Prepare To Be Obsessed With These Beauty Brands In 2018

In the weird and wonderful world of beauty on the internet, 2017 was the year of the unicorn, the truly crazy face masks, the Fenty Beauty takeover, and the contour kit from KKW that we should probably pretend never happened tbh.

Yeeeah... looking back now, it was kind of a lot.

Beauty addicts, delve into the wonders of how a Lush Brazened Honey Face Mask is actually made IRL...

So, we don’t know about you but after getting through all of that we are MORE than ready for a whole new vibe when it comes to approaching makeup and skincare for 2018 - and that means delving into some new brands too.

Expect a whole lot of millennial pink packaging to come your way, along with a focus on fresh skincare, movement towards minimalism and some epic levels of inclusivity over the next twelve months.

Covering all bases with skincare, makeup and haircare alike, these are the Insta-ready, upcoming beauty brands that you should probably prepare to be obsessed with throughout 2018.

Lixir

Have you ever seen anything that you need on your Instagram feed as immediately as you need these tubes of aesthetic goodness?

If all of the best beauty brands out there had a baby, it’d probably look something like LIXIR. But hey, it’s what’s inside the minimal nude and black packaging that really counts.

Their no-fuss range of the essentials like cult Vitamin C Paste and must-have Electrogel Cleanser cover the basics for an essential everyday routine, with what they describe as an ‘advanced yet relaxed approach’ to skincare. The dream for lazy guys and girls, basically.

Glossier

Glossier had a pretty great year in 2017 with their long-awaited UK launch basically taking over the blogosphere for a good few weeks, but the only way is up in 2018 for a brand that creates products and packaging as good as these.

With a mantra that’s all about celebrating ‘real girls in real life’, expect to find refreshingly simple products that believe barely there is better.

Swap your heavy foundation for the sheer enhancing Perfecting Skin Tint, ditch your defining pencil in favour of Boy Brow, and swap your contour kit for Cloud Paint. You’ll soon see why everyone wants to be a Glossier girl.

Harper + Ari

If you’re after something that’s gonna transform your rough, winter-beaten skin into its true peachy self, you need a Harper + Ari jar sitting pretty on your bathroom shelf.

Kinda niche, but just one of their Exfoliating Sugar Cubes is enough to exfoliate and nourish your entire body if you massage it gently over wet skin in the shower a couple of times a week.

You’ll soon be softer than soft and smell good enough to eat. They literally describe it as ‘dessert for your skin’, so what’s not to love?

KNOW Cosmetics

Been sleeping on KNOW Cosmetics 'til now? Time to wake up and get involved, because they launched into Superdrug and Oliver Bonas last year and are about to be all over your social media thanks to that GOALS packaging.

Dubbing themselves a ‘fixer brand’, KNOW are here to offer easy peasy solutions to your everyday makeup dramas with each of their products cleverly named after a beauty stress.

No Thin Lips aka lip plumper, No Dark Shadows aka under eye concealer, No Bare Brows aka… well, you can probably work that one out. Simple, but oh so effective.

Lore Originals

Gender neutral beauty is set to become much more prominent in 2018, with growing conversations about gender, representation and equality finally leaking into the beauty world too.

Kinda like you’d get a unisex fragrance, unisex skincare is set for a breakthrough over the next few months, with super cool brands like Lore Originals here to cater to both ‘his and hers’ haircare in one go.

Cleansing, purifying, conditioning and restoring ingredients for your hair? Check. Minimum effort, off-duty model vibes? Double check. Nude and marble packaging? Yes it matters, and yes it's a check. 

Drunk Elephant

Sisters and misters over in the States will already be familiar with Drunk Elephant, but the best-selling Sephora skincare brand is FINALLY hopping over to the UK too, and beauty experts could not be more excited.

Hitting Space NK in 2018 (so yep, it’s slightly more on the pricey side), Drunk Elephant aims to ditch all of the dodgy ‘question mark’ ingredients from its formulas, leaving behind some seriously effective skincare that gets rave reviews.

Inside the cute pastel packaging you’ll find gems like the TLC Sukari Babyfacial, the TLC Framboos Glycolic Night Serum and the Lala Retro Whipped Cream. Yep, we’ll take the lot, please.

Words by Lucy Wood