The Stylist Skincare Awards 2025 is returning this October, with Stylist’s beauty team having spent the last six months working through serums, SPFs and eye creams to arrive at what beauty director Hanna Ibraheem calls ‘our definitive edit of the very best skincare on the market.’
It is, in the context of how award seasons tend to work, a more honest timeline than most. Six months of actual wear-testing, not a fortnight of press samples and a spreadsheet, is the kind of rigour that separates a useful guide from a glorified brand directory.
Why skincare topped the list
The decision to revive the awards was driven, at least in part, by data. Think Stylist, Stylist’s insight agency, surveyed thousands of women about the essential items they purchase every month. The answer was not a new It bag, a pair of trending trainers, or even a red lipstick. Skincare came out at the top. It is perhaps not surprising, and yet it is still worth saying plainly: for many women, a well-chosen moisturiser or a dependable SPF represents a more considered, more repeated purchase than almost anything else in their wardrobe or washbag.
The skincare industry has accelerated considerably in recent years, with buzzy actives, new delivery technologies and a steady stream of innovations arriving with enough frequency to make even seasoned editors squint. Stylist’s position, as they describe it, is to cut through that noise rather than amplify it. Coverage that draws on dermatologists and tests innovations in areas such as K-beauty is framed as a practical service to readers rather than a rolling trend report.
The Stylist Skincare Awards winners announced in October
Ibraheem’s announcement carries the particular warmth of someone who has actually been living with the products. ‘I’m delighted to announce that we’re bringing back our esteemed The Skincare Awards with the winners set to be announced this October,’ she said. ‘The result is our definitive edit of the very best skincare on the market: products that deliver on their promise, innovations we believe are moving the industry forward and formulas that make skincare a joy. I can’t wait to share the winners with you.’
The framing matters. ‘Products that deliver on their promise’ is a deliberately low bar in the best possible sense: not the most innovative, not the most expensive, not the most talked about on social media, but the ones that actually do what they say. That is, in practice, a harder standard to meet than it sounds, and it is the correct one.
There is also something worth noting in the phrase ‘formulas that make skincare a joy.’ Skincare has spent the last decade accumulating a certain amount of obligation, the ten-step routine, the ingredient-stacking anxiety, the fear of getting the order wrong. An awards list organised around joy rather than complexity is a reasonable corrective.
The beauty team has been testing across the full range of a skincare wardrobe, from the foundational (SPF, which is non-negotiable at any price point) to the corrective (serums, which is where most of the industry’s innovation energy currently sits) to the targeted (eye creams, still a category that divides dermatologists and devotees in equal measure). Winners will be announced in October.
Whether a particular formula makes the final edit will come down to the team’s six months of accumulated evidence. For readers making purchasing decisions in an oversaturated market, that is the most useful thing an awards list can offer: someone else has already done the work.
