs, or weekly polish changes that keep a chic blue-red looking crisp on short nails, or a regular buff for the most polished of polish-free manicures. But unfortunately, most of us don’t have enough…

Technically speaking, a tool is a device for accomplishing a task, but sometimes it can be so much more than a means to an end. Take, for example, the most indulgent-feeling blush brush to ever grace your cheeks. Or a hand-painted hair clip designed to look like a ribbon. Or a waver that makes achieving…

Maybe beauty’s scientists and creators were feeling particularly restless over this past year and wanted to challenge themselves. Maybe they wanted to prove human ingenuity is still very much alive in the age of AI. Or maybe they simply felt the world could use a little novelty of the foil eye shadow and whisper-light foundation…

The standards for “clean” beauty are about as opaque as this year’s Best of Beauty-winning liquid eyeliner (Lisa Eldridge Kitten Flick Liquid Eyeliner). While we do celebrate a little mystery in makeup, we would really like to see more transparency in so-called clean products. But there is no universal definition of clean in the beauty…

The time was October, 1996. The Yankees were about to win the World Series, Bill Clinton was on his way to a decisive reelection victory, and, even more consequentially, Chanel Vamp was the nail polish color du jour. It was also the date we published our very first Allure Best of Beauty awards. The notion…

Allure editors leave no stone—or compact, palette, or tube—unturned when determining our Best of Beauty Award winners. And considering the number of submissions we receive (this year’s count was around 5,500), you’d be correct to assume that doing so takes a whole lot of time and commitment. But for you, dear reader, we’ll happily do…