We're officially in the stretch of the year where I start every week thinking I have time and end it wondering where the weekend went. The holiday rush is gearing up, and the beauty calendar has gone from a trickle to a shove: launches, pre-launches, passes, exclusives, all of it happening before the Christmas noise drowns everything out. Now, what's worth a spot in the kikay kit before the parties start, and what's just noise? That's the question I had open while going through this week's news. Let's get into it.
Estée Lauder's new Advanced Night Repair essence wants to be the first thing on your face
Estée Lauder has added a step to the ritual. The Advanced Night Repair Recovery Treatment Essence is a water-light liquid that goes on right after cleansing, morning and night, before the Advanced Night Repair Serum. The brand's pitch is "a bio-exosome treatment in a bottle": what Estée Lauder calls Bio-Exosome Technology, with more than 500 peptides acting as skin "micro-messengers," plus Tripeptide-32, a peptide the brand says it picked out of 60 million variations and keeps exclusive to itself, and hyaluronic acid to hold on to the water.
The numbers Estée Lauder is quoting are from its own clinical tests on 31 Asian women, measured four hours after a single application: 84 percent more hydration and 19 percent more resilient skin, with a 20 percent reduction in visible redness and a cooling effect of 0.9°C on contact in smaller panels. It's also positioned for sensitive and post-IPL skin, with no drying alcohol, silicones, or synthetic fragrance. The reason to layer it, per the brand, is penetration: an in vitro test found the serum absorbed better over the essence than on its own. That's the classic essence argument, now with exosome branding, and it's the clearest sign yet that the "skin longevity" vocabulary has arrived at the Estée Lauder counter.
How to use: three to five drops, pressed into skin, then the serum. It's available now at select Estée Lauder stores and on the brand's Lazada flagship and Shopee store.
MAC's Glow Play highlighter is a putty, and it has flip
MAC's Glow Play line started with the cushiony blush, and the new Glow Play Bouncy Highlighter is the same idea taken to the high points of the face: a creamy, cloud-like putty with superfine shimmer that you tap on with a finger for a sheer glow or build with a brush for a full light-catching beam. The texture is the point. It's bouncy in the pan, blends without dragging base, and layers over bare skin or finished makeup, which makes it a good candidate for the midday touch-up that's been happening in your office bathroom anyway.
The Philippines gets all eight shades, and half of them have a "flip," meaning the pearl shifts color as you move. Sky Kissed (light pink pearl) and Stratus (light purple pearl) are the soft ones. Sunset Drizzle is a mauve pearl with a blue flip, Cloud Candy a bright red-pink with gold, Wind Chill a white pearl that flips blue and green, and Cloud Burst a light bronze with gold. For medium to deep skin, Sepia Skies (medium bronze, copper flip) and Glowzone (dark brown, purple flip) are the ones that won't go ashy. It's a 7.5g pan and US$34 in the States. Available now at MAC stores and online.
BW Women's Whimsyland party has a ticket, and the ticket is a deo spray
Blackwater's women's line has spent the week filling in the details of Once Upon a Spritz: Return to Whimsyland, the November 8 celebration of the BW Women Whimsical Collection. The event itself is a Sunday afternoon, 3 to 7 PM, at Bigger Pictures on Sheridan Street in Mandaluyong, with performances by Will Ashley, MeiMei, and VXON. The way in is a P499 Whimsical Event Pass on the Blackwater Official TikTok Shop, and the mechanics are a little unusual: you search "Once Upon a Spritz," pick the Whimsical Deo Body Spray variant you want, and check out. That purchase is your pass. The spray itself is handed to you at the event, along with booth access and brand freebies. Slots are limited.
The booths now have names, which tells you what the afternoon looks like. The Potion Garden is where you'll find the full collection, which the brand is now describing as nine scents in total. Whimsical launched with five, so that's four new ones, and Blackwater is still keeping the names to itself, which presumably is the reveal. The Twinkle Grove is a bedazzling station for your deo spray, Petals of Paradise is a flower bar where you build an arrangement to take home, and Pixie Rings is a ring toss with prizes. Dress code is pastel and whimsical. For P499, a deo spray plus a concert plus a flower bar is a fairly generous bit of math, and the under-P200 price point that made the Whimsy sprays a group-chat favorite is clearly funding a bigger ambition for the line.
Happy Skin's "perfectly sunlit" launch is an illuminator with ceramides in it
The teaser said "something perfectly sunlit," and the answer turned out to be the Off Duty Glow Illuminator, P799, which landed over the weekend alongside two new pot products. The illuminator is a lightweight, second-skin glow with ultra-fine light-reflecting pigments rather than chunky shimmer, and it's built to be used four ways: on bare skin, under foundation as a radiant primer, mixed into your base for all-over luminosity, or tapped on cheekbones as a highlight. Happy Skin has also put actual skincare in it: ceramides for the moisture barrier, bakuchiol for firmer-looking skin over time, and Crodarom to calm visible redness and shine. There are six shades, matched to the brand's foundation names (Ivory Beige, Nude Beige, Soft Beige, and Sand Beige among them).
The companions are the Off Duty Seamless Perfecting Pot Concealer (P599, five shades from Cream Beige to Medium Beige), a creamy full-coverage pot for concealing, brightening, and sculpting, and the Off Duty Seamless Perfecting Pot Corrector (P599, in Peach and Medium Peach) for neutralizing dark circles and discoloration before the concealer goes on. The pot format is a smart move for the humidity: it's easier to pick up a little and build than to fight a doe-foot. All three are available now online and in stores, and the illuminator is already showing "low inventory" in some shades on the brand's site.
Issy is relaunching its base in black, and it's a Shopee exclusive on Saturday
Remember the founder's "I don't believe in launch calendars" carousel from the start of the month? One of the mystery slides has a name. Issy's Soft-Focus Skin Collection arrives this Saturday, October 25, exclusively on Shopee, in new black packaging ("We now come in black. The groundbreaking part is inside."). There are two products. The Fluid Skin Tint is a remarkably lightweight formula with blurring pigments, a natural matte finish, a weightless feel, and a self-setting formula that doesn't need powder: three drops for sheer coverage, six to nine if you want more, and either way the brand's line is "skin looking like skin." It comes in 15 shades, which is a serious range for a local tint. The Soft-Focus Powder Skin Tint is the blurring powder from the spoiler slide, designed to pair with the fluid tint shade for shade.
Makeup artist Slo (@slomakeup) is the face of the launch, explaining "the thinking behind the future of skin," and the brand has spent the week leaning into its seven-year history of "rethinking base". A self-setting matte tint with 15 shades, if it performs, is a direct shot at the skin tint category the Korean brands have owned on Shopee.
Faboulash has five new XL styles and a Jelly Eugenio drop today
Faboulash's Bespoke XL Pre-Bonded 10-Row Lashes are the cluster lashes you see on a lot of TikTok Lives, and the lineup has grown from eleven styles to sixteen. The five new ones cover the range: XL12 Soft Glam is full clusters with a rounded, glamorous finish, XL13 Wispy Cat-Eye is long and fluttery with the emphasis on the outer corners, XL14 Bold Volume is dense and dramatic (the brand's own caption: it "does NOT do subtle"), XL15 Wispy Spikes is textured and spiky for a defined soft-glam effect, and XL16 Natural is lightweight and subtle for a more open-eyed look. They're on TikTok Shop, Shopee, and Lazada now.
The more interesting bit is what's dropping today, October 23: a Faboulash x Jelly Eugenio collaboration, teased all week as "something new underneath" and "eye candy." Jelly already has his 4-step Skin So Good system with Sunnies Face, so this is his second local collab in a month, and a lash collab is a natural fit for someone whose whole aesthetic is a very done eye. No details beyond the date at press time.
Galderma is paying $1.5 billion for ZO Skin Health
If your derma has ever sent you home with a bag of ZO, this one's for you. Galderma, the Swiss dermatology company behind Cetaphil, Restylane, and Alastin, has agreed to buy ZO Skin Health for US$1.5 billion in cash. ZO is the physician-dispensed brand founded by dermatologist Dr. Zein Obagi in 2007, built on daily, regimen-based retinol and acid protocols, and sold through more than 16,500 physicians, medical spas, and online accounts in over 40 countries, including a good number of Metro Manila clinics. It did about US$330 million in sales in the twelve months to June.
Galderma's logic is straightforward: ZO's retinoid-heavy daily regimens sit neatly next to Alastin's peptide-based pre- and post-procedure line, and together they make Galderma the biggest name in what the industry calls medical-grade skincare, the stuff you can only buy from a doctor. The company plans to spend heavily on ZO in the first year and says the deal should close by early 2027, pending regulators. Dr. Obagi's line on it: "I am confident we have found a home where our philosophy will endure." For the rest of us, it's another sign that the clinic counter is where the big money in skincare is heading, right as every drugstore brand is putting "derm-inspired" on the box.
And that's it for this week's Beauty Roundup!
