clean-beauty
(39)
Kjaer Weis makes the case for keeping the case
A makeup artist spent eight years developing organic cosmetics that could hold their own on a professional shoot. The clever part was giving the packaging a longer career than the blush.
Karissa Bodnar and the Business of Keeping a Promise
She began with false lashes, a one-bedroom apartment and a promise to make beauty useful beyond the mirror. The company grew; the promise became the operating system.
Laurel Myers Built the Grown-Up Version of CBD - Then the Market Grew Up Too
She helped turn a chaotic ingredient boom into a lesson in trust, standards, and the stubbornly unglamorous work of building a consumer brand.
Omy Lab Started With No Capital. Now It Puts 20,000 Formulas Behind One Skin Quiz
Two students turned contest winnings and a borrowed university lab into a skincare factory built for people the beauty aisle overlooks. Their useful trick was not AI alone - it was owning the messy work between the quiz, the formula and the filling line.
Pacha Soap Built a $30 Million Business on Better Bars - Then Killed a Brand to Find Its Next Customer
A dorm-room crockpot became a national natural-care business by making soap look irresistible and its supply chain matter. Now Pacha is testing a harder proposition: whether a mission-led manufacturer can retire yesterday's story, fix the products customers gripe about and earn a younger shopper without losing the people who got it here.
Madison Reed Gave Away 7,000 Boxes - Then Built a Hair-Color Habit People Would Pay For
Amy Errett spent heavily to make salon-grade color feel safe at home, discovered that free customers rarely return, and turned the lesson into an omnichannel beauty business built around guidance, repetition and trust.
Prima Raised $12.5 Million, Hit Sephora, Then Went Dark - Here’s the Comeback Playbook
Prima turned a mistrusted ingredient into a polished beauty brand, raised $12.5 million and landed national retail. Then an ambitious merger failed, operations stopped, and the founders learned the expensive difference between owning a standard and owning a supply chain.
The Dime-Sized Rebellion Against Your 20-Ingredient Face Wash
Shubhangini Prakash left banking, learned to distrust her own bathroom shelf, and built a skincare line around a tablet you can read in a single breath.
Lady Gaga Burned Down Her Own Makeup Brand - Then It Grew 400%
Haus Labs failed quietly on Amazon. Then Gaga and CEO Ben Jones threw out every formula, moved to Sephora, and bet the company on fermented arnica and 51 shades.
The House of Brands That Started With a Kilt
Society Brands buys founder-run e-commerce companies, keeps the founders on the payroll, and is betting that Canton, Ohio can out-scale the aggregators that flamed out.
Trafilea Built a $100 Million Marketing Machine - Now It Wants to Put the Machine to Work
The Uruguay-born owner of Shapermint spent a decade turning ads, checkout flows and customer signals into shared software. Its next product may be the operating system behind the brands, not another item in the cart.
TULA Made the Microbiome a Beauty-Aisle Business
A gastroenterologist turned the skin microbiome into a prestige-beauty proposition. Twelve years, thousands of retailer doors and one P&G acquisition later, TULA is testing whether “balance” can remain distinctive in a crowded skincare aisle.
How a Suburban Beauty Store Became the Place 46 Million People Shop
Ulta built a beauty empire by refusing to choose - drugstore mascara and prestige serums on the same shelf, a hair salon in the back, and a rewards program that now knows what nearly 47 million people put on their faces.
Orveon Global
Orveon is a four-year-old company built from three beauty brands with nearly a century of combined history. Its wager is that sharper digital retail, patient product renovation and a shared operating engine can make familiar names feel current again.
Rare Beauty
Selena Gomez built a makeup company where a blush that sells every three seconds funds therapy for teenagers. Here is how Rare Beauty turned self-acceptance into a business worth around $2 billion.
ILIA Beauty
ILIA stopped treating “natural” as a purity test and started treating makeup as a delivery system for skincare. That pragmatic turn helped a lip-balm experiment become a prestige beauty business approaching $200 million in annual revenue.
Chantecaille
Chantecaille turned a missing butterfly into a beauty business model: botanical formulas, collectible color and conservation stories sold at prestige prices. Now owned by Beiersdorf, the family-built brand is testing how far that unusually gentle formula can travel.
Kosas
A bug taxonomist turned four kitchen-table lipsticks into a $150 million makeup company - by insisting cosmetics do the work of skincare.
Evolved By Nature
Evolved By Nature is a Boston-area biotechnology company that turns discarded silkworm cocoons into a liquid, renewable protein platform called Activated Silk. From that platform it builds a library of natural peptides and biopolymers used as petrochemical-free alternatives across three markets: clean skincare and cosmetics ingredients, biodegradable finishes for leather and performance textiles, and injectable biomaterials for medical aesthetics. Founded in 2013 by silk-chemistry veterans Dr. Gregory Altman and Dr. Rebecca Lacouture, the company has raised roughly $190M including a $120M Series C and counts Chanel among its investors and partners.
goop
goop is a wellness and lifestyle brand founded by actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 2008 that began as a weekly email newsletter and grew into a direct-to-consumer company selling clean beauty, skincare, supplements, fashion, and home goods alongside editorial content, a podcast, and events. It pairs aspirational storytelling with 'contextual commerce,' turning wellness articles into shoppable curation for a largely affluent, female audience. The brand is known both for pioneering the modern wellness-media category and for the controversy its more provocative products and health claims have generated.
Bloomi
Bloomi is a sexologist-led, direct-to-consumer intimate wellness brand offering clean, plant-based products - lubricants, arousal oils, intimate washes, moisturizers, and body-safe vibrators - designed for sensitive skin and free of common vulvar allergens. Founded by sexologist Rebecca Alvarez Story, the company pairs a proprietary 'Clean Standard' for ingredient transparency with shame-free sexual health education, and became the first Latina-founded brand to launch in the sexual wellness aisle nationwide at Target.
DIBS Beauty
DIBS Beauty - short for Desert Island Beauty Status - is a New York and Austin-based makeup brand built on a simple premise: fewer products, better results. Co-founded in 2021 by creator Courtney Shields and operator Jeff Lee alongside Tula Skincare's Ken Landis and Dan Reich, DIBS makes multi-use, vegan, cruelty-free essentials like its hero Desert Island Duo blush-and-bronzer stick. The brand grew primarily direct-to-consumer through Shields' social following, took growth capital from L Catterton in 2023, and expanded into Ulta Beauty in 2024. Its tagline: 'Do less. Look like you did the most.'
Hume Supernatural
Hume Supernatural is a San Diego-based clean personal care company making plant-, mineral-, and probiotic-based products - led by an aluminum-free deodorant - that support the skin microbiome while controlling odor. Founded in 2020 by an attorney, a Sun Bum veteran, and a cosmetic chemist, the brand rejects the trade-off between 'natural' and 'effective,' formulating from scratch with proprietary biotech ingredients. It sells direct-to-consumer, on Amazon, and through retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, and CVS, and has grown into one of the fastest-growing natural deodorants in the U.S. natural retail channel.
MALIN+GOETZ
MALIN+GOETZ is a New York-founded modern apothecary that makes uncomplicated, high-performance skincare, fragrances and candles for all skin types. Started in 2004 by Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz - a couple who met the beauty and design worlds head-on - the brand launched with six essentials gentle enough for Malin's own sensitive, reactive skin. Two decades later it is a cult grooming staple sold in dozens of countries, known for its grapefruit face cleanser, eucalyptus deodorant and its 19th-century-apothecary-inspired packaging.
Playground
Playground is a female-founded sexual wellness brand making clean, vegan, water-based personal lubricants and intimacy products intentionally formulated for women. Its FDA-cleared, clinically tested formulas blend adaptogens like ashwagandha with skincare-grade ingredients such as hyaluronic acid, vitamin E and bamboo extract to support vaginal health while boosting libido. Co-founded with pop icon Christina Aguilera as Chief Brand Advisor, Playground raised $2M in seed funding and sells direct-to-consumer plus retail partners including Target.
Red Flower
Red Flower is a New York City natural lifestyle company founded in 1999 by cultural anthropologist and herbalist Yael Alkalay. It makes biodegradable, biocompatible botanical beauty - certified organic perfumes, aromatherapeutic body and hair care, bath-house-inspired home spa collections, and its signature petal-topped candles. Vegan, cruelty-free and free of parabens, sulfates and petrochemicals, the brand turns everyday washing and bathing into deliberate sensory rituals, and supplies luxury hotels and spas with award-winning guest-room amenities.
Jeff Lee
Jeff Lee is the CEO and co-founder of DIBS Beauty, the L Catterton-backed color cosmetics brand he launched in September 2021 with influencer Courtney Shields and Tula Skincare founders Ken Landis and Dan Reich. Before beauty, Lee was a corporate attorney at Wachtell, Lipton and Skadden Arps, then chief operating officer and partner at Alex Rodriguez's AROD Corp. He also spent two decades as a globe-trotting pageant coach - GQ dubbed him 'Mr. Miss Universe' - and is the only person to have worked out at all 106-plus Equinox gyms worldwide. He holds a JD from Yale, an MBA from Stanford, and lectures on ethics and leadership at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton.
Jeremy Horowitz
Jeremy Horowitz is the CEO and co-founder of Hume Supernatural, a San Diego based clean personal care brand best known for its microbiome-supporting, plant-and-probiotic deodorant. A former corporate lawyer who spent 16 years inside the San Diego Padres and later ran investments at Selby Venture Partners, he traded contracts and box seats for prebiotics and skin barriers, launching Hume digitally in March 2020. Under his lead the brand became the fastest-growing natural deodorant in the natural retail channel, landing in Whole Foods, Sprouts and CVS and drawing investors including Lupita Nyong'o and Alex Morgan.
Yael Alkalay
Yael Alkalay is the founder and CEO of Red Flower, a New York-based natural beauty and lifestyle company she launched in 1999. A former creative director at Shiseido in Japan and a Columbia MBA, she built Red Flower around botanical formulations, aromatherapy and self-care rituals, selling to Barneys in her first year and growing the brand into a SoHo flagship and a fixture in spas and hotels. She is an early and persistent voice for non-toxic, biodegradable, vegan and cruelty-free beauty.
SEEN Haircare
SEEN Haircare is a dermatologist-developed hair and scalp care brand built on the idea that 'haircare is skincare.' Founded by Harvard-trained dermatologist Dr. Iris Rubin after her own haircare products caused facial breakouts, SEEN makes shampoos, conditioners, serums, masks and styling products clinically proven to be non-comedogenic (won't clog pores) and safe for sensitive skin. The brand is sold direct-to-consumer and at more than 700 Ulta Beauty doors, and closed a $9 million Series A in September 2024.