NewBeauty 2026 Awards: 395 Winners Signal Where Beauty Is Heading
Every spring, one list lands harder than the rest for anyone paying attention to where beauty is actually going. NewBeauty’s Annual Beauty Awards, now in their 16th year, dropped their 2026 winners on March 31 — a 59-page special awards section inside the Spring-Summer issue (hitting newsstands April 7), with model and actress Molly Sims on the cover.
The scale: 395 winners across 10 categories — Skin, Hair, Makeup, Fragrance, Nails, Body, Smile, Wellness, Innovations, and In-Office Treatments. What separates this list from the crowded field of beauty awards is the machinery behind it.
How the Jury Works
NewBeauty doesn’t rely on editor enthusiasm alone. The selection process combines yearlong hands-on testing by the editorial team with a structured survey of 150 board-certified dermatologists and plastic surgeons. These are practitioners who see patients daily, recommend products on clinical grounds, and use treatments in their own practices.
The editor testing isn’t a few weeks of trying new launches. Products are evaluated over months, with the question always being: does this visibly change anything? When that observation lines up with what dermatologists are actually recommending, a product makes the list. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
The Theme CEO Mike Glaicar Named
NewBeauty CEO Mike Glaicar described this year’s awards as representing “a new era of beauty — where science, innovation and wellness converge.” That framing holds up when you look at which categories are growing and which types of products dominated.
The Skin category saw a clear lean toward clinical-grade formulations: peptide complexes, retinol alternatives with study-backed efficacy data, and barrier-repair ingredients that have crossed from dermatology into mainstream skincare. The Wellness category, once treated as adjacent to beauty, now sits firmly inside the awards structure — a signal that inside-out approaches (supplements, gut health, sleep support marketed for skin outcomes) have become mainstream enough to judge alongside topicals.
Innovations covered the products that don’t fit neatly into existing buckets: at-home devices, AI-assisted skin diagnostics, hybrid formulas that blur the line between treatment and skincare. In-Office Treatments reflected where aesthetic medicine is heading — energy-based devices and injectables that reduce downtime while improving precision.
Using the List
395 winners is a lot to sort through. The practical approach: start by category, then filter by whether the pick reflects the dermatologist survey data rather than just editorial preference. NewBeauty’s structure makes it possible to distinguish between “editors loved it” and “clinicians recommend it” — though many winners earn both.
The full list is available at newbeauty.com/awards/2026. Print copies of the Spring-Summer issue reach US newsstands April 7.
NewBeauty operates under MJH Life Sciences, a medical media company founded in 2005. That parentage matters: it’s the reason the awards have consistently maintained a clinical advisory infrastructure that most consumer beauty publications don’t have the institutional backing to build.