Rooibos cosmetics

This week, we’re doing things a little differently. Joining us on the Glossy Beauty Podcast is Laurie Lam, E.l.f. Beauty's chief brand officer, providing an up-close look at the beauty brand’s latest project: a 15-minute short film, “Cosmetic Criminals,” which is playing in select AMC theaters before the start of the movie “Mean Girls”. It is also streaming on Amazon Freevee. The film parodies the...

With over a decade's worth of experience in the hair-care industry, entrepreneur Shelby Wild is now venturing into the mass hair-care space. In July 2023, Wild unveiled California Naturals, a clean hair-care brand that launched direct-to-consumer and with exclusive distribution at Target. Compared to her previous hair-care brand, Playa, Wild is taking a different approach to hair care by zeroing i...

After working in Hollywood for over two decades, Ashley Tisdale has now set her sights on the wellness space. In 2020, she launched an online community platform called Frenshe with the goal of making wellness and wellness-focused goals a bit more accessible to all. Two years later, that community transformed into the wellness brand Being Frenshe. And in July 2022, the brand launched at Target with...

Before the term "clean beauty" was coined, brands were making notable strides in the space. One of those was Pacficia Beauty, a 100% vegan and cruelty-free beauty brand founded in 1996 by Brooke Harvey-Taylor and her then-partner-now-husband Billy Taylor. The brand, which is currently based in Portland, Oregon, is partly a love letter to Harvey-Taylor's childhood, she said. She grew up on a ranch...

Over the past year, the Glossy Beauty Podcast has provided an insider’s look into the beauty industry through thoughtful interviews, unique perspectives and forward-thinking commentary. But this week, we’re taking a look backward.  For the final episode of the year, hosts Emma Sandler, Glossy’s beauty and wellness editor, and senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner, are joined by myself, Glossy’s West...

Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight, the 23-year-old identical twins and co-founders of ITK Skin, got their start on YouTube in 2013, where they now have over 7 million subscribers. They also have 9.3 million followers on Instagram and 6.6 million on TikTok. Together, in partnership with the beauty incubator Maesa, the sisters launched ITK in August 2022. The brand started at Walmart, with 15 products pr...

Over the past five years, corporate venture capital (CVC) has emerged as a major player in the startup funding space. And CPG company Reckitt plans to be front and center of that change through its own CVC firm, Access VC. In 2020, Rakesh Narayana, gm of Access VC, saw that most consumer venture funding was flowing toward traditional food and beverage consumer brands, not categories like sexual he...

Cyndi Ramirez founded Chillhouse, a self-care spot in SoHo, in 2017. The idea was to solve for a white space she’d observed: a place to get an affordable massage, a manicure and an adaptogenic matcha latte, all under one roof. During Covid, Chillhouse pivoted quickly to ensure its survival, launching press-on nails featuring its signature cool-girl nail art. Since then, the brand has also launched...

Olamide Olowe is a born entrepreneur. The Topicals skin-care founder grew up in an entrepreneurial household and pursued track running, which enabled her to earn a scholarship to UCLA, where she initially studied pre-med to become a dermatologist. Topicals was born after Olowe's college roommate revealed a family connection to SheaMoisture. On the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast, Olowe...

Pritika Swarup has built a large following, thanks, in part, to her successful career as a model. A graduate of Columbia Business School, Swarup founded her skin-care brand, Prakti, in 2021. It was designed to blend Ayurvedic tradition with modern skin-care ingredients. It soft-launched with one product, an exfoliating powder. Today, the brand has six products and sells direct-to-consumer, though...

Mona Kattan has been obsessed with fragrance her whole life. So after building Huda Beauty with her sister, Huda, following its launch in 2013, she decided to build her own brand, Kayali, starting in 2018. Now, Huda Beauty, Kayali and Wishful (which makes skin care) form the Kattan sisters' beauty empire. Kattan's passion for scent is evident when she speaks about perfume. In January, she shared a...

Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali's office is in New York City. But, on any given day, he could be in Miami or Los Angeles, or just about anywhere else, working on one of the various side projects that keep him busy both in and out of the dermatology office. Dr. Bhanusali has founded multiple companies including Skin Medicinals, a prescribing platform allowing dermatologists to custom-create formulas for their...

Joey Gonzalez, CEO of Barry’s, said he used to hate working out in group settings. Living in Los Angeles in 2004, Gonzalez found his way into the workout studio and fell in love with it. Barry's -- formerly Barry's Bootcamp until 2015 -- first began in Los Angeles in 1998 under Barry Jay. At the time, Barry's had a military boot camp theme with camouflage decorations and dog tags for clients. But...

Violette Serrat, the mostly mononymous makeup artist behind the brand Violette FR, decided to become a makeup artist as the result of a costume party. She put some glitter on a friend’s face for the event, and inspiration struck.  After pounding the pavement doing various makeup jobs, in 2011, she was discovered by Vogue France, which helped to kickstart her career. Since then, she has worked with...

Digiday Media and WorkLife is proud to present season two of The Return, a podcast about what it’s like for Gen Z to enter the workforce for the first time in a post-pandemic world. In season one, The Return followed an Atlanta-based advertising agency as the company returned to the office after a two-year pandemic hiatus. There were clear challenges among this population of workers who knew what...

Jo Malone, CBE, was born special. She was born with synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon wherein one sensory stimulation can create involuntary experiences for another. For Malone, this means she can experience smells visually. Malone parlayed this uniqueness into creating Jo Malone London, a global fragrance brand that The Estée Lauder Companies bought in 1999 for an undisclosed sum. Malone left...

For the past 10 years, Dr. Shereene Idriss has been a practicing dermatologist in New York City. And in 2018, she also became a social media star. Today, Dr. Idriss has 657,000 followers on Instagram, 441,000 on TikTok and 704,000 on YouTube. In October 2021, she opened her own practice, Idriss Dermatology, in Manhattan. Then, a year later, in October 2022, she launched PillowtalkDerm, her skin-ca...

It is notoriously difficult to succeed in the luxury indie beauty space, and not many brands do. But by all accounts, Noble Panacea has superseded all expectations. Noble Panacea launched in Oct. 2019, emerging as the result of the scientific discoveries of Sir Fraser Stoddard, a scientist who has received numerous awards, including the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His discovery of the organic s...

When Idris and Sabrina Elba, husband and wife, launched their gender-neutral skin-care brand, S’able Labs, in July 2022, it was just ahead of the boom in celebrity beauty launches. The brand had been in development for over a year, born during the height of the Covid-19 era. The impetus was an Instagram Live series the couple started together called "Together Tuesdays," in which they talked about...

Sravya Adusumilli, the founder of Mango People, never thought she would become a makeup brand founder. But, after spending her academic career in a chemistry lab, she found she preferred being an entrepreneur. Mango People is Sephora’s first Ayurvedic-inspired makeup brand, selling via Sephora.com. Mango People products include a bronzer stick, a highlighter stick and a multi-stick for cheek, lip...

When Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson first launched Too Faced back in 1998, the beauty startup world was a whole different game. Over the decades, the co-founders powered through all the big changes in the beauty industry, from the rise of Sephora to the onset of the influencer era. After Estée Lauder Companies acquired Too Faced in 2016, Blandino and Johnson are at it again with a new company...

It's no secret that natural deodorant gets a bad rap. Clean beauty consumers looking for brands that leave out ingredients such as aluminum have long complained of having trouble finding something that works. These frustrations were what inspired Sarah Moret to found body-care brand Curie in 2018. Aluminum-free deodorant has come a long way since then, as Curie’s latest news shows: The brand launc...

Patrick Ta has come a long way from the MAC counter, where he started working over 12 years ago in Scottsdale, Arizona. Today, the brand founder and full-time makeup artist travels the country creating looks for Gigi Hadid, Sydney Sweeney, Camila Cabello and Alix Earle, among other well-known names. He often documents the process or the finished looks for his following of 3.4 million on Instagram...

Back in the day, the men’s grooming category was synonymous with shaving products. But not anymore. The rising acceptance of facial hair has led to a boom in beard-care products.  Take Scotch Porter, for example. On top of the fact that it's the top-selling beard-care brand at Target, its beard conditioning balm is the No. 2 best-selling product in the retailer's entire men’s care category.  “Bear...

We all know that there are diehard skin-care enthusiasts out there who spend hours researching the ingredients.  In 2021, Emily DiDonato and Christina Uribe launched skin-care brand Covey to target the opposite of that type of customer. Instead of "skintellectuals," they’re focused on the busy millennial who doesn’t have time to go down what they call the “skin-care rabbit hole.” Both founders are...