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What defines beauty today? And who gets to decide? The beauty industry is being overhauled by emerging business models, new customer behaviours and demands, updated standards and ideals and a pushback against tired norms. These innovators are on the frontlines, determining what beauty will look and be to a new generation of customers. Through their brands, products, outlooks, investments and visions, they’re answering questions in real-time about what beauty will be next.
Lauren Bowker
Founder and creative director | The Unseen
Lauren Bowker is the founder and creative director of The Unseen, a London-based material innovation company. After developing a pollution-sensing compound while studying at Manchester School of Art, she went on to study textiles at the Royal College of Art in London and created a series of inks which change colour in response to heat, light, wind and environmental changes. Aeronautics, automotive and fashion brands were keen to use her technology, prompting Bowker to launch The Unseen. The goal is to develop novel materials that open up new possibilities for ingredients, colours and materials, using them to visualise what we can’t normally see. Items created so far include a jewelled headpiece for Swarovski that can depict the wearer’s brain activity; a garment that changes colour to reflect emotions such as fear and excitement; and beauty products that adapt to varying environmental conditions. In 2022, The Unseen collaborated with hair company Schwarzkopf to launch the world’s first holographic colour-changing hair dye, which changes colour in response to temperature and light. This year, the brand introduced a reflective eye makeup product that transforms under a phone camera’s flash. Bowker’s innovations demonstrate an ability to personalise colour cosmetics at scale.
Alice Lin Glover and Marie Kouadio Amouzame
Co-founders | Eadem
Alice Lin Glover and Maire Kouadio Amouzame met while working at Google’s marketing department. A friendship turned into a business partnership in 2021, as the two joined forces to create Eadem, a dermatologist-developed skincare line entirely focused on the needs of skin of colour, after both realising how much they had to compromise with the current market offering. Their first launch in 2021 was Milk Marvel Dark Spot Serum — which was their only product until the following year. Pioneering what they call Smart Melanin Beauty in their formulas, they received a Glossier Grant for Black-Owned Businesses and were selected to take part in Sephora’s Accelerate Incubator Programme, as well as appear on the retailer’s ‘Next Big Thing’ display later this year. The brand is on track to grow sevenfold year-over-year in 2023 and, despite being bootstrapped, has grown profitably. Next up? Continuing to build brand awareness and achieving global growth.
Éva Goicochea
Founder | Maude
With the wellness industry expanding to become a multi-trillion-dollar business, sex and pleasure has remained a category that many retailers were nervous to go near. However, Éva Goicochea, and her company Maude, have made it impossible to ignore. Launched in 2018, Maude is a sexual wellness brand with principles of simplicity, inclusivity and quality. In 2022, it became the first sexual wellness brand to be stocked in-store in over 260 Sephora stores as part of its ‘Next Big Thing’ display. Maude has more than 300 doors in 33 countries and has raised over $13 million in investments from firms including True Beauty Ventures and the corporate venture capital arms of Natura & Co, Reckitt, Fable Investments and Access VC, as well as angel investment from the actor Dakota Johnson and Everlane founder Michael Preysman. A top priority for Goicochea is improving access to sex education, leading to Maude partnering with non-profits including Advocates for Youth and Siecus. Later this year, Goicochea will make her curatorial debut at the Museum of Sex in Miami with an exhibit called Modern Sex: 100 Years of Design and Decency, exploring the cultural and social impact of the restriction on the marketing and distribution of sexual health products.
Nyakio Grieco
Co-founder and founder | Thirteen Lune and Relevant: Your Skin Seen
A first-generation American of Kenyan descent, Nyakio Grieco is an entrepreneur and advocate for clean and inclusive beauty. With a mission to cultivate a more equitable beauty industry, her businesses include skincare brand Relevant: Your Skin Seen, which specialises in melanin-rich skin, and e-commerce beauty site Thirteen Lune, which features Black and brown-founded brands and was co-founded with Patrick Herning, who also heads up the size-inclusive e-tailer 11 Honoré. In January this year, Thirteen Lune closed an $8 million investment and later opened its first physical store in Los Angeles and signed a partnership with US department store JCPenney, where it has grown to have concessions in all 600 stores. In addition to Grieco’s beauty enterprises, she also sits on the boards of socially conscious non-profit organisations Girls Inc. of Los Angeles, Legacy Youth Leadership and BeautyUnited.
Fara Homidi
Makeup artist
New York-based makeup artist Fara Homidi is beauty’s breakout talent of the year due to her slow approach and sophisticated style. Homidi was born in Afghanistan and relocated to California with her family during her teenage years. In the early 2000s, she moved to New York to pursue her career in fashion and beauty. Using a unique palette of colours and materials to create depth, today, her technique can be spotted on the runways and in campaigns for luxury and fashion brands including Victoria Beckham, Miu Miu, Chloè, Coperni and Eckhaus Latta. In March, she launched her namesake beauty brand, rooted in fewer but better products that don't follow trends. Her focus on timeless colours and luxurious packaging aligns with beauty’s shift towards collectibles, and fills a gap in the luxury space for clean and conscious cosmetics. Creating an inclusive shade range — something that Homidi feels the industry still lacks in the clean beauty space — is top of mind as she builds out her business.
Harry Lambert
Creative director | Pleasing
Harry Lambert is a British stylist, best known for dressing stars such as Harry Styles, Emma Corrin, Josh O'Connor and Eddie Redmayne, and championing emerging designers including Steven Stokey-Daley, 2022 winner of the LVMH Prize; Edward Crutchley, a double Woolmark Prize winner; and Harris Reed, now creative director of Nina Ricci. Represented by Bryant Artists, Lambert’s approach to styling is ushering in a new acceptance for how men dress and challenging traditional red carpet standards by dressing clients like Styles in pearls, flares and jumpsuits. Alongside Molly Hawkins, Lambert is the co-creative director of Styles’s lifestyle and beauty brand Pleasing, whose joyful offering of nail polishes and other products and videos on social platforms like TikTok has young consumers hooked. Lambert is helping to lead Pleasing at a time when male celebrities are talking more about beauty and grooming and are coming to market with their own beauty offerings.
Kory Marchisotto
CMO | Elf Beauty
Premium beauty brands often lead the conversation, and all compete for limited consumer bandwidth and spend, but Elf Beauty has secured 18 consecutive quarters of net sales growth and market share gains and become the third-largest mass cosmetics brand in the US — all with products as inexpensive as $2. Much of their buzz is attributable to chief marketing officer Kory Marchisotto, who joined in 2019 after stints at Shiseido, LVMH and Puig. Under her leadership, the company has created splashy and inventive marketing campaigns, such as its first-ever Super Bowl ad, starring actor Jennifer Coolidge. Marchisotto’s ability to spot where Gen Z’s attention is heading is proven, with products routinely selling out and TikTok videos gaining millions of views. She’s also helped the brand maximise viral moments — it was a surge in user-generated content that started its Power Grip Primer’s ascension to viral status, but it was Marchisotto and her team catching it at the right moment and deftly spinning into the Super Bowl spot that secured its lasting success.
Cristina Nuñez
VC investor | True Beauty Ventures
Scouting the next big beauty brand once might be a fluke. Doing it several times is a proven skill. Cristina Nuñez co-founded True Beauty Ventures, the need-to-know beauty venture capital fund that identified K18, Dieux Skin, Youthforia and Caliray as soon-to-be leading brands. A first-generation Cuban American, Nuñez is passionate about changing the face of investing and leaving a lasting positive impact on the industry by providing access to resources, capital and advice that empowers BIPOC-focused and founded brands. Aside from investing, Nuñez sits on the board of Maude, Youthforia, Moon Juice, Crown Affair and more. Prior to co-founding True Beauty Ventures, Nuñez held key operational roles within the beauty industry, including general manager and chief operating officer at Clark’s Botanicals and chief of staff at Laura Geller Beauty, as well as working on strategic business development for Equinox. Next up? “My hope is that we can raise a much larger Fund II, so that our reach and impact in the industry is that much bigger. I would love to see some of our founders achieve a successful exit in the near future so they can also turn around and support the next cohort of disruptive founders,” says Nuñez.
Olamide Olowe
Founder and CEO | Topicals
Launching a successful beauty brand in a hyper-saturated market is admirable. Launching one, making it the fastest-growing brand at Sephora and also becoming the youngest Black woman to raise $10 million in funding is even more so. In 2020, Olamide Olowe, who had previously co-founded the beauty brand SheaGirl in partnership with SheaMoisture (later acquired by Unilever), launched Topicals, a skincare line geared toward people with chronic skin conditions. Olowe identified that many customers who struggled with eczema, acne and psoriasis were underserved and created Topicals to put a more fresh, luxury and efficacious spin on the standard drugstore pharmaceutical treatments. Striking at the opportune moment as conversation around so-called “bottom-shelf” beauty ramped up, Olowe has scaled Topicals into a fast-growing force. With the tagline “funner flare-ups”, Topicals has changed the conversation around scarring, pigmentation and other skin concerns, widening the aperture and challenging the vision put out by incumbent brands.
Hind Sebti
Founder | Whind
After 20 years of working with leading beauty houses such as L’Oréal and Procter and Gamble, Morocco-born Hind Sebti launched Arab beauty brand Whind. Sebti is seen as bringing forward the clean beauty conversation in the Middle East. Powered by a system that she calls the “chemistry of glow”, the skincare and fragrance brand work with high-performance active ingredients such as niacinamide, ceramides and vitamin C that are merged with powerful ingredients from ancestral Moroccan rituals such as argan oil, rhassoul clay or orange blossom water. Whind is part of Waldencast Ventures, a beauty and wellness fund co-founded in 2019 by Sebti and Michel Brousset, which also includes Milk Makeup and Obagi Skincare (Sebti is chief growth officer of the latter).
Whind started as a direct-to-consumer brand available globally and this year added fragrances to its range. Within the Gulf region, it has made Arab women look at traditional beauty rituals in a new light. It is available at stores such as Galeries Lafayette and Printemps in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, with physical retail outlets in Saudi Arabia being announced soon. Internationally, it has started working with beauty retailers such as US chain Blue Mercury. Sebti believes it is imperative for consumers to experience the brand through more brick-and-mortar, so adding more stores will be a focus for the next year.
Rachel ten Brink
General partner and co-founder | Red Bike Capital
Founder, investor and advisor are just some of the hats Rachel ten Brink wears. General partner and co-founder of Red Bike Capital, an early-stage VC fund based in New York, ten Brink’s focus spans health and wellness to fintech. Before launching her venture capital fund, in 2014, she co-founded and served as chief marketing officer of the e-commerce fragrance subscription company Scentbird, a Y Combinator-backed startup that went on to receive over $29 million in venture funding. Leading growth, brand and revenue, she scaled Scentbird to over 500,000 subscribers and built enterprise partnerships with the likes of Glossier and Coty. And before that? She spent twenty years building billion-dollar beauty brands, working for Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Elizabeth Arden, among others. She’s now focused on leveraging her deep connection and broad category expertise to identify, fund and mentor the next batch of innovators. She serves as an advisor at Techstars, the investment and mentoring firm, and is especially interested in widening opportunities to fellow Latina women, serving on Columbia Business School’s Hispanic Alumni Association and as a board member of Latinas in Tech.
Nam Vo
Influencer and founder | Dewy Dumpling Delights
Many influencers launch their own beauty brands. Nam Vo took a different path after seeing an opportunity in consumers’ desire for in-person experiences and community. In 2022, the celebrity makeup artist self-funded the launch of Dewy Dumpling Delights, a new partner model for pop-up events leveraging Vo’s audience and expertise. She rented out a food truck and commissioned an artist, Brianna George, to wrap the truck in a bespoke design, then took to the streets of New York. Partnering with brands such as Oribe and Hourglass, Vo used her social media channels to announce daily where the truck would be. Her followers flocked to the spot, queuing for hours to receive product samples from partner brands and enjoying custom drinks and desserts created by cafe Lazy Sundaes. Vo has no formal business education, dropping out of high school and moving to New York to focus on makeup and developing sharp brand and marketing acumen along the way, as well as 440,000 Instagram followers. The truck was such a success, luxury skincare brand Augustinus Bader approached Vo to host their own similar event later in the year. Vo is currently developing Dewy Dumplings Delights to create more experiences and continuing to provide her services as an advisor to beauty brands on their influencer strategy. The truck will be back later this year, this time with delicacies from Saigon Social.
Jawara Wauchope
Hairstylist
Jawara Wauchope, known just by his first name, is one of the most sought-after hairstylists in fashion thanks to his knowledge, range of work and ability to work with different hair textures. His impressive roster of clients includes luxury brands such as Chanel, Hermès, Gucci and Off-White, and influential music artists like Cardi B, FKA Twigs and Solange. After graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Aveda Institute, Jawara moved to London and assisted respected hairstylists such as Guido Palau, Luigi Murenu and Sam McKnight on runway shows and shoots, which helped develop his artistry. Hair remains one of the biggest challenges when it comes to inclusivity backstage at fashion shows, with many stylists still unable to work with textured hair. Jawara, who is represented by Art Partner, stands out with his mission to encourage conversation and progress around different standards of beauty in fashion.
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