Preppy skincare is the pink-and-pastel routine that took over social media, built on Glow Recipe, Drunk Elephant and a few lip treatments. Here is what each brand actually stands for, and what younger skin really needs.
Preppy Skincare, From The Official Preppy Handbook to Watermelon Toner
Lisa Birnbach's satirical The Official Preppy Handbook came out in October 1980 and sold over a million copies, and forty-odd years later preppy means something else entirely: pastel bottles, lip treatments and a very organized vanity. The preppy skincare look took off with the Sephora kids moment in early 2024, when tweens crowded stores for Drunk Elephant, Glow Recipe and Summer Fridays. Glow Recipe is the most photogenic of the lot. Christine Chang and Sarah Lee met as new hires at a big beauty company in Korea in 2005, quit in 2014 to start Glow Recipe with their own savings, and began by selling Korean brands to American shoppers before launching their own line in 2017. The name comes from Korean spa menus offering different glows, and the first product, a watermelon sleeping mask, was inspired by their grandmothers rubbing chilled watermelon rind on heat rash. The Dew Drops, the toner, the plum serum and the strawberry serum are the fruit-coded bottles you see on every shelf, with bright packaging that does half the marketing. The toner and the strawberry serum carry exfoliating acids, so they are for grown-up skin, not a ten-year-old.
The Drunk Elephant shelf
Tiffany Masterson was a stay-at-home mother in Houston when she founded Drunk Elephant in 2012, launching in August 2013 with a list she called the Suspicious Six, ingredients she avoids, including essential oils, fragrance and dyes, silicones and drying alcohols. The name comes from marula oil and the myth that elephants get drunk on marula fruit. B-Hydra is a hydrating serum, Slaai a butter cleanser that melts away makeup, D-Bronzi a set of bronzing drops with peptides, and Lippe a balm that gives lips a plumper look. The colorful pumps are part of the appeal, and the gentler formulas here are the ones I would reach for first.
Lips and mists, and the skip
Laneige relaunched in America through Sephora in September 2017, starting with the Lip Sleeping Mask, and it is still the overnight treatment most people picture. Summer Fridays began in 2018 with one product, Jet Lag Mask, from the bloggers Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Gores Ireland, and its lip butter is the daytime version. Sol de Janeiro, named for the peak of the Brazilian summer sun, makes the Cheirosa 40 mist, and Touchland, which Andrea Lisbona moved from Barcelona to Miami to launch in 2018, turned hand sanitizer into a scented mist after a Kickstarter that hit its goal within 24 hours. What I would skip, for anyone under 13, is the acids and retinoids. A gentle cleanser, moisturizer and sunscreen are enough; ask a dermatologist before adding more.
Keeping it simple
The fun of this look is the color and the ritual, not the number of steps. Pick one cleanser, one moisturizer, one sunscreen and a lip treatment. Add a serum only if your skin asks for it. Share the mists, not the acids. If anything stings, rinse it off and stop using it. The best routine is the one you enjoy doing. If you want to keep browsing, I also put together Preppy Nails, from Gingham to Pastel French and Korean Skincare, One Step at a Time.
