Rooibos cosmetics

From Kylie Jenner to Martha Stewart, 51-year-old skin-care brand Mario Badescu has been cited as a go-to by a wide range of celebrities known for their strong thirst trap game. What started as a small facial studio in New York City has now become a brand stocked in thousands of stores at national and international retailers. Joseph Cabasso, the president of sales and co-owner of Mario Badescu, joi...

One of only 17 artists to ever achieve EGOT status, singer-songwriter John Legend is also a man of many business ventures, such as wine, fashion and now skin care. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, he shares all the details of his newly launched brand, Loved01, which debuted in CVS on February 1 and enters Walmart in March. Speaking to Glossy not long after welcoming his third b...

Formerly the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, Jostein Solheim took the helm of Unilever’s Health & Wellbeing division in June 2021. He’s drawing on over 30 years of experience at Unilever to guide the 4-year-old division through its acquisitions, which have so far included wellness and supplements brands including Nutrafol, Liquid I.V. and Olly. The company has high hopes for the new division with “w...

A beauty industry veteran, Victor Casale knows a thing or two about building brands. After serving as the chief chemist at MAC Cosmetics from its inception through its acquisition, he later went on to found CoverFX. Now, he’s back in the beauty startup world in a big way as the co-founder of two brands he’s helping run simultaneously: custom skin-care brand Pure Culture Beauty and refillable makeu...

From an early age, Richard Parker was aware of his skin. When Parker was a teenager, he was diagnosed with a skin condition caused by sun damage called ochronosis. And in his early 20s, he suffered from acne. After meeting multiple dermatologists and learning more about products and ingredients that could help his conditions, Parker was inspired to venture into health and beauty to share that know...

After selling her skin-care brand Nyakio Beauty to Unilever in 2017, Nyakio Grieco set her sights on beauty retail with the launch of Thirteen Lune in 2020. As multiple beauty retailers were pledging to offer at least 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands, she came up with a “90/10” model for Thirteen Lune: 90% of brands are BIPOC-owned, with 10% owned by those who demonstrate allyship. W...

It’s that time of year again. To wrap up 2022 on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, West Coast correspondent Liz Flora, beauty and wellness editor Emma Sandler, and senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner sat down from New York and Los Angeles to have a Zoom chat about the biggest beauty industry trends of the year. The power of short video for beauty was more obvious than ever this year, thanks to not only th...

For many consumers in the market for cosmetic procedures, busy lives often mean that anything with an at-home recovery period isn’t always possible. That concept has been a big selling point for Dr. Dennis Gross’ eponymous skin-care brand, which is still going strong with its cult Alpha Beta Universal Daily Peel after over two decades. Created to offer a chemical peel with no skin redness or need...

In 2008, Mario Dedivanovic was working the retail floor at Sephora. Now, his own eponymous brand can be found on its shelves. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, celebrity makeup artist and brand founder Dedivanovic sat down to discuss his epic career journey and how it brought him from becoming a top celebrity makeup artist to launching his brand Makeup by Mario in 2020. The conv...

For Akash Mehta, Ayurvedic beauty is a family business. Growing up in a British-Indian household, Mehta interacted with Ayurveda, an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent, through his mother and grandparents. Meanwhile, his father worked in the beauty industry as a fragrance entrepreneur. Despite not initially planning to work in beauty, Mehta now sees the va...

When Harry Slatkin and his wife, Laura, built Slatkin & Co., they disrupted the fragrance industry by making home fragrances accessible to a wider demographic. Slatkin sold Slatkin & Co. to Limited Brands, which owns Bath & Body Works, in 2005. But he kept his role as executive chairman and president of the company, and eventually took over the entire home fragrance division. After gro...

When beauty and personal care executive Rod Little joined personal care conglomerate Edgewell as CFO in 2018, the company’s core businesses of shaving and feminine care were seeing mid-single-digit declines. Competing with giants like Procter & Gamble and DTC disruptors like Billie, the company was in need of a transformation.  Rising to CEO in 2019, Little identified the areas that needed to...

Nearly every turn in Isamaya Ffrench’s career was unexpected. Ffrench grew up in a family of engineers and didn’t ascribe to the glamorous rituals her mother and grandmother practiced when she was a child. Her introduction to beauty came by way of discovering Kevyn Aucoin’s iconic beauty book “Making Faces.” But even after studying that book cover to cover, Ffrench still didn’t have dreams of beco...

When Harry's was founded in 2012, co-founders Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield were trying to connect the dots between quality razors, affordable prices and a brand that could connect with consumers. "I can tell you exactly where it was' it was a Rite Aid on 14th and Wilshire in Santa Monica, California. I had run out of razor blades and was wandering through the store, looking for somebody to u...

As the barrier to founding a beauty brand is lower than ever, there is also more opportunity to spot the next big thing earlier in brands' life cycles. Private equity firm True Beauty Ventures "was really born out of a frustration ... and being restricted on the types of businesses [we] could invest in," said TBV co-founder and general partner Cristina Nuñez on the latest episode of the Glossy Bea...

When reviewing the beauty landscape, there are increasingly fewer companies that are built as family businesses. Today, the market skews heavily toward building a company and selling it at a faster-than-ever clip. Though deal flow continues to be hot, NuFace's founders Carol Cole and her daughters, Tera Peterson and Kim Morales, are focused on building their brand while keeping themselves at the h...

There is no telling if beauty has reached its peak celebrity brand moment. But Lisa Sequino, co-founder and CEO of JLo Beauty, said that doesn't matter; her company doesn't solely trade on Jennifer Lopez's famous persona. In fact, Sequino said JLo Beauty is as much about pro-living as it is about Lopez. "Over the past four years, at my old seat [at Estée Lauder Companies] — where I would sit and l...

While health tracking devices are not new, Ōura, best known for its $300 Oura Ring, has somehow seamlessly bridged the worlds of technology, wellness and design, so much so that Kim Kardashian, Jack Dorsey and Prince Harry are all fans. That unlock happened largely due to the ring’s focus on sleep, according to Oura CEO Tom Hale. “Most fitness wellness trackers are oriented around ‘get more activi...

Mara Beauty founder Allison McNamara was surrounded by beauty growing up — her father Michael McNamara is a longstanding executive in the space. But beauty wasn't an obvious career path for her, at least not at first. "I was actually a television host and reporter before doing Mara," said McNamara, on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I worked at Popsugar, and for a long time, I di...

When co-founders and partners Matthew Herman and David Kien started developing Boy Smells, they weren't exactly sure they had a brand. In fact, Herman said the process of making candles in their living room in 2016 was a side hustle. Both Herman and Kien were working in fashion at the time; Herman was a designer at Nasty Gal and Kien worked in production at The Elder Statesman. "We didn't have a t...

The beauty industry is filled with experts, dermatologists, aestheticians and makeup artists, all trying to leverage their expertise in an increasingly crowded market. But the cosmetic chemist — the person who formulates products and oversees development — has long stayed behind the scenes. That changed when Ron Robinson debuted his skin-care brand, BeautyStat, where he is founder and CEO. After w...

When Andrew Stanleick left Coty in February to become president and CEO of The Beauty Health Co., the parent company of Hydrafacial, some in the beauty industry were surprised. Stanleick was responsible for much of Coty’s recent turnaround, including the revamp of Covergirl, as well as leading the company’s joint ventures with Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics and Kim Kardashian West’s KKW Beauty. In...

Like many beauty entrepreneurs, Rachel Roff, founder and CEO of Urban Skin Rx, came up with the idea for her brand after a workplace epiphany. As a trained aesthetician, she discovered that the tried-and-true treatments found in dermatology and aesthetics environments were not suited for darker skin tones. “When it came time for me to do practicals [hands-on experience to graduate and receive a li...

The road from investment banking to baking to beauty isn’t obvious, but it's a circuitous career path that led Kate McLeod to launch her eponymous skin-care brand. “I was a trader at Goldman Sachs and ended up leaving Goldman and went to culinary school. I had a made-to-order bakery and I loved what I was doing, but then life always changes,” said McLeod on the most recent episode of the Glossy Be...

The indie fragrance market has gained steam in recent years as newcomer perfume brands attempt to reinvigorate the industry. One brand that is getting it right is D.S. & Durga, founded by husband and wife David Seth and Kavi Moltz. Like many small business owners at the time, the two founders launched their Brooklyn-based fragrance house nearly 14 years ago with their own funding. David Seth M...