Beauty Roundup: GRWM's Viola and Silk Cases, blk's Pocket Minis, Vice x Lierge, and The Outset Closes Its Doors
The local brands have figured out that we will buy anything twice if the second one is smaller, and I say that as someone who already owns the full-size versions of everything in this week’s column. Over in the international section, the mood is more sober. one brand is apologizing and another one is closing. Let’s get into it.
GRWM read the comments and made two new palette cases
If you've been typing "make it purple" under every Face Card post, congratulations, it worked. GRWM Cosmetics is adding two colors to the Face Card Customizable 6-Pan Palette Puffy Case: Viola, a soft lilac, and Silk, an off-white. The brand says it straight: "The comments said it, and we had to make it happen." It's the same puffy case as before, semi-gloss PU leather with a quilted diamond pattern, two pan slots with removable protective covers, a pinhole for popping pans out, and a little built-in ejector pin so you're not prying at your blush with a hairpin.
The thing to remember about these cases is that they're the furniture, not the makeup. The pans are sold separately, and the whole point of Face Card is that you fill them with whatever you actually reach for. So Viola and Silk are really an invitation to rearrange, which is a low-cost way for a brand to get you back on the site. Both colors land today, October 9, at 5 PM, everywhere GRWM sells.
BW Women is teasing a Whimsical sequel, and the first one just got cheaper
BW Women posted a single frame this week: a fairy emoji, the words "Whimsical 2.0?", and a date, November 8. That's it. No product, no shade, no scent. The original Whimsical Collection, the deo body spray that has been doing the rounds all year (and bankrolling the Dylan Menor concert raffle, whose 13 winners were announced Wednesday), is apparently getting a second act, and the brand would like you to speculate in the comments until then.
In the meantime, the current Whimsical is on buy-one-take-one for 10.10, alongside the regular BW Women Deo Spray in any variant, with a P100 voucher on a P1,000 spend and a free Blackwater HexaEdge razor on P299 orders (P499 on TikTok Shop). The brand's other story this fortnight is I Mist Summer, three I Mist You Conditioning Hair Mists in Vanilla Whisper, Citrus Melody, and Lavender Harmony, with castor and argan oil so your hair gets something out of it besides a scent. Summer, in October, in a typhoon month. We'll allow it.
Hello Glow spent the weekend handing out SPF to Pokémon trainers
Hello Glow set up an SPF Glow Station at Pokémon Run 2026 on October 3 and 4, which is a very specific place to find your audience: thousands of people about to spend a morning outdoors in costume, most of whom had not thought about sunscreen. The booth did touch-ups, ran a toss game, and sent people off with tote bags. This is the kind of sampling that actually makes people excited to try the product instead of tossing it somewhere and forgetting about it.
Back online, the brand's 10.10 sale is live now: the Mattifying Sunscreen Spray at 40% off, the Rosewater Serum Soothing Gel at 35% off, buy-one-take-one on the Sun Care Stick SPF 60+ and the 3-in-1 Lightweight Sun Care Gel, and a free 3-in-1 Lifting Serum sampler on orders of P299 and up. If you've been meaning to try the pouch serum we talked about last month without committing to a full pouch, this is the cheap way in.
blk put its whole routine in a jelly pouch
blk Cosmetics has gone mini, and not shyly. The Pocket Minis Set (P1,499) is a seven-piece kit: Mini Soft Blur Powder Foundation, Mini Creamy All-Over Paint, Mini False Lash Waterproof Mascara, Mini Lip Butter, a Mini Paint Keychain, a Mini Jelly Pouch, and a scatter of Whimsy Gems to stick on things. There are four sets, each built around a foundation shade (Oat, Vanilla, Butterscotch, Chestnut), with the paint and lip butter shades changing to match, so you pick your base first and the rest follows.
It's limited edition, pitched at "early gifting season," and the brand is openly encouraging you to collect all four, which is a lot of mini mascara for one person. The honest use case is a travel kit or a handbag backup, and at P1,499 for a full face in one pouch it's a fair deal, especially if the minis are generous. The set got first dibs on Joselle Alandy's TikTok Live on October 6 and is now in stores and online everywhere blk is sold.
Vice is building a palette you assemble yourself, with Lierge Perey on the throne
Vice Cosmetics' next big drop is V x Lierge, a limited-edition collection with TikTok creator Lierge Perey, whom the brand has crowned the "Queen of Face." The centerpiece is the Three Strikes Palette, a customizable magnetic system: an 8-pan Eyeshadow Palette in three color stories (Miss Smokey, Miss Cutie, Miss Golden), a Blush Trio, and a Brontour Trio that stacks a cream bronzer, a shimmer powder bronzer, and a cool-toned contour in two depths, Miss Baked for fair to light-medium and Miss Toasted for tan to deep. You buy the pieces you want and snap them together.
Lips get their own corner: the Lip Pout Lip Bullet, a soft-matte creamy bullet in six nudes and roses (Everyday Pout is the mauve MLBB), and the Lip Sculpt Lip Liner in eight browns with names like That Kween and That Diva. The launch is in two parts: an invite-only event on October 16 for ten winners of the Queen Lierge Challenge, then the TikTok Live grand launch on October 23 at 7 PM on Lierge's account, which also kicks off Vice's TikTok Shop Super Brand Day (October 23 to 29).
Haus Labs grew a bronzer from six shades to eleven, the hard way
Pasabuy alert, with a side of accountability. Haus Labs' new Sun Dipped Bronzing Veil was supposed to launch with six shades. Then creator Golloria, who has built an audience testing how products perform on deep skin, posted that the deeper end didn't go deep enough, and added that she'd been asked to take the post down because the product was still under embargo. That second part is what turned a shade-range complaint into a story.
To the brand's credit, it didn't argue. Lady Gaga apologized, said the launch had been "handled poorly," confirmed the company had apologized to Golloria directly, and pulled the bronzer back into development. It's returning with eleven shades instead of six, and Haus Labs says it's reviewing how it handles feedback internally. No relaunch date or local pricing yet, so if you're pasabuy-ing from the US, wait for the eleven.
The Outset, Scarlett Johansson's skincare brand, has closed
Four years after it launched with a promise of simplified, gentle, "clean" skincare, The Outset is done. The closure went up quietly on the brand's own website at the end of September, with a note that existing orders will still be fulfilled. Co-founder Kate Foster Lengyel had already stepped down in April 2025, and the brand spent part of this year under a fractional CEO, which is rarely a sign that things are going well.
The trade read is that The Outset got caught in the middle: too gentle and too vague for a market that now wants clinical results and named actives, and too expensive to compete with the K-beauty brands doing clever formats at a fraction of the price. It sold at Sephora, Goop, and Nordstrom, never officially in the Philippines, so most of us only ever met it through pasabuy or traveling. Still, it's a useful marker. A famous face and a calm aesthetic no longer carry a skincare brand on their own.
Mary Kay is doing K-beauty now, and it's not a drill
Mary Kay, the brand your tita sold in the 90s, has launched a Korean-made, special-edition K-Beauty Texture Edit, and the ingredient list reads like a TikTok Shop bestseller page. The Melt-In Cleansing Balm goes balm to oil to milk and is infused with PDRN, the salmon DNA fragment everyone is suddenly putting in everything, plus rice bran oil and vitamin E. The Snail Gel Face Patches are cooling hydrogels with snail mucin, niacinamide, licorice, and several hyaluronic acids. The Collagen Moisturizing Gel is a bouncy jelly with collagen peptides, niacinamide, and squalane, pitched squarely at the glass-skin crowd.
It went on sale October 5 in 40 markets, through Mary Kay's website and its Independent Beauty Consultants, while supplies last. Mary Kay has operated in the Philippines for years, so the odds are decent that this is one of the 40, but the release doesn't list them. Either way, it says something that a direct-selling institution now thinks "made in Korea" is the pitch.
And that's it for this week's Beauty Roundup!
