If you ever want to spot hoards of Glossier diehards out in the wild, all you need to do is venture to the corner of Canal and Lafayette in New York City. Not only is the SoHo intersection home to the company's original office and showroom, but it's now the location of the first permanent Glossier Flagship, which opens to the public tomorrow, November 8th. After years of attracting tourists, fans, and editors alike to the 123 Lafayette St. HQ, the brand is gearing up to entice even longer lines of millennials in sheer matte lipstick and no-foundation foundation in the massive new space, designed to characteristically Instagram-friendly perfection by Gachot Studios and P.R.O.
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From floor to ceiling, just about everything is covered in a wash of pale pink and the sort of ASMR textures (just look at the grooved display holding the Cloud Paints and Balm Dot Coms) you might expect someone to make a whispery YouTube video about. The brand also added features that weren't available in the former showroom, like double slate sinks (known as the "wet room") stocked with skin-care samples free for testing and an experiential room dedicated to the brand's best-selling brow gel filled with giant mirrors and oversized bottles of Boy Brow (not for purchasing, but for selfies).
Glossier didn't just renovate the space for the sake of content creation: It also set out to improve the shopping experience. Forbes reports that offline purchases will be synced to online purchases, meaning that a customer can browse inside the store, add products to their cart, and finalize the checkout at home if they so please. Oh, and if you've missed the employees in off-white dystopian jumpsuits, don't worry — they're back, and ready to help you chat through any product you finally have a chance to sample in-person.
But the flagship store is only half (okay, maybe more than half) of the brand's big news; considering it hasn't even been a year since Glossier received over $50 million in funding from investors, our expectations are higher than ever for product launches in 2019. Before the brand reveals what's to come in the new year, it decided to follow up successful innovations, like Lash Slick, Zit Stick, and Solution, with an idea plucked straight from fans: reintroducing the beloved Generation G Lipsticks with a streamlined new look.
The sheer matte lipsticks recently got a major makeover that not only overhauled the tube, but the formula, too. The translucent plastic sticks sometimes criticized by customers in the past (truthfully, we dug 'em) were replaced by sleek, durable silver tubes. The revised formula includes the addition of new moisture-retaining ingredients — sunflower synthetic beeswax, blue agave, and safflower oil — that promise to hydrate your lips while still delivering the same blotted effect we've come to know and love. Luckily, the six-shade range is still the same, so you can get your Crush and Zip exactly as you remember them. Now, when should we expect the Glossier candle we were (not really) promised?