Rooibos cosmetics

When the pandemic hit, Matt Newman, like many hairstylists, found himself at home unoccupied. Eventually, though, he took his expertise to TikTok — and today, he has 2.4 million followers on the platform and another 1.2 million on Instagram. Regularly working with brands like Tresemmé, he's known for both his tutorials and his takes on viral trends and hacks. But what he is most proud of in his fo...

Sarah Potempa, celebrity hairstylist and co-founder of The Beachwaver, is a live-selling expert. It all started in 2012 when she launched her first product, the original Beachwaver rotating curling iron, live on QVC. “It was wild because they said, ‘Don't get too excited — you might get four or five shows in your first year.’ … And then I was on QVC over 50 times my first year,” she told Glossy. ...

Claudia Sulewski's career started at age 11, when she launched her YouTube channel with a video about applying her mom's blue eyeshadow. Today, the channel has 2.46 million followers. On Instagram, Sulewski also has 2 million followers, and she has yet another 1.1 million on TikTok. Last year, she translated her success as a creator into the launch of her brand, Cyklar, which she bootstrapped and...

“VICs are the driving force of the luxury business,” Sukeena Rao, co-founder of London-based personal shopping firm Luminaire, told Glossy. “They count for a large percentage of global sales with pretty much every brand.” VICs, or "very important customers," is shorthand in the luxury market for a growing subset of high-end, wealthy shoppers that are “very low key, very off the radar [and] not kno...

With the fragrance industry expected to generate $59.9 billion in 2024, both new and heritage brands are strategizing to differentiate in the growing market. For some, the result is offering niche scents, and for others, it's leveraging communities. For 8-year-old DedCool, a genderless, planet-first and functional approach is what sets it apart, said founder Carina Chaz. Since launching DedCool in...

Shontay Lundy is on a mission to disrupt the sun-care space.  She is the founder of Black Girl Sunscreen, a sunscreen brand she launched in 2016 as an alternative to the many sunscreen formulas that leave a white cast on skin, a problem that’s particularly noticeable on medium and dark complexions. The line was an instant hit and she quickly gained wide distribution at Target, CVS, Ulta Beauty, Wa...

Lisa Guerrera and Emmy Ketcham, co-founders of Experiment, met in 2019 at an event for the Sephora Accelerate program, which Guerrera participated in with her first business. Together, they soft-launched their skin-care brand in 2020 with a lime-green silicone sheet mask. Since then, the brand has grown to include products including a glycerin-based hydrating serum, a “micro-slugging” oil gel and...

Chloe Green-Vamos, the vp of global innovation strategy at the Estée Lauder Companies, leads the company's global research and development strategy, innovation portfolio insights and analytics, and enterprise innovation planning. She’s also the chief of staff to Estee Lauder Companies’ chief research, product and innovation officer, Carl Haney. Green-Vamos represents a new kind of executive role a...

Sarah Creal got her start in beauty while working at a Clinique counter. But it wasn't long before Creal was working in product development and marketing at major brands including Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford and Prada Beauty. In 2018, she co-founded Victoria Beckham Beauty with the former Spice Girl herself — she was CEO of that company until 2022. Then, earlier this summer, she debuted Sarah Creal Beau...

Sloane Stephens started playing tennis at 9 years old and quickly climbed the ranks, beating Serena Williams in the 2013 Australian Open at age 19. She is the founder of The Sloane Stephens Foundation, which works to introduce tennis to underserved students — and, as of August 21, she is the founder of Doc & Glo, a body-care line that debuted with two products: the $18 Game-Changing Deodorant...

Back in 2014, Lindsay Dahl’s career trajectory took an unexpected turn. She’d spent a decade working at chemical safety- and environmental-focused nonprofits in Washington D.C. before she got an offer she couldn’t refuse.  “I never thought I would go to the corporate side,” Dahl told Glossy. “If I'm being honest, I really liked being a part of the nonprofit community where I felt like I could be b...

Nathalie Gerschtein’s career at L’Oréal started before she even graduated college.  “One of the reasons I joined L'Oréal, [which I met] on campus [in college], was because it would give me the opportunity to work internationally, and I knew I really wanted to discover different cultures, different go-to-market strategies,” she told Glossy. “Then when I started to work in beauty, I realized how joy...

When Javon Ford (@javonford16, 455,400 TikTok followers) graduated college, he knew he wanted to be a chemist and wanted to work in the cosmetics industry. What he didn’t anticipate was becoming wildly popular on TikTok with nearly half a million followers. Ford’s background in chemistry, working on making new formulations for cosmetics companies, has given him an in-depth knowledge of what goes i...

When it comes to influential families in the beauty industry, Jami Morse Heidegger and daughter Hannah Heidegger are in a class all their own. They represent the third and fourth generations of skin-care brand owners in the U.S. dating back to the late 1800s.  After immigrating to the U.S. as a child, Jami’s grandfather Irving Morse apprenticed for John Kiehl, the founder of Kiehl’s Apothecary in...

Before business partners Nicole Collins and Corey Weiss launched the 213Deli text-commerce beauty shopping platform last year, they were behind the scenes working for digital commerce trailblazers like Ipsy and Flip.  Weiss worked in media at Sony Pictures and Yahoo before spending a decade growing the business side of Ipsy, a beauty subscription service started by Michelle Phan in 2011, where he...

Jess Hunt, now 27, has been creating content for over a decade. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, where she got started, and another 184,000 on TikTok. Through her career as a content creator, she met Jenna Meek, formerly the founder of a beauty brand called Shrine, who eventually became her co-founder. Today, the duo runs Refy Beauty. Refy launched in 2020 and hit shelves at Sephora by...

In December, America’s first big move to regulate the beauty industry in more than 80 years went into effect with the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulatory Act of 2022, best known as MoCRA. But it isn’t until the end of this month that the industry will meet its first big deadline from the Food & Drug Administration.  By July 1, brands and manufacturers must provide a list of their products an...

In May, Live Tinted turned five years old. The brand was founded by Deepica Mutyala, a veteran of both the corporate beauty space, as a one-time manager at Birchbox, and the creator space — Mutyala has 502,000 followers on Instagram. Live Tinted launched in 2018, four years after Mutyala went viral on YouTube (333,000 followers) for a video about correcting dark circles with red lipstick. That vid...

Unlike many beauty executives, Sara Mitzner, vp of brand marketing at AS Beauty Group since 2019, started her career in fashion. Her resume includes roles a Complex, Fullbeauty Brands and Swimsuits for All. AS Beauty Group is a personal care product company that owns Cover FX, Laura Geller Beauty, Julep Beauty, Mally Beauty and Bliss brands. Mitzner has led many of AS Beauty brands' biggest market...

Taylor Frankel is one of three co-founders of Toronto-based Nudestix. And, as the beauty brand's main face, she has been spending the year celebrating its 10-year anniversary. She founded the brand with her sister, Ally Frankel, and her mother, industry veteran Jenny Frankel, when the two sisters were teenagers. In today's competitive beauty market, making it to the 10-year mark deserves to be cel...

When Prose launched in 2017, custom hair care was an untapped market, allowing the brand to disrupt the space. Since then, Prose has sold over 10 million units and expanded to skin care, in May 2023. May 2023 also marked a significant milestone for Prose: It reached profitability before bringing in about $135 million in sales for the year. In 2024, co-founder and CEO Arnaud Plas estimates the bran...

Since launching in 2018, Westman Atelier has become one of the most covetable brands in luxury beauty. From the $68 foundation sticks that introduced the brand to the market to newer launches like the Lip Suede Matte Lipstick ($50) and, most recently, the Suprême C serum ($325), the brand's products are the kind that people like to show off on their vanities or pull out of their handbags. The Supr...