And while I know that a big chunk of the beauty products Team U.S. wax lyrical about aren’t available on UK shores, it’s my job to know what’s trending in different corners of the world. Whenever a product crops up that I know isn’t available in the UK, I pop it into Google to see what it has to say for itself. I scroll through U.S. beauty sites to read reviews, check their retailers and dissect their ingredient lists for any up-and-coming ingredients trends.
But imagine my surprise when not once, not twice, but three times in the past month I have googled a U.S.-adored beauty product to discover that actually it is available in the UK—I’ve just never heard of it. It got me thinking about all of the brilliant beauty products that simply don’t get any airtime.
I sat down and had a serious think about what the reasons for this could be. Differing tastes? Perhaps. Less corporate budget being spent on UK promotion? Very likely. Stiff competition in a nation that is inherently stuck in its beauty ways? Most certainly. The reasons that these U.S.-favourite beauty products haven’t received equal levels of hype in the UK, I decided, are probably down to boring business decisions, not because the products aren’t any good.
So to help lift the lid on some beauty products that U.S. beauty editors adore, I had a cracking idea. First, I reached out to one of my favourite people in beauty, Who What Wear’s senior beauty editor in the U.S., Erin Jahns, to see if she thought my idea had any legs. When she agreed there seems to be a big disparity in our go-to recommendations, we decided it was time to do something about it. I sent her a list of all of the products I think U.S. beauty editors deem the best in the business in various categories (based on my research) along with their cult UK counterpart and asked her to confirm or deny.
I then made it my mission to get my hands on every U.S.-favourite product I could so that I could test it out against our UK go-tos. And I’ll warn you now: Things got competitive…
