It's Halloween weekend running straight into Undas, which in Manila means two things: the costume makeup is already half-bought, and half the city is about to spend Friday evening on the expressway. Are you excited for the long weekend? All I’m doing is playing tennis so I’d say it will be a good one. Let’s get into the beauty news!
GRWM Cosmetics is teasing a pot concealer for November
GRWM Cosmetics has spent the week doing the thing brands do when they're sure of a product: showing you bare skin and saying almost nothing. The posts started on October 25 ("your next base fave might be just around the corner"), then got more specific. October 27: "Different skin, different needs. One pot that gets it. Coming this November." October 28: "Coverage that needs no introduction. Coming this November." The videos are bare-faced testers with visible blemishes and texture, filmed close, and the brand's hashtags have settled on "soon." Put the clues together and you get a pot concealer, the brand's first entry into a format that Happy Skin and Issy have both leaned into this quarter.
That makes sense for GRWM. Its base line has been built on their All About That Base concealer and their Daily Skin Tint, which are mid-coverage products for people who like their skin to show. A concealer in a pot is the opposite move: a dense, medium-to-full cream you pick up with a finger or a small brush and place exactly where you need it, which is also the format that survives Manila humidity better than a doe-foot.
No name, shade count, or price yet, and the brand hasn't said which week of November. If you're waiting, GRWM's own sale runs October 29 to 31, and its 11.11 Beauty Clock In is scheduled for November 9 to 15, which would be a very GRWM place to launch a new base product.
Vice x Lierge took 110,000 orders in one night, then had to apologize
The V x Lierge TikTok Live Grand Launch happened last Friday, October 23, and by Vice's own count it became the brand's biggest live yet: Vice Cosmetics finished as the number one brand on TikTok Shop overall and the number one brand on TikTok Shop Live, and Lierge Perey became the number one creator livestream and, per the brand, the record-holder for the highest GMV ever in a single TikTok Shop Live session in the Beauty and Personal Care category. Vice hasn't put a peso figure on it, but a brand that's been the top seller on the platform for years calling something its biggest ever is the number that matters.
Three days later came the other post. On October 26, Vice published a three-slide apology addressed to everyone who ordered from the live. The headline figure is in the first slide: the brand received over 110,000 orders on October 23, "many of you are still waiting for your orders to ship," and "your orders will not be cancelled." The second slide is more specific. Some Queen Lierge bundles went out missing a palette (at least one order reported broken), which Vice calls "an oversight on our end," and the brand says all affected customers will get the missing palette at no additional cost, with its team already reaching out; if you're one of them, you can also send your Order ID through TikTok Shop chat to speed it up. The third slide is the sign-off: "We understand the disappointment, especially after all the excitement surrounding this launch."
To be fair to Vice, this is the right way to handle it. But 110,000 orders through a single creator's livestream is a scale nobody in local beauty has had to fulfill before, and the missing-palette problem is exactly what happens when bundles get assembled in a hurry. The customizable, stack-it-yourself format that made the collection exciting (eight-pan magnetic palettes at P695, stackable blush and bronzer trios at P695, lip liners and bullets at P395) is also the format with the most pieces to lose. If you ordered and your bundle came up short, check the carousel and send that Order ID. The Super Brand Day deals ended October 29, and the collection is still on Vice's TikTok Shop.
Squad's Bloodline Tint is a lip oil with a stain inside, and you're not allowed to shake it
Squad Cosmetics timed this one well. Bloodline Tint launched on October 27, just in time for the Halloween weekend, and the brand's own warning is the hook: "BEWARE: DO. NOT. SHAKE." It's a hybrid of lip tint and lip oil, with droplets of pigment suspended in a crystal-clear hydrating oil, so the tube looks like a lava lamp of red until you swipe it. The water-based pigment is carried with hyaluronic acid, the oil base has sweet almond oil, vitamin E, and sunflower oil, and the result is a glossy, "just-bitten" stain that stays after the shine wears off. Shake it and you'd blend the two phases into a uniform pink, which is apparently not the point.
The five shades are all Halloween-coded: Blood Drip, Vamp Stain, Fresh Bite, Draw Blood, and First Bite. Squad posted a "lipmaxxing 101" video on Thursday showing five ways to apply them, from a dab in the center for a bitten lip to a full swipe for a proper red. It's available on Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and in stores nationwide, and Squad's birthday sale (up to 50 percent off) has been extended to October 31, so there's a window to get it cheaper.
The two-phase lip oil has been a K-beauty and C-beauty idea for a while; it's nice to see a local brand do it at a Squad price, with a name that makes it fun to buy.
Jennifer Lawrence has a haircare brand, and it's built by a biotech company
The celebrity-beauty graveyard has been filling up this year (The Outset closed this month, Halsey's af94 quietly went dark, and Rhode was sold to e.l.f. before its founder could tire of it), so the obvious question about mes°, which Jennifer Lawrence launched on October 27, is why this one should be different. The answer she's giving is the partner. mes° (pronounced "mess") was built with Arcaea, the Boston biotech company founded by MIT-trained engineer Jasmina Aganovic, a Ginkgo Bioworks spinout that raised US$78 million in 2021 from investors including Chanel and Givaudan, and that already develops ingredients for Olaplex and Chanel. Lawrence found Aganovic through a TEDx talk on using biology to make better hair ingredients, said it gave her "goosebumps," and the two have been working on this for about three years. Aganovic, for her part, "didn't want to do a celebrity thing," but eventually changed her mind after one too many calls from Ms. Lawrence’s team.
The line is three products, all sold only at mesbeauty.com. The Multitask Repair Mask (US$52) is the one with an idea in it: it goes on dry hair and can be left on for five minutes, overnight, or worn slicked back as a glossy wet look, which removes the "stand in the shower for 20 minutes" step most of us skip. It uses a biomimetic tri-lipid complex and olive squalane, and the brand claims six times less breakage and up to 158 percent more lipids. The Good Roots Volume Mist (US$34) uses what Arcaea calls ARC-5 technology and Mediterranean microalgae for root lift and 75 percent less scalp oil, and the Off-Duty Restyling Serum (US$44) is a two-phase oil-and-serum for days two to four, with 86 percent less frizz and heat protection to 450°F. The set of three is US$120.
All of those numbers are the brand's own and come without methodology, so read them as marketing. The pitch is "Unbothered Beauty," which is to say: fewer washes, less effort, and products designed for how people actually live with their hair rather than for a lab. Lawrence has talked about her own damaged, hard-to-manage curls as the starting point.
There's no international shipping yet, so this is a pasabuy if you want to try it, and at these prices it's not a casual one. But a celebrity brand whose science partner is a real biotech firm with real customers is a different animal from a white label deal with a name on the box, and I'm more curious about this one than I expected to be.
Dove made a perfume that smells like the soap, priced it at $19.57, and sold out in a day
This is the launch that made me raise an eyebrow, and then made me think: wait I want it. Dove has released its first-ever fine fragrance, and the scent is the Original Beauty Bar. That's it. That's the fragrance. Dove Original Fragrance is soft, clean, and, in the brand's word, "instantly recognizable," developed by Ann Gottlieb, the nose behind CK One, Dior J'adore, and Marc Jacobs Daisy, and it comes in a glass bottle shaped like the curved bar with a gold Dove bird for a cap. The price is US$19.57, a nod to 1957, the year the Beauty Bar launched in the US.
Dove says this came from years of comments and DMs asking for the soap scent in a bottle, and it was handled like a sneaker drop rather than a counter launch: a waitlist opened October 22 at dovefragrance.com, sales opened October 27 at 9 AM Pacific as a one-time, limited-quantity run, and by October 28 Dove's own Instagram had changed the caption to "SOLD OUT" and posted a thank-you: "It started with a Beauty Bar. Then came your comments, scent memories, and your requests to bottle the Original." The brand says it won't be restocked, though the post ends with "We're listening," which is the kind of thing a brand says before it makes more.
I think the reason it landed is that "clean skin" has quietly become one of the most-wanted scent profiles of the past two years, from Glossier You to all the soapy musks on TikTok, and Dove has owned that smell for nearly seventy years without ever bottling it. Somebody in that marketing meeting was right. Now do the pink one.
And that's it for this week's Beauty Roundup!
