Browsing: Best of Beauty 2026

Mid-October in New York City is often filled with gloomy gray days, and the Financial District—the Big Apple’s steely home for big business, bougie briefcases, and skyscrapers—tends to be a pretty colorless place. But at 11 a.m. on Oct. 18, 2026, in a sleek, subterranean space a stone’s throw from where Succession filmed its exterior shots,…

What’s better than one 30th birthday celebration? Two, duh. After a day filled with masterclasses, mingling, injectable appointments, and top-tier goodie bags at Allure’s Best of Beauty Live, the team did it all again for a nighttime session at Halo Twenty Eight in Manhattan’s Financial District.

At Allure, few things are more sacred than Best of Beauty—our annual venture to compile a roster of products that will eventually sit within a beauty editor-verified Pantheon of perfection. What began in 1996 as a novel concept, with just 73 categories, has become for all intents and purposes, the Nobel Prize of beauty. Over…

With so many K-beauty fans on the Allure staff (with me arguably being the biggest, hi!), it’s hardly a surprise that more than a handful of Korean skin-care, makeup, and hair-care products have earned our most prestigious stamp of approval: a 2026 Best of Beauty Award. The pros are plentiful: affordable prices (everything on this…

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…