What’s Actually in the Cart This Summer
June arrived with full humidity and the kind of heat that makes getting dressed feel like a minor athletic event. Refinery29’s editors have been fielding the season through breathable wardrobe staples, sweat-resistant makeup, and a short list of accessories worth wearing straight through to September. The monthly R29 Loves roundup is the distilled result – things that made it past the Slack channels, the group chats, and the brunch tables, and into actual daily use.
This month’s haul leans into the specifics of peak summer: products that don’t melt, pieces that travel well, and a handful of small luxuries that make the heat slightly more bearable.
Among the standouts are a hypochlorous acid mist that earned the beauty director’s permanent loyalty, a sparkly eyeshadow stick that outperforms formulas at double the price, and what the team is calling the chicest summer fragrance they’ve encountered this season.
Rhode’s Pocket Bronze Does What Self-Tanner Won’t
The Rhode Pocket Bronze is what happens when a bronzer stick takes its job seriously. The formula is a balm-texture stick – silky on application, buildable in finish – that delivers warmth and dimension without sun exposure. That sounds like a familiar promise, but the execution is different enough to justify the attention it’s getting.
A single swipe across the forehead, nose, and cheeks is enough to shift a complexion toward summer. More passes add actual dimension rather than just more pigment sitting on the skin. The base formula includes skin-strengthening peptides and moisturizing ingredients, which means it’s not simply depositing color – it’s maintaining the skin underneath while it does. There’s no sun damage, no waiting for a self-tanner to develop, and no risk of uneven streaking from application mistakes. Rhode has built something here that removes most of the friction from bronzing, and the editors who’ve been using it aren’t inclined to go back to anything more complicated.
The Pocket Bronze fits the broader Rhode approach – functional packaging, ingredient-forward formulas, results that don’t require much skill to achieve. One swipe is enough for a low-effort finish. Several swipes get you somewhere more deliberate. Either direction works.
The Eyeshadow Stick Closing the Gap Between Drugstore and Luxury
A sparkly eyeshadow stick making the R29 edit sounds minor until you understand the specific comparison being drawn: this particular formula, according to editors, rivals luxury-tier products that cost significantly more. That gap between accessible and high-end eye products has historically been wide and obvious – in pigment payoff, in wear time, in the way the shimmer reads rather than sits flat.
This stick is closing it. The editors flagged it specifically because it holds up against sweat and humidity, which is the one performance requirement that eliminates most affordable eyeshadow options in July. A product that applies well in the morning but migrates into the crease by noon is decorative at best. Summer makeup that actually stays is a different category of useful, and this one is being treated accordingly.
The rest of the beauty selections follow a similar logic – the beauty director’s hypochlorous acid mist, the summer fragrance that cleared every other contender this month. These aren’t novelty picks. They’re things editors kept reaching for after the initial test, which is a different standard than first impressions.
Accessories That Outlast the Season
The fashion side of this month’s roundup skews toward what Refinery29 is describing as “outfit-making accessories” – pieces the editors plan to wear past the heat wave rather than retire with the season. Vacation-ready details, things that work with the breathable wardrobe staples already filling the summer rotation.
Summer accessories have a narrow window to prove themselves. They have to function in heat, which means materials matter, and they have to work across enough contexts to justify the purchase. The pieces that made this month’s edit cleared both bars. They’re not summer-specific novelties; they’re things that happen to work especially well right now and will keep working in October.
Refinery29 selects and curates all R29 Loves picks independently through its editorial team. Prices and availability reflect the time of publication, and the site may earn commission on purchases made through links.
The Rhode Pocket Bronze is the product that keeps coming up in every conversation about this month’s edit – which raises the question of whether a bronzer stick should really be this hard to stop talking about, or whether it just found the exact moment the market was ready for it.
