What a Painter Sees in a Tube of Lipstick

The first Kosas lipsticks began with a problem familiar to anyone who has painted a face: a convincing flesh tone contains rather more than beige. Sheena Zadeh-Daly was studying portrait painting, mixing earthy neutrals and pinks, when she saw colors she wanted to wear. A lesson intended for a canvas had wandered into the cosmetics business. In 2015, she launched four lipsticks. The palette had found another use.

It is a pleasing origin for a company whose founder studied biology and chemistry before pursuing business and art. Each discipline offered a different way to examine the same object. What was it made of? Would somebody buy it? And did the color look alive? A lipstick, it turns out, can keep several departments occupied.

Today, Kosas reaches shoppers well beyond its Los Angeles beginnings. Its founder’s story still turns on close observation: the feel of a formula, the particularity of a shade, the moment a customer’s complaint contains something worth hearing. Getting those judgments out of her head and into a company has been the longer education.

A palette before a product

Beauty was present long before there was a business. Her mother worked behind cosmetics counters and brought products home. For a child fascinated by makeup, this was an agreeable arrangement. Zadeh-Daly could play with what arrived and develop preferences before anybody expected her to explain them in a presentation.

Growing up in Southern California, she had both a microscope kit and an art kit. At ten, she made glitter gel highlighter. The combination is almost suspiciously tidy in retrospect, but the adult route was less direct. She studied biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and later earned an MBA at Chapman University. Training with a fine artist in Los Angeles added a practical understanding of color.

There were ordinary jobs, too. Her first was as a cashier at a car wash. Another involved examining dead insects under a microscope and identifying them, eight hours a day. Bug taxonomy has limited glamour, even by the standards of entry-level work. Her later career would offer considerably more opportunities to discuss pink.

Painting supplied a way to make those discussions precise. A shade could have complexity without becoming difficult to wear. In her account of developing the early lipsticks, Zadeh-Daly describes the discovery of human color: mixtures that appeared vibrant rather than flat. She carried that attention from the studio into the first products.

A dream acquires a supply chain

A private preference is an excellent place to begin and a difficult thing to put on an order form. Zadeh-Daly remembers the early manufacturing problem clearly: established people in a small industry had little reason to take a chance on her. Calls went unanswered. The brand’s future was vivid to its founder; potential partners had rather less to go on.

Finding somewhere to sell the products required another round of persuasion. Fashion boutiques were part of the early route, followed by interest from specialty retailers including Goop and Credo. There was no automatic passage from an attractive shade to a counter where customers could discover it. The work included learning who might understand the product, then making that understanding useful.

Her daughter gave the decision to start a personal urgency. While her child was still a baby, Zadeh-Daly thought about encouraging her to follow her dreams. She realized she wanted to offer an example from her own life. The sentiment became a practical commitment, with all the unromantic business of making and selling that followed.

For the first two years, explaining Kosas could be difficult. She felt what the brand should be before she could articulate it. Collaborators helped give that feeling a form other people could recognize. Even with a strong sense of taste, she needed a shared language. A company cannot operate indefinitely on its founder’s ability to point and say, more like that.

Learning to hand over the keys

As Kosas grew, another question appeared: how much of the company should its founder personally run? Creating the brand and managing its operations asked her to switch between different kinds of work. She has described the strain of moving between those responsibilities and the decision to bring in a CEO so she could concentrate on her strengths.

Jean-Marc Plisson joined as chief executive in 2021. That division of labor is an important part of her career. The title founder can sound like a ceremonial attachment after an appointment like that. In a company built around a particular person’s judgments, there is substantial work in preserving the point of view and developing what comes next.

She also reconsidered what she wanted from collaborators. Looking outside the industry for innovation had sometimes slowed her down. She came to appreciate people who knew how to execute an idea efficiently. Having an unusual vision did not require everybody involved to approach the work without a map.

“My greatest strength is my ambition.”

Sheena Zadeh-Daly

Her ambition has room for apprenticeship. She admires artists who spend years learning their craft and describes nature as a source of color. Those interests suggest a working rhythm measured in practice as well as launches. A good eye develops through looking again, including when the commercial calendar would prefer an immediate answer.

An invitation for the critic

There is another useful episode in her education: a critic who disliked the makeup. Mikayla Nogueira had publicly criticized Kosas products, including its Tinted Face Oil. Zadeh-Daly took her to dinner in Los Angeles and listened. It is a more demanding response than refreshing the comments in search of somebody kinder.

The conversation sat within a wider period of change. Kosas replaced its restrained black-and-white packaging with pastels and brighter colors. Nogueira was one of several voices offering feedback as the company changed its lineup and presentation. Some earlier products disappeared. A recognizable brand was becoming a different-looking collection on the shelf.

That willingness to revise helps explain why the story cannot be reduced to the first four lipsticks. Founding gave Zadeh-Daly a starting point; the business kept supplying new information. Customers could love an idea, dislike its execution, or ask for something she had yet to make. Each response asked for a decision.

By 2023, she was describing product development as a combination of her own needs and repeated requests from the community. A customer asking once is a conversation. Many customers asking repeatedly can become a brief. Her job involved recognizing which requests belonged in the brand and turning them into something coherent.

The color travels

The UK became a significant next chapter in 2023, with launches at Sephora and Space NK. Zadeh-Daly had wanted the brand there for years. She saw an affinity between the market’s appetite for experimentation and the freedom of expression she wanted Kosas to offer. A personal aesthetic was meeting shoppers with their own ideas about how to use it.

Sephora Middle East followed in September 2024. For the daughter of Iranian parents, the region carried a particular connection. She has spoken about Persian beauty traditions and the attention given to the experience of getting ready. The brand’s international story had a family dimension as well as a distribution strategy.

She calls the desired effect “comfy glam”: color and polish that remain easy to wear. It allows room for different amounts of makeup and different occasions. Her description of the Middle East emphasizes artistry and glamour, qualities that fit comfortably with a founder who learned by painting the human figure.

Expansion also changes the scale of the creative problem. More colleagues must understand the same decisions. More shoppers bring different expectations. An instinct that once governed a kitchen-table project has to survive conversations across a much larger organization. The founder’s taste remains useful only if it can travel beyond her immediate presence.

A longer view from the studio

At the tenth anniversary in October 2025, Zadeh-Daly reflected on pacing growth and protecting the company’s character as the team became larger. She stressed the need to balance intuition with evidence. The painter’s eye still mattered; so did finding out whether the choices worked.

“Trust your intuition, but validate it with data.”

Sheena Zadeh-Daly

In January 2026, she returned to the personal basis of product development: things missing from her own routine and requests from the people using Kosas. She described wanting more storytelling and enjoyment in the act of creating. Asked who she would like to see wearing the brand, she suggested Zoë Kravitz. An expanding business can still have a wish list.

There is a domestic scale to her idea of achievement. Walking into the first headquarters beyond her house and garage was a milestone she remembered. At home, she has described family dinner at six and watching Friends before sleep. The company may demand invention; the end of the day can accommodate a rerun.

Her advice about work begins with noticing what attracts you when nobody is watching. That is a useful place to leave the painter who became a founder. Before the packaging, the retail meetings and the reviews, there was somebody paying attention to a mixture of colors. She wanted to see what else they could become. The business has made that question considerably larger.