Focus On: 5 Amazing Beauty Founders

While many devotees already know that Tatcha's products are formulated according to the ancient skincare rituals of Japanese geisha, it’s a lesser known fact that the brand’s founder, Victoria Tsai, battled chronic dermatitis and eczema for years before finding a solution to her troubles. The Harvard MBA grad was so enamoured by her discoveries that she worked four jobs and even sold her engagement ring—all while pregnant—to get her own business off the ground.

As an established makeup artist working across runway shows and high fashion editorials with a star-studded clientele including the likes of Kate Moss and Sienna Miller, Charlotte Tilbury had found her lane by the time she launched her eponymous brand in 2012. But behind this story of success is a tireless worker who truly lives and breathes beauty—it’s not easy to run a company of your own when you’re constantly on the road for other high-profile campaigns. Many of the products in her line are designed to complement just about any skin tone, and incorporate carefully considered ingredients with nourishing properties—she has admitted to wearing some to bed each night, after all.

Left: Image via saintjanebeauty.com, Right: Image from @saintjanebeauty

A descendant of Californian wine royalty and trained in creating beauty lines for Marc Jacobs and Kat Von D, Casey Georgeson created Saint Jane in early 2019 after uncovering the miraculous benefits of CBD, including its ability to radically calm and soothe skin. The beauty market gets flooded easily with the launch of every hot new hero ingredient, but Georgeson plans to go the distance with a “clean” approach that uses sustainably-sourced botanicals and high concentrations of actives to treat and transform. Watch this space.

Kavita Khosa worked at a bank and a law firm before finding her true calling in exploring Ayurvedic practices and yoga. It was this discovery that eventually led to the inception of Purearth, a beauty and wellness brand offering face, body and tea products that are good for the world as well as the self. Responsible production is at the heart of Purearth, but it also boasts an admirable purpose-driven agenda. Sustainability and women’s rights, particularly in India, are extremely important to Khosa who once ran a non-profit yoga school. She launched the associated Pure Purpose Foundation to help corporate entities implement powerful social impact initiatives.

The celebrity doctor once known for the vampire facial has long since moved on from that headline-grabbing title. And though you can still score pots of personalised “blood cream” at her clinic, Barbara Sturm’s other skincare formulas are just as effective without being invasive. A trained orthopedist with a focus on inflammation, she creates solutions that fuse science and nature to boost skin immunity—essentially, teaching your skin to fight for and heal itself. Perhaps more shocking than her bloodthirsty tendancies is that Sturm doesn’t wear sunscreen unless it’s a beach day. Instead, she subscribes to the theory that good, strong skin should be able to defend itself against short bursts of exposure. She’s a devout supporter of topical and ingestable purslane as a natural anti-inflammatory that aids cell repair—consider it a key ingredient in many of her elixirs.