The temperature has dropped. We (I) have quite relished slipping back into black opaques and entwining cashmere around my neck. And so, the natural biological instinct to take stock, renew and rediscover takes over - in many ways, and not least in the beauty sense. The new season requires - nay, deserves - a little more than a dollop of tinted moisturiser, a spritz of salt spray and a flicker of mascara. 

Here is your chance to pivot into autumn with a new finger-tap of rouge-noir nails, make that pledge to finally work out how to do eye shadow without seeing Dame Barbara Cartland when you look in the mirror and taking a fresh, preventative approach to looking after your skin. The cusp of a new season is a chance to become different - not better, nor worse - version of you; perhaps there's a new olfactive character to summon and play, a thrilling new texture to smooth onto the skin at bedtime, a new foundation that makes you question everything that has gone before it.

But then, the new season also brings the Chanel ski's of the beauty world: you may not necessarily need them, but they're so fantastical and majestic, they just seem to make everything better. See Dior's Airflash Matte Spray (think Judy Jetson, spraying on her make-up in the ladies of a intergalactic space-ship), or La Prairie's Eye and Lip Perfection a Porter, a heavy silver disc, encased with a nourishing eye balm and sheer lip balm, which looks like a miniature version of a 50s leather hat box. Skin touch ups are the new make-up touch ups, you know. 

Click the gallery for my ultimate top 20 beauty big hitters of now, the things that I genuinely know work and ones I think you'll genuinely relish.