“Great writing and perspective! I love your takes on the industry and how they are cross-category and very thoughtful. I am in the beauty industry and had followed your brand…excited to see what you are bringing into this new phase. And above all, I appreciate your honesty!” - (Paid Subscriber)

Unpacking the Politics Behind BLUSHGATE: PaintedByEsther v. Patrick Ta

Is it Columbus Day already?! This year is really flying by.

Since the whole Fifteen Percent Pledge thing Slutty Founder has been overdue on handing out our lashings. I should have known it would only be a matter of time before someone in the beauty community decided to act out!

Patrick Ta, I’m so sorry, but you’re next up, boo.

But first, let me back up for a sec.

Before I was even aware of who PaintedbyEsther was, I was aware of her work.

Esther, or PaintedbyEsther is the makeup artist popularly known for her transition blush technique that has been living rent-free on our beauty feeds for…I feel like forever? Her signature high-watt blush looks have been painted on celebrities like Doechii, Tyla, Saweetie, and more recently Love Island’s Olandria (which includes her 2026 Vanity Fair Oscars After-Party look).

Frankly, Esther’s signature technique dominates any result where “blush” was typed in the search engine.

So when Patrick Ta (no stranger to controversy like not paying POC creators including Jools LeBron of ‘very demure’ fame; here’s a great video that sums up his pattern of behavior) announced the launch of his “Transition Blush” to be released on May 28th, demonstrating a technique Esther is widely credited for, social media had some veryyyy big feelings.

Who Gets To Own Transition Blush??

Contrary to what’s circulating, Patrick Ta does not own the concept “Transition Blush” exactly—that’s the Internet playing telephone and trademarks don’t quite work like that—but he has filed a Class 3 Trademark for the product itself “Transition Blush” (Class 3 trademarks cover beauty/personal care/grooming products). He can’t own the technique or the phrase alone.

According to USPTO, the trademark for “Transition Blush” is live, but still pending. Technically, there remains an opportunity for a third party to challenge or oppose the trademark (ex: if Esther or another opposing party demonstrated prior commercial use of “Transition Blush” before his filing date), but the hard truth is that unless Esther used the phrase commercially prior to him, it makes legal opposition difficult. She popularized a technique, but didn’t have a product attached to it (that we know of) :(

In my utopia she would have filed the trademark just to hold it. It hurts knowing it’s just around $300 bucks per class.

While Patrick not owning the technique itself doesn’t block Esther from her signature, it does monopolize the language, which is what I, as well as many people find so icky. If Esther ever wanted to launch a product and call it by the name most associated with her work, she couldn’t.

Isn’t that sad?

Who knows what she may or may not have been cooking up before PT beat her to it. Do we assume she didn’t have anything coming down the pipe simply because he beat her to the punch?

Patrick Columbus

The comments defending Patrick Ta argue that the technique isn’t specific to Esther; that he’s a smart business person and that they don’t understand the backlash.

His opposition has started calling him “Patrick Columbus.”

In a timeline of events, the same day he releases his third demonstration video in which he shows off his transition blush technique (nearly identical to Esther’s, even reciting some of the exact language she used in a previous video) Esther enters the chat with a now 2.8M+ view video giving her side of things.

Here is how everything went down in her words:

• Esther makes it clear that she has never once claimed to have invented the technique. She didn't claim it because she knew it would be met with, ‘Well, you didn't start it, you didn't create it. How dare you?’

• Esther has had multiple strange experiences with Patrick Ta's camp (two or three, by her count). She has spoken about them to friends who can attest.

• She’s in LA when she receives a booking request from Patrick’s business partner, who got Esther's number through a hairstylist Esther had recently collaborated with. Esther normally only accepts direct bookings through her agent, but this time made an exception.

• The booking was for a “do and go,” which means you do the makeup and leave. It is not a one-to-one lesson. However, on the day of the appointment, her agent forwards a request that Patrick’s partner wants to RECORD A VIDEO of Esther doing the glam.

• Esther cancels the booking as it “didn’t sit right with her.” Learning and teaching is different service.

@paintedbyestherI’ll only speak about this once.

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Poor girl. Her voice is literally trembling!!

Like clockwork, Patrick quickly and (most likely) expectedly as a part of his colonization strategy (colonization used as a placeholder for the time being until I think of something else to call whatever this is)—catches wind of the backfire.

He posts a video with a caption that clarifies that he had been working on transition blush since 1+ years ago (as if he probably wasn’t stalking her for 5), and acknowledges PaintedbyEsther’s talent, whose username by this time, has been spammed endlessly in his comment section.

Idk if I’m one of few people that registered “she popularized this look through Olandria” as a shady and backhanded way to downplay the history and impact of Esther’s signature glam that had been popularized long before Olandria even dominated our feeds. He knows that. Isn’t he a makeup artist?

I also want to call out Patrick’s calculated use of Black models for his demo videos—which is so blatantly intentional that it REEKS. We can’t ignore that one of the reasons this makeup look has been so impactful because of the unique and eye-catching way the pigment sits on darker skin—something Esther has championed and democratized.

@patricktaTransition Blush In Shy At First @Patrick Ta Beauty

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I mean PLEASEEE. He’s not worried about being inclusive any other fucking time and here’s proof.

Literally not one black girl until it’s time for the Transition Blush to come out LMAO.

Delusional!!

Last in his offenses, I want to swing back to his copying of Esther’s verbiage in his beauty tutorials.

Commenters pointed out how Esther says in order to do her technique, she puts the product on the “back of her palm” and how Patrick can be shown doing and saying the same thing bar for bar in his eerily similar tutorial:

The funny thing is, Esther has clarified that she misspoke when she referred to it as “the back of her palm.” This stood out to me as one of the more interesting acts of theft; that he used this verbiage in particular.

Here’s a video from August 25th 2025 when he does what he calls “his version of PaintedbyEsther.” Seems like he had no problem attributing the work to her before a product was involved. Yet above he’s saying he’s been doing this technique since 2021.

@patricktaBlush Application Tutorial @Patrick Ta Beauty “Shes Seductive”

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It’s like he wants to wear her skin! I’m literally shaking, like I have chills.

Why not collaborate with her on a launch? A limited PaintedbyEsther x Patrick Ta blush trio? It would have really done numbers! PT rides the wave from borrowing her technique, they make the drop limited and hype, while Esther doesn’t have to risk the infrastructure.

(Danessa, my dear if you’re reading this—the girls are saying this is your moment!!!!) Danessa told me she loved my work, btw 😌. Be jealous!

Unfortunately, sharing isn’t good enough for people this greedy. Why collaborate when you can colonize? Now nobody gets anything. Cause this will likely flop.

On that note, there’s something about this whole situation that is uniquely American. It’s a microcosm of the same society where someone will burn a field just so their neighbor can’t harvest it, even if that means they don’t eat either. Cut off their nose to spite their face. It’s so dumb lmao. This is the behavior Patrick Ta defenders are calling smart business by the way.

While a piece of me was ALMOST inclined to applaud PT for being so nimble and timely, I actually think this launch is backfiring in a way he and his team gravely miscalculated. This launch including the blowback was definitely something they planned for, likely anticipated, and yet STILL decided to move forward on thinking it was worth the risk.

I want to point out something a friend of mine Angela Ubias (exited founder of Common Heir fame) pointed out:

Their VP of Product being a Black woman leads me to think that may be why they felt insulated enough to move forward on this. They probably didn’t bank on Esther having enough pull to make it hurt where it counts, and thought the noise would die down. That’s what makes it so disappointing.

Team Patrick Ta really thought they knew who they could play with.

Did they actually think nobody cared about Esther enough? Did they not anticipate that people would be sooo turned off that the product might flop? Girl.

Okay, you own the mark for this bullshit, but now what?

The Colonization of Ideas Really Is Just Business (Unfortunately)

I’m not sure what Patrick Ta is doing in revenue (reports float somewhere between $30M-$70M), but something I observe and have thought about a lot lately—even separately from this—is that the most successful brands, directors, screenwriters, hit-makers, etc…are that way because they’re often the best at colonizing.

It really is a matter of art and commerce and how they converge—art often not at the speed in which commerce demands.

Here's what I've come to accept. The art we love, the brands we buy, the sounds we can't get out of our heads—NONE of it is accidental. There is a machine behind this shit to make even the un-calculated look calculated. That’s why when some no name person with 3 followers comes on the internet in a manic state and said such and such stole from them—I believe it.

The biggest and brightest businesses don’t sit in brainstorms waiting for inspiration, they surveil and go idea farming. Watching who’s building something that’s working, extracting it, employing their own bigger, better infrastructure and manufacturing a launch moment is literally a part of their workflow. That’s why you’ll read some version of this article time and time again.

The colonization of ideas is absolutely a feature of the American success formula, not a bug.

There is also the matter of why Esther hasn’t been able to productize her own genius first. I can only assume it’s overwhelming, but more simply — she may just not have access to the infrastructure. Should we fault her for it? I really want the internet bystanders who’ve never built a thing but somehow consider themselves brand-building geniuses to consider this: just because you see someone or their work everywhere, that doesn’t necessarily equate to the means or bandwidth they have to support future venture—especially as an artist and especially in CPG (dare I remind you of the throes of Pat McGrath running Pat McGrath?).

Do you yourself get any richer by being insensitive about it?

The unfortunate thing about professions like makeup artistry or celebrity styling, for that matter, is that at the end of the day, a service job can only scale but so much unless you’re able to productize that talent. Not everyone is made for that / wants that / has access to that—and even though business is business, it’s also okay to say —at least in regards to this Patrick Ta thing: it’s kind of fucked up.

Personally, I think Black creators need to stop being pioneers at shit (if we can help it) and I want to see us steal, lie and gaslight straight to the bank like everybody else. It’s not like there are any repercussions! It’s the American way!

MLK Jr. had his dream, honey and I have mine.

Anyways, this is getting long so to wrap this up:

- This is crazy.

-This wouldn’t be half as bad if we didn’t have Esther’s version of events.

-His team reaching out to book her for a tutorial before launching this product is INSANE to me.

-There is something so sinister about the way Patrick Ta and team went about this that leaves a bitter taste à la Khloe Kardashian v. Destiney Bleu.

-I hope this launch flops.

-We’ll see what the sales say. I will be watching.

-We know Esther didn’t invent the technique. NEWSFLASH! I don’t care.

Footnote: For you guys puzzled as to why Jackie Aina has seemed to flip her damn lid and is supporting him: (whispers) Jackie and Patrick are friends lol.

A little birdie / one of our readers spotted them hitched up at the birthday party of a British talent manager held at Lavo in WeHo (which I’m elated it’s now closed, for separate reasons) “where the bartenders were mean in their little leotard outfits.” I’m told they were sitting together at the bar having glasses of free prosecco “laughing and doing a little 1-2.” This was over a year ago, but it looks like they’re still going strong.

As my friend put it, which feels particularly apropos to this piece—”all of this is a game of friends behind the scenes, and a who’s who.”

Unfortunately, I don’t trust us enough to successfully cancel Patrick Ta, but I’m hopeful that at minimum I’ll see a step back from him for now. He needs a time out, and I’m tired of his games!!!

(Dare, I confess, I actually find his products stunning).

It’s a shame!

Rooting for you Esther!!! <3

“Nothing but the truth!” - Jadis (Paid Subscriber)

I’m Ending Grant Strategy Services

After 1+ years of helping early-stage brands land spots in some of the most competitive grant programs and accelerators in beauty (Sephora Accelerate, Ulta, Goldman Sachs, etc…) I'm retiring my Grant Strategy services for good — and I'm going out with a sale.

To celebrate 🎉 my birthday 🎉 and usher in the new energy I am marking my signature Grant Strategy Workbook + Cheatsheet down to $177 (from $397), which you have the opportunity to purchase here.

I am deleting this product on 5/18 midnight and will no longer be offering 1:1 Grant Strategy going forward.

The workbook is dense with the exact frameworks I used with clients, including a plug+ play Q+A and answer key. If you're looking to tighten your brand narrative for funding opportunities, this is the move.

If you're building a consumer brand and need 1:1 help thinking through positioning, partnerships, or your next move—you can reach me here or at essence@essenceiman.co.

A brand is not a plan

Ummm…why am I coming across so many aspiring female founders who think starting a consumer brand will get them out of their financial situation?

That is the WORST reason to start a business!

It’s like going to the casino and hoping you hit because you need to pay a bill.

I've been sitting on this because I didn't want to come across a bitch towards anyone who may have consulted with me in the recent past, but I fear this is becoming a wider epidemic that I can’t stand for.

I hear so many things like: “I’m just not made for a job” or “I’m tired of working for somebody else” or “all the energy I put into working for somebody else I could be putting towards a business.” “I just want to live at least a comfortable enough life.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is America. Who doesn’t?!

Employee vs. Founder Muscle

For the life of me, I simply cannot fathom how an employee-minded person (not derogatory) who is used to working, thinks they’re going to feel any better walking into something that demands everything and guarantees nothing.

Both of those things require two different sets of muscle. If you've spent years building the employee muscle, that's what you know. There's a comfort in that structure, even when you hate your boss and you're counting down to 5pm every single day. Think about what it would cost you mentally to go straight from that to no safety net?! You can’t replicate the safety of that monotony in the early days of working for yourself, even more so if you’re starting out under-resourced and looking to escape your current version of what you think is hell.

It goes both ways! When it comes to having a corporate job, I admit I’m pretty out of touch. When I’ve gone through occasional phases of exploring jobs, I realized I didn't know how to perform in that environment—the language they were looking for, how to show up, or what the unspoken rules even were. If it was something I wanted I really had to rehearse and I’ve never felt like the work at this stage.

The truth is, if you’re someone who’s used to living a low-risk life, the last thing you’ll want to do is capriciously assume the high-risk life of being a consumer brand founder, especially if you’re not someone who has a diabolical track record of making large and uncertain bets on their future.

Some days when I’m close to getting my period, even IIII wonder if I’ll wake up one day and regret how much time I spent throwing spaghetti against the wall. That’s just the nature of the entrepreneurial lifestyle when you had to start from zero.

Do you want that?

By the time I was starting a business around 27, my nervous system had already been primed to move through financial extremes and sudden life changes.

Is that you?

Some of you girls are crying over $40k in debt and have a conniption if your credit gets dinged by a few points (which to me is like child’s play).

I’m just saying……

I know right, who am I to talk and tell women not to take such chances on building a brand.

Starting with $200 became a huge piece of my public brand narrative. Although it worked for me, I would NOT do it again.

I’m flattered that so many baby founders reach out because maybe they want to be like me or aspire to a similar success journey, and I genuinely find that so touching and endearing! But I have no problem being honest in that my journey was the exception (not the rule). I truly believe the conditions that made that path possible for me 6 years ago do not exist today. The low-barrier-to-entry era of beauty, wide-eyed consumer discovery, forgiving margins, hyper-focus on indie beauty, a low CAC and high ROAS back when META was Facebook, and Instagram was still Instagram — those heydays are gone, my love.

There was also very unglamorous point where I went to work a job I HATED—DETESTED (in International Tax) just to keep my financial sanity and the business alive. Being a scrappy hustler and having to generate constant out-of-the-box ideas to stand in for a lack of funds was getting old fast, and I was barely a year in.

I could not have predicted the pandemic and how WFH would suddenly create favorable circumstances to my at home business. I could not have predicted quitting my job because of a tone-deaf company-wide email about the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. I could not have predicted going viral the day after I quit said job because of a write up by an editor I'd seeded months earlier with zero expectations.

A lot of that was also luck and timing, which you’re even more desperado for when you don’t have all the right resources.

And luck is not a strategy.

Why I’m so adamant about this is because starting from scarcity sets the foundation for how you see the entire business.

When you’re building from a place of financial pressure, the lens you see through is so distorted. In my experience I’d go as far as to say that starting from scarcity wires how you show up in the business permanently.

• You make decisions from a place of stress and insecurity (even when the money is there)

• You may not feel worthy of the help you need and freak out about how much every conversation with a qualified person could potentially cost you

• You’re more emotionally volatile and tethered to every single outcome

• You burnout much faster because all of your energy is charged by lack + urgency

• You may even build the wrong products; for trend and this falses hope of giving people “options” — not building for the actual opportunity that exists (ex: I once had such a wide SKU assortment before I honed in on just body care as our focus)

• You strategize around survival and not long-term growth. You calibrate your pricing, positioning, and partnerships around what you can survive instead of what the opportunity actually calls for

• You’re prone to success dysmorphia!!!!

I can’t tell you how broke + stressed I felt CONSTANTLY while I was building my consumer brand even though I was objectively doing well and living comfortably. I so badly wish I could tell my former self “girl, you got it! you’re doing it! calm down!” But how I chose to show up Day 1 (desperate to make something of myself) oppressed me for the next several years. And once you’re so caught up in the business it’s really a hard energy to suck yourself out of.

Not to be all woo-woo, but in order create wealth you have to first feel wealthy. The energetic frequency of wealth is not dizzy and scattered. It’s slow and secure.

There is no perfect moment to start a business and I’m not telling you to wait for one. BUT—

Today, more than ever you need a brand with a big opportunity, tighty-tight positioning, some capital to burn and ideally you’re keenly invested in landing a certified dream team. You need to come in resourced, not hoping the business becomes the resource!

I believe that what a lot of women are reaching for isn’t a brand or a business, it’s comfort; some sort of reprieve from the throes of late-stage capitalism in a way that I don’t think most are able to articulate. It’s a completely legitimate thing to want and there is nothing wrong with that! But starting consumer brand isn't how you’re gonna get there.

Not even close.

xxo,

SF

To partner with us or send a tip — email us: hello@sluttyfounder.com

“Nothing but the truth!” - Jadis (Paid Subscriber)

I can’t lie, the release of Start With Yourself and Famesick kind of solidified how I was feeling about books being so back.

Both releases (out on the same day, btw—was the astrology just so good on April 14th?) absolutely DOMINATED the timeline last month and although I think both have fundamentally shifted the way high-profile book releases are marketed and have earned full analysis—I want to focus, for now, on Emma Grede’s debut, Start With Yourself (the business manifesto she wishes she had in her early 20s) and what I think made the marketing rollout behind it such a success.

The magnetism around Emma’s rollout was that ‘damn for free??’ feeling akin to how your besties respond when you post your feet on the gram—when the value so dramatically exceeds what you’d expect from the subject that it feels like a steal. Like long-kept secrets finally revealed through a celebrity memoir—or in this case—actual tangible business advice from the Kardashian whisperer herself. There is a quality about what Emma made good on that felt suspiciously indulgent and a little too good to be true—so much so, that you almost felt compelled to participate.

In the days of modern marketing, keeping information and intimacy too scarce frankly reeks of a desperate play for monetization. You know that irritating feeling when you read two lines of a boring newsletter and the author has the unmitigated gall to hit you with a paywall? Doesn’t that kind of piss you off? Conversely, when someone offers high-stakes candor upfront, you become more invested, especially if they train you to expect more of it from them. People feel they should eventually pay for being allowed to hop the fence. They can’t believe the sacrifice you made in “vulnerability” (even if that sacrifice was entirely calculated).

When you give away an abundance of information freely, it suggests there’s an infinite well of that much more. Not only was the book abundant in information, it created an abundance of discourse. I think this is precisely where Start With Yourself won on and offline.

I agree with a brand person I admire who pointed out that what made this launch genius was because of the way Emma treated this book as a BRAND launch compared to a book/product launch.

What I’ll add is the difference in that regular launches feel more flash-in-the-pan while brand launches require a more sustained indoctrination phase. This book isn’t just another item to live under Emma Grede Inc. It’s the foundation for whatever she does next, as well as a blueprint for many future female ventures.

Read more

“Nothing but the truth!” - Jadis (Paid Subscriber)

I published this nearly 6 months ago after seeing Emma Grede speak at an Axios Pro Rata event, so imagine my surprise to see her comments on motherhood, corporate success and work life balance turn into such a discourse months later 😭

I literally told you guys back then that she wasn’t that kind of girl!

What’s funny is that when I was in the room, I had no clue how far that statement would travel once her book actually came out. Nothing about her comments felt particularly explosive in that moment and literally nobody reacted. To be fair, I was sitting in a room full of tech junkies and people who watch the markets.

Also not lost on me is the irony that during that same conversation, the interviewer (Axios correspondent Mady Mills) asked her her thoughts on the rise in outrage as marketing.

Emma basically shrugged it off and more or less said that it doesn’t matter as long as people are talking. Outrage comes and goes, and people move on to the next thing to be mad about.

I’ve seen some people on the internet refer to Emma as a ‘genius marketer’ due to having started this intense discourse on 3-hour parenting and not working from home. And to that I say….people are overthinking it lol.

I don’t think she’s marketing outrage so much as the online community craves a reason to be outraged. What I’m peeping is this — most people can’t recognize a controversy when it’s actually happening. They only recognize it once the internet tells them how to feel about it.

The difference between being a doer and a thinker if you will.

This ropes back into my piece last week. The friction between the two only creates more success and opportunity for the former.

So if people who’ve never created a thing in their life want to talk about how you navigate your world — let them!!!!

Some News

• My latest hyperfixation has become the Delve scandal. You girls know I live for a fraud story. ICYMI, Delve, a 30U30, YC-backed startup, got exposed for selling fake compliance certifications to other companies. They marketed themselves as an AI platform but were allegedly outsourcing manual work to overseas audit mills. An anonymous whistleblower published a takedown here on Substack and We HAVE to talk about this!

  and I are putting our investigative hats on and going live tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5:30p EST on here. I WILL be bringing my juiciest glass of Shiraz for this exposé!!!!

  

• Vogue has deleted Tracee Ellis Ross’ “Cloud Bob” from their article.

• Dare I say….Goop Kitchen is actually that girl. It was one of few delivery options that I didn’t hate while living in West Hollywood. Sue me! Yesterday they brought their delivery service to New York City. I think Goop will continue to win because they sold an extreme and highly particular vision of what a well-lived life looks like and then figured out how to monetize it. Food is the most intimate and repetitive wellness behavior. But also, Goop Kitchen is more accessible than their philosophy would lead you to believe. I would order in even as a penny pinching founder when delivery after a long day at the warehouse felt borderline self indulgent. It's about time they expanded to new markets and with a reported 60% YoY growth, the numbers support it.

• Real Housewives of Rhode Island just HAS IT.

• Walmart is rolling out digital price tags, and I’m scared about what this could mean for the future of commerce. The technology (which they claim they’re using for operational efficiency) enables dynamic pricing, which is the same model airlines, hotels, and rideshares already use to charge you more when they think they can get away with it. It’s only a matter of time that this hits Neiman Marcus! Don’t PMO!!!!

• Of all the Kardashian brands, Kylie’s seem to invoke shell company the most. She pivoted her canned vodka brand Sprinter into a functional, ingestible skin hydration powder (under the same brand)???

• Westman Atelier has secured $15M in fresh capital.

• Vacation receives a $70 million investment from VMG partners. How did I miss this Soft Services collab? I do enjoy that buffing bar.

  That’s all for today. Meet me and tomorrow on here at 5:30p EST sharp so we can delve into the Delve scandal!

  See you then!!!!

Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian (subscriber)

I left a hot pilates sculpt class this morning and it was basically the same temperature outside. We are SO back and I am SO ready for a summer in Miami. I am learning Miami is now being called ‘Wall Street South.’

Speaking of, I have been getting really into the markets lately so I’ve been feeling a little richer and irrationally more informed. Have also been making a point to make at least 2 new great connections a week. Besides that not too much is new?

Here’s what’s on my mind this week.

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Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian (subscriber)

Welcome, to all of my new followers :) This week’s newsletter is free.

If you’re new to discovering Slutty Founder — I’m so glad you’re here!

In the latest installment of the healing my visibility wound saga, I took it to the next level and said yes to being a guest on the She’s So Lucky Podcast.

You can watch here or listen in on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

The episode is fittingly titled Stop Taking Yourself Off the Pedestal and I wanna zero in on my biggest takeaway in regards to that, which is this idea of feigned helplessness.

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Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian (subscriber)

I’m not a perfect person. Apparently, I can’t concentrate or engage with my work in any meaningful way when I have something big on the agenda.

Did I ever tell you about the guy I matched with on Raya and he was like what brought you out to LA and I said “my fame” and he unmatched me? He wasn’t that hot anyway.

I do want to be very clear that despite how comedic and verbally expressive I am, I am actually extremely uncomfortable with my inevitably growing fame and my inner propensity towards fame.

Anyway, I canceled my ADHD appointment this week to instead film a guest spot on one of my favorite podcasts because I have a commitment to saying yes to things that are aligned—even if they may at first make me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Plus, I’m sure you guys find me enjoyable off meds????

I always think I’ve mostly outgrown my fear of being seen until the opportunity gets bigger. I almost psyched myself out about this, because this pod is kind of a big deal, but I did a bunch of EFT tapping to help manage the doubt and anxiety and you know what else? I took this moment off the pedestal! I feel like a huge piece of recognizing the source of my anxiety (when it shows up) has been noticing when things start to feel ‘end all be all’ — as if I only have one shot. Never! You’ve gotta think that everything you do is the start to that much more excellence, even if it bombs. Who cares!

The taping ended up going really well (obviously) and I had SO much fun.

I can’t wait for you guys to see it!

It will be out everywhere you get your podcasts next week.

Point is, I’m glad I moved through the discomfort even if that left me with a lot to catch up on this week.

SO much beauty news. Acquisitions, launches, celebrity stuff, etc. Let's get into it.

COMING NEXT TUESDAY!

On Alix Earle’s launch of Reale Actives, I don’t think there’s much to overthink.

Personally, I’m surprised we aren’t seeing this brand a lot sooner, especially given how central acne has been to her personal narrative. Beauty is usually a top of mind money grab and she’s documented her acne journey so prolifically.

I won’t dedicate too much to analysis here because it’s only been two days and the topic of Reale Actives has already been discussed at length. I simply don’t find Alix or Alix discourse that interesting, although I’m not mad at her!

Dare I say….(sigh) I loved the ‘wtfisalixdoing’ campaign. The marketing + content strategy really got my attention. I was also pleased with how she seeded a diverse group of creators from what I saw. This is where my praise starts and ends.

Some thoughts summed up:

• What's surprising is how unproven the launch feels for a brand that is literally rooted in acne. No testimonials, no before-and-afters, no visible proof of efficacy — not even with this brand having took so long to launch!!!

• I visited the website in search of some kind of before and after moment and sank into immediate disappointment once I got to a collection of social media acne journey videos ALL OF ALIX.

  The only time the website features anyone else is for professional imagery. There are no examples outside of Alix. Am I to trust it works because Alix’s acne journey has been so public? Even though the only thing that cured her was Accutane?

• Is this to replace Accutane or be used alongside Accutane? We need clarification in the product use messaging here.

• Sex doesn’t sell like y’all think it does. The hyper-sexual tone feels excessive and honestly, a bit tired. Why am I looking at a photo of Alix in her bra and panties on the landing page? It’s kind of like Sydney Sweeney’s SYRN in this way where I feel the creative feels disconnected from the actual product promise and audience need aka what female consumers actually want. Acne is vulnerable, emotional, and often rooted in deep insecurity. If I’m a chick with acne, I don’t need to see Alix standing in front of a medicine cabinet half naked to sell me on acne treatment. We already know the body is cute + skinny and trust that the boobs are done, girl! I DO however, think this visual messaging would work if there were currently spots of acne on her face, because it gives people a sort of — she has this thing on her face where she would otherwise be perfect, so because there’s a flaw I can point out, I feel less insecure with my own self, and can hate her less and buy in.

  This was the psychology behind her rise to fame, btw and why her followers conflated her accessibility with “relatability.”

  why is she holding her phone instead of some product :(

• You know I always get on the name thing with celebrity brands. I genuinely think celebrity teams overestimate how much a celeb's name elevates a project. Are we allergic to creativity? Reale Actives reads more activewear to me than acne. Hate.

Read more

Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian (subscriber)

Whenever I go viral, I again become aware that I’m probably not the best version of myself in my comment section. Like I feel like the Philly in me just awakens, you know what I mean. Anyway, that awareness has prompted me to a phone detox. I’ve also started sleeping with my phone on airplane mode again— I don’t know why I ever stopped! Please do so as well! The best sleep of my life and not yelling at strangers in my comment section has alchemized into TWO newsletters this week. ‘Weekly-ish,’ she said.

I also had time to get into a FANTASTIC book, Buckeye which found me on a walk earlier this week on one of those sunny days before it snowed. I highly suggest it if you can get past the author’s clear fixation towards making every character blonde, even the side ones.

After that I’m starting ’s The Raise, which I’m also itching to get into.

Will I start incorporating book recs on here?

I will say that if you’re a brand founder or marketer, I HIGHLY suggest you start reading more fiction. It’s a subconscious way to develop a better instinct for world building.

Inside Jobs

• Amika is hiring freelancers across social, content creation, video editing, design + more. Apply here (must be New York City based)

• Dune Suncare is looking for an E-comm / Shopify freelancer

• One Skin is hiring for various roles from Copy to Social Media

• Rare is looking for a beauty-obsessed writer to join their Creative/Copy team for the Summer

• Ouai is looking for a Copywriter (temp)

• Aunt Flow is looking for a Distribution Channel Manager

Funding Opportunities

• LvlUp Ventures is backing 250 CPG companies over the next 365 days from Pre-Seed through Series B. Pitch your company in 10 words or less

• It’s the FINAL DAY to apply to XRC Brand Builder Grant

  It’s a short and easy application. Don’t miss out.

• For access to other available grants: DOWNLOAD the updated 2026 Grant Database (free)

• You can also access my winning Grant Strategy Workbook and Cheatsheet here

News

• In case you missed my thoughts on this viral question: Does it cost $10M to run a beauty brand?

I also wrote about it here:

I need your thoughts!

Other Happenings

• Ulta just released their Q4 earnings with a “better than planned financial performance,” reporting $3.90 billion vs. $3.80 billion expected.

  I have no idea why I’m rooting so hard for Ulta, I don’t even shop there. Probably because they actually support their founders.

• I may have to start covering Quince….I feel like dupes have more of our loyalty than we're willing to cop to. Everybody can’t be at Reformation buying it fresh off the rack (at least that’s what the numbers say)!

  Why else would they have just raised $500M?

• Highsnobiety recently published something this week on how groceries are becoming cultural goods and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Mainly because I think a lot about where the needle moves once traditional status symbols become democratized. I’d staunchly agree that what’s in your belly has become the new marker.

• To the surprise of no one, the e.l.f edge control launch has not been doing hot…

I hate that we live in a time where we can’t tell whether or not them not seeding many Black creators for this launch was a fumble or a strategic play.

Dare I say… I had a feeling when I covered it last week, that this would not go well 😭

• Esteé Lauder is suing Jo Malone over the use of her name on a Zara fragrance — her name, which they have the rights to, mind you. The packaging says "Created by Jo Malone CBE, founder of Jo Loves." ELC says those words breach the contract she signed when she sold them her name in 1999. Now she's being sued.

  Jo Malone has said publicly that this deal was the biggest mistake of her life.

  This is exactly what I DIDN’T want for Pat McGrath.

• is an example that you can be radically outspoken and still get ahead in life. Needed this news.

• I loved learning about Tyra Booker this week and her move from Senior Director of Global Social at Ilia to Assistant Vice President of Marketing over at Rare. We can never have too many gorgeous women in high places, I just feel???

• David must be having some really sh*tty astrology transits this year

Here’s the founder’s interview in Feed Me.

Anyways, it’s Friday. I don’t have any more news, I just needed an excuse to talk to you guys.

When I tell you I can’t wait for dinner this evening because I’m going out and I’m ordering this pesto and pistachio gemelli al dente that’s about to BUSS SO HARD!!!! And I’m ordering a Negroni to wash it down, even though I tell people I don’t drink.

Ugh my mouth is watering just thinking about it!!!

x,

SF

Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian (subscriber)

Hello and welcome back to our show :) What a gorgeous, sunny day to be writing in from the East Coast!!

Quick thing before we get into this week’s newsletter:

ICYMI—Sephora has shocked us all and opened up their Accelerator program this month. You have just 21 days left (March 31 deadline) to apply.

I’ve been in the weeds of this application and have even helped a client land a spot. The hardest part isn’t just filling it out. It’s making every answer weave together to tell one cohesive brand story. I am happy to handle it for you.

I only have a few spots left. If you’d like to work together let me know here.

Does it cost $10M to run a beauty brand?

In a recent episode of the Gloss Angeles Podcast, David Yi — founder of the now-shuttered Korean beauty brand Good Light Cosmetics — made a claim that quickly spread across our feeds.

When asked what he thinks it “realistically costs to run a beauty brand in 2026,” he said it takes $10M to truly be competitive and cover things like collaborations, your marketing force in retail and to stay visible amongst the competition.

“Those are just table stakes right now,” he says.

As tough as that figure is to stomach, a surprising number of founders I know didn't flinch at it. With the Rhodes and Rares of the world, $10 million starts to feel like the bare minimum just to be taken seriously.

So does it take $10M to build a beauty brand?

Dare I say….I highly disagree! Here’s why.

What does a successful beauty brand even look like?

Read more

Slutty Founder is a weekly-ish newsletter about the business of beauty.

Truly the best profile on Substack for founders - Priscilla Jiminian

Hiiii. It’s me.

What’s been up??!?! What a February it was for SF.

I’ll have you know I’ve exceeded my growth goals for this platform last month —and, really, I have you to thank for that because apparently y’all love when I get out my belt!!!!

I’m not going to be coy about how proud of myself I am for releasing my first episode of “whatever it was” (still not yet calling it a podcast), mostly because of the anxiety I had around losing my light and having to re-beat my face, re-do my hair and set up my tech identically the following day for continuity…. da-da-da-da-da!

I can’t lie—with all of your encouragement and the predilection I have towards hearing myself speak, I find it safe to say you can expect more from me on camera.

I also find it safe to say that this conversation is very far from over.

My reporting on The Fifteen Percent Pledge has only been the beginning of a much larger conversation around how Black founders are actively reimagining how they build and fund their businesses in ways that actually reflect the moment we're in.

Here’s what happened this past week:

• ICYMI: I released my very first video episode on a deep dive of The Fifteen Percent Pledge. You can watch it here or on Youtube.

• The woman who makes a business out of ‘championing’ Black businesses doesn't seem to think they need more funding. See for yourself. I do wonder if Aurora caught wind of the fact that we’re honking the horn on her, because she’s been unusually active in people's comment sections this week.

  

  

  via Instagram and Threads

  Her answer to "what's our plan?" is apparently independence from investors and community dollars — while running a grant program on a VC model (*allegedly*). What is her answer to solving the visibility and awareness problem for brands we don’t know exist? Rootwork?

• If @wilgloryy hasn’t come across your timeline yet, you need to reset your algorithm. She is into 100 days of a daily cold email campaign petitioning MacKenzie Scott to deploy $1 billion to 1,000 Black women founders at $1M each.

  In tandem, if you've been told no by a VC and felt it indeed was that deep, she wants to hear from you: wilglory@animairis.com.

  

• Sephora Accelerate is open. I actually have had a client accepted into this program. If you too want my help with your submission, let me know here.

  Unlike what we’ve learned about the Fifteen Percent Pledge’s x Sephora Beauty Grant, you actually have a shot at this one. Application deadline is March 31st. Let’s make some ✨magic✨

• On the Hanifa pause:

Read more

Slutty Founder is a weekly-ish newsletter about the business of beauty.

You guys, I did a thing and recorded my first long-form video episode for Slutty Founder. I resisted this for the longest because of the sheer work, hair, makeup, phone accessories, set design, and editing it takes (in fullest transparency this took me 2 work days to put together and my left eye has started twitching again from looking at my screen for too long—keep this in mind before pressuring your outspoken best friend to start her own podcast), but I’d say it was worth it to get my belt out on The Fifteen Percent Pledge and give them the rest of their (overdue) spanking.

After publishing The Concept of the Fifteen Percent Pledge and posting my initial video critiquing the selective pattern of their Sephora Beauty Grant, the picture that emerged was bigger than I could capture through written word alone.

Who knew this org would be the impetus to me (potentially) committing to a podcast!

Anyway, back onto the Beauty Influencer Awards, I mean the Fifteen Percent Pledge.

With the outpouring of responses from people who have claimed to have either interacted with Aurora James, the Pledge, and even her brand Brother Vellies, I was absolutely incensed to dig deeper.

And the deeper I dug, the more questions I had.

It was undeniable that there was a much larger story to be told than what some might dismiss as just some failed applicants who were jealous they never won the Sephora Beauty Grant.

Some of the questions I developed were around:

• The Pledge’s origins

• The money

• The defunding of the Achievement Award (3-tier monetary grant)

• Their relationship with Sephora

• That dreaded application process

• The spectacle — WTF is that Gala even about?

In this 30-minute dive, I break it all down.

I’ve gotta be honest, up until the final hour, I genuinely considered paywalling this, not only because of the insane level of work it took to piece together, but because I probably don’t need a black Suburban parked outside my house á la They Cloned Tyrone. But I don’t accept that I came this far turn back and be p*ssy, especially after preaching in my earlier article about transcending the fear of speaking up. Maybe more importantly, I feel a duty to hold up the conversation I started.

This investigation took so much yapping, phone storage, and more off-days from my gym routine than I want to allow on my injectable peptide allegations journey. If you have it in your heart for reparations, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I am an open channel for wealth.

Also, it’s how I’ll be able to keep this up without having to worry about who I’m pissing off.

upgrade to paid

Love you guys!!!

Enjoy!!

xox,

SF

The reason I say this is specific is because I think more often we hear from the perspective of those who struggle to believe they can, and that has just never been my ministry. I’ve always been an enormous dreamer, with an aggressive appetite for success and I always assumed that I could have whatever I wanted— the homes, the successful businesses, the mega-yacht as a push present, the celebrity boyfriend (whom I no longer want).

That’s not where this is headed.

What I want to talk about is this pattern I had to overcome of moving the goalpost by always working towards becoming worthy of the things that I wanted instead of just …thinking I was worthy of the things that I wanted.

My issue was never belief. My issue was the belief that I hadn’t earned having it in the now.

stop trying to fit the bill

I told myself I needed the right shoe, the right bag, the right apartment with southern lighting, the right hairstyle; to get back to my smart-lipo’d pandemic body, to be able to slide into those light-wash Re/Done jeans I refuse to sell—only then would everything click!

What the fuck was that?

Plot twist: even when you get those things you’ll still find a way to push the goalpost out once again!!! Even when I had everything I wanted it didn’t stop me from thinking I had to work on becoming more more more. I was rarely satisfied with who I was, wholly, in the present.

At the end of 2020 I moved into the best loft in all of Philadelphia—that had a literal rock climbing wall, mind you —(which I never climbed by the way) because I told myself having this thing would motivate and encourage me to create more. I don’t even think I made 20 videos in that apartment before I moved to LA a few years later. I certainly didn’t write anything. I did book more plastic surgery consultations.

I told myself the same lies when I got to LA.

Maybe I’ll be more motivated to show up when I move from Downtown to WeHo.

What do you think I did when I got to WeHo? Girl, I was so full of shit.

I just couldn’t sit still with myself!

It’s a harsh realization to come to that the reason you hesitate and hide behind more self-improvement is because you don’t accept yourself. Like I once did, you might think you accept yourself, but if you feel this constant need to work on things, you probably don’t.

Years of putting everyone else's voice and authority above your own will convince you that you have to be working towards becoming everything but who you are RIGHT NOW. You collect 99 opinions and next thing you know you're contorting yourself into 99 different people. At some point it gets exhausting being a damn shapeshifter. What’s so wrong about being you anyway? Are you in the Epstein files or something?

Like, literally it gets to a point.

Why create more time and distance between you and the things you want?

I don’t believe in working on myself because I don’t believe a lady has to prove her value through greater effort. I really hate this for women because too often we’re socialized to pick up another journal, or become a better person, or investigate the things we do to put others off. Do men do this? I don’t know a single person with a Y chromosome that is this introspective or that works overtime to fit the bill.

The truth of the matter is this—if you don’t accept yourself, you’re just always going to be waiting for your ships to come in. What are you going to pick up another journal in the meantime? Wait for a sign that things are on their way? Pathetic. More work and external validation can’t replace self-acceptance. And accepting yourself can’t be conditional. Further, it has to be radical. So you might as well settle into yourself.

Do it even if your lighting’s bad.

What better way to kick off our first Black History Month newsletter by giving The Fifteen Percent Pledge their lashings.

This is a conversation, one that (based on my DMs this week) a lot of us have been afraid to have.

I posted a video the other day and I asked a simple question:

“You wanna know why they call it The Fifteen Percent Pledge? It’s because you have a zero point fifteen percent chance of winning if you’re not a famous influencer.”

Was I wrong? lol.

Like most organizations that claim to be Black people focused, it’s evident by now that there’s a clear gap between what it claims to be and what it actually does.

One tell—and perhaps what stoked the flame of the latest online fodder—is who the Fifteen Percent Pledge decides to award their Sephora Beauty Grant to. The pattern has looked the same since its inauguration, except this year folks seemed really fed up.

When you look at all of the past recipients, a few things come into focus pretty clearly.

Each brand awarded hits at least 3/5 of these things:

• A very well known / socially visible founder (ex: Issa Rae - Sienna Naturals)

• Have already won the Sephora Accelerate

• Is already retailing in Sephora (or entering Sephora)

• Has a significant social media following / online presence

• Has a personal connection to one of the judges (allegedly)

I’m not going to argue that these brands are any less deserving or need the money any less than smaller brands do. I’m certain they work very hard and deserve to be congratulated. It’s not their fault they’re superstars. As one friend of mine pointed out on my 4th phone call that afternoon as I was prepping lamb chops—if you took the time to apply in the first place it’s probably because you could use the funds. You know how this industry is. Objects are less shiny than they appear.

Believe it or not, I’m not against cronyism. It’s what makes our world go round. I’ve said it myself that when you’re feeling behind in life it’s because you need better friends.

But why does Fifteen Percent Pledge encourage all of these other founders to apply (even going as far to reach out to non-Sephora affiliated brands directly) and submit essay level questions, detailed financials (unusual, BTW, outside of final rounds), a deck, AND a video component knowing they don’t have a shot?

Do they just have all of these people apply to make it look like there’s work actually being done? Does this add context to their market knowledge?

My biggest critique remains the disconnect in the messaging of the program.

How are you betting big on these Black and Brown-owned brands, but you’re not putting your biggest dollars behind the non-obvious choice? Isn’t that at the heart of being disenfranchised? That people aren’t willing to bet on you because you’re not their most safe or legible choice? It’s like how VC’s love giving moneyed White men even more money. How does this make Fifteen Percent Pledge any different from those existing institutional gatekeepers? A question I’m not afraid to ask!

After I posted my video I was flooded with DMs, voice notes, and phone calls from founders who have been sitting on this feeling about The Fifteen Percent Pledge and its founder Aurora James for a while now, and just needed somebody to say it.

The response painted a much broader picture that the Sephora Beauty Grant is just one way in which the Community thinks the program falls short.

Among some of the messages I received and have permission to share:

Via Threads

To add insult to injury was this video (referenced by a commenter above):

Monica, I’m really sorry that happened to you.

The concept of being left out at an event rooted in equity and inclusion….

In our star-obsessed reality, the celebrity attendees for the Gala naturally overshadow the messaging about the actual initiative. I’d imagine it challenging for an outsider to deduce what the Pledge is actually about. Especially if I can’t tell what change has actually been enacted. And if my DMs are any indicator —nobody can.

Beyond the grants, what does the Pledge actually do? What does 15% commitment of shelf space even mean? How does that guarantee Sephora doesn’t put your ass in the back or on the side like they tried Ami Cole? Not many of the Black founders I know have much problem getting into retail. The real problem tends to be lack of capital to sustain and scale. I’d be curious to see if they have any data / details on how the founders they back are able to scale through retail successfully and remain in store.

As per a recent Vogue article Aurora says:

“Since launching the Pledge, we’ve helped place more than 1,000 Black-owned brands on major retail shelves nationwide, and last year alone, we distributed over $1 million in grants.”

As a beauty editor friend of mine pointed out to me, why don’t we hear much from of any of the 1,000 Black brands placed on shelves and whom FPP distributed said $1M+ dollars to? Girl, you know all the Black people in this industry know each other! LMAO! Plus we tend to share our wins pretty loudly.

We know at least publicly that in 2025 they awarded: RedDrop ($200,000), Brooklyn Tea ($35,000), and Bernard James ($15,000) in their non-Sephora related awards.

Who else is there?

I failed math a couple of times, except for the year my teacher was an ephebophile so my count could be off.

One of the Pledge's recent initiatives according to Aurora also includes: “an AI training initiative to ensure Black founders aren’t left behind as technology reshapes business.”

I’m sorry WHAT lmao. Girl, it’s called get on Claude and create an account. Who needs extensive AI training to run a Shopify store?! N*ggas need money!!

Why are we still weaponizing incompetence when it comes to the actual needs of Black and Brown foundersssss. I’m draineddddd. Please bore someone elseee.

The O’jays said it best and I haven’t heard it since. Say it with me on the count of three.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!!!!!

At this point, The Fifteen Percent Pledge seems more of a concept than a commitment and throwing in Beyoncé adjacent high-profile figures is what has allowed them to skate by.

As for the actual gala which one of my followers referred to as an “initiation,” I still don’t forget about how they had Kim Kardashian posted up as an attendee last year fresh off her MAGA debut. Is there anyone responsible for reading the god damn room?

And you almost have to ask — at $10k a seat for non-celeb attendees ($6k I hear is the Black people discount) — I’m curious as to where gala funds are being appropriated and how it’s gone to support the initiative in tangible ways.

At this point, I wouldn’t put it past them that they do this event in February because it overlaps with Black History Month—a convenience so they don’t have to pretend to care about our Black asses March-January.

I don’t know if you can tell (and I know it’s not funny), but I swear I cannot stop laughing the more I write.

I’ve resolved that we can’t pay these people too much mind, child. The world is a stage.

And in the future when there’s conversation to be had out loud, I want us to stop being so scary! I feel like this fear of speaking out against the many ways in which this industry has harmed so many of us is like an epigenetic trauma response—not rocking the boat once meant self-preservation and survival. But today I think it only keeps us further disenfranchised. Speaking up (to me) is literally curse-breaking.

Anyways. Y’all better get up and put y’all on some O’jays. It’s Black History Month still!!!!

xoxx,

SF

Welcome back and happy Friday.

To the influx of new subscribers both free and paid, welcome!

We cracked top 100 Rising in business last week and I want to thank you for your help on making it happen! Slutty Founder is starting to evolve at an exciting pace and words can’t capture how much I value your support and curiosity.

Let’s get into this week’s much anticipated newsletter.

I can’t believe I almost wrote The Pat McGrath story off as just another soon-to-be business closure. I was like: “Good for her!” You know I love when the girls walk away from something.

Well…this is a little more shell-shocking.

ICYMI: Legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath hit the headlines last year, from a slashed valuation, to an auction announcement, to last week’s bankruptcy filing.

Maison Margiela couture spring 2024 show in Paris; Courtesy / Pat McGrath

So many have asked for my opinion on this, but I initially thought the subject was too dull to even bother. The only thing that got my blood pumping were the misguided takes blaming the brand’s decline on its steep price point, as if we don’t live in the age of pay-in-4.

I knew there was something deeper under the hood and eventually something nudged at me to dig deeper.

This situation is far more complex than I anticipated. It isn’t a story that can be simplified to untimely market positioning or $125 eyeshadow palettes.

It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you get in bed with the wrong people, and how the wrong kind of money can systematically dismantle a legendary brand and legendary human.

Although the brand says they are continuing in “an ordinary course of business”, what’s happening could very well mark the end of Pat McGrath Labs as we know it.

Buckle up.

Read more

Hi and welcome back.

Inside today’s newsletter: some culture stuff, more brand wind downs, Tiktok and techno-feudalism, and reflections from the trenches of entrepreneurship.

• Pat McGrath has officially filed for bankruptcy and canceled its auction. It feels like just yesterday we were celebrating a billion dollar valuation, I feel. The people who think this bankruptcy can be reduced to the brand simply being too expensive are not my kind of thinkers.

• released their first fragrance in collaboration with H&M. I love that I can tag them now that they’re on Substack.

  Am I the only person that can’t help but pocket-watch when I see big campaigns go out like this? Like the dancers, the hair, the makeup and choreography, an original song lmao. There is really money in this world.

Read more

Hello and welcome to our first newsletter of 2026.

It's been almost a year exactly since I published the essay that would become both my most-read piece about the most misunderstood moment of my career: Why I Shut My Award-Winning Beauty Business Down.

In the article I detail that what struck me most in the weeks following my shutdown was the readable disappointment from people who couldn’t pick up on why I seemed to be so genuinely unbothered about this massive change in my career.

In mid-2024, closing a brand was still treated as a jarring decision to make—an admission of defeat that made you ripe for example as a cautionary tale.

Underneath every nosy “what happened” really was “what happened so I can make out better than you did.”

Now with light of this year, the “why unfollow your dream?” narrative has come to feel a little low-EQ and entirely dated even though it’s such a short time later,.

2025 was the year of the beauty brand closure.

Beauty brands shut down in waves.

Here are a few to jog your memory (some of which I’ve written about here):

• Ami Cole

• Youthforia

• Futurewise

• Ren Skincare

• LVMH offloading it’s 50% stake in Fenty Beauty

• Pat McGrath Labs (assets up for sale)

• SKNMUSE

The announcements came so frequently that by year's end, we'd become desensitized to such news.

Even a number of close friends of mine with brands still open confessed to me their serious thoughts about shutting operations down—many of their brands well-known and critically acclaimed.

2025 was a reckoning.

And this year, so many founders were left wondering—why keep pouring my labor, capital, and identity into a slot machine that feels less and less rewarding?

Oh, what life was before we blamed the algorithm

The dominant beauty playbook from roughly 2016–2023 looked like this:

Discovery → DTC → Community → Retail Validation → Mass Distribution

Once upon a time you launched with a hero product and a good founder story.

You built community through Instagram, cultivated yourself some brand ambassadors. You proved concept through DTC, then leveraged that traction to secure investment and then larger retail channels. From there, maybe you’d scale internationally or become an acquisition target for a conglomerate looking to capture your audience.

This model worked because consumer attention was more abundant. Efficient CAC was achievable, and retail still signaled inevitable expansion. [Some] founders could still raise capital based on potential and the assumption was that scale would eventually solve for the unit economics.

As of today these variables have fundamentally shifted, the most notable to me being retail.

Landing a dream retailer is no longer a benchmark for inevitability.

With the influence of channels like Tiktok Shop + Live Shopping, in store retail is no longer a vital discovery or growth channel. One of beauty's best-kept secrets is that department stores like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's place the smallest PO’s! I’m talking like 12 units across a SKU. They’re not buying by the boatload, like unseasoned founders fantasize about.

Beyond the tiny orders, many of these retailers are barely staying afloat themselves.

Saks has dominated retail news this year with their financial struggles. They still owe one of my girlfriends an invoice.

And let’s not even start on Sephora who is developing a bit of a reputation as a place where indie brands go to die. To win in that store, you have to play by their rules, which is hard and expensive.

Nearly all of the shuttered brands I listed above counted Sephora as a retail partner. It goes to show that treating Sephora as the holy grail shouldn’t hold such weight.

Aspiration is dead

Image // Alyssa Powell for Business Insider

In an economy where the future feels illegible, consumers are buying products to self-regulate. Aspiration implies a future, which, by now, most Americans have stopped trying to envision.

Alongside this, I notice more brands de-elevating their brand equity in order to move faster and sell more. They’re consciously trading the cachet that comes from being selectively distributed in a market where the economy is tense and attention is short.

In other words: no one’s too good to trash it up a little in order to grow.

A few years ago, my friends and I with prestige brands would have turned our noses up at selling on TikTok Shop. Now, brands like Dieux and Topicals are performing well there—come to think of it—my first Dieux order was from TikTok Shop, even though the brand is also in Sephora. I’m still as equal a fan even though Tiktok Shop was my entryway.

Outside the prestige market, brands have more room to win, reaching an audience that wants value and convenience. On TikTok Shop, customers get a discount while the platform drives traffic and conversions for the brand, creating a mutually beneficial setup.

At the same time, aspirational channels are showing less upside, and brands that cling to them are leaving growth on the table.

This year, Ulta posted growth across major categories while Sephora declined—in Spring 2025, makeup was up 4% at Ulta vs. down 25% at Sephora; skincare up 17% vs. down 2%.

Consumers have stopped prioritizing aspiration over practicality. Sephora only offers one (aspiration), while Ulta prioritizes accessibility—operating like a grocery store for beauty. You can get a $10 product and a $60 product in one trip, with a loyalty system that actually pays you back.

Why stay where customers are pulling back when you can go where they’re actually spending?

A few days ago, it was announced that Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty ended their Sephora partnership, and is choosing to expand in 1,500 Ulta doors by February 1st, 2026. I think this captures that exact inflection point.

While I don’t pretend to understand the mind of an Ulta shopper as that store evokes a very specific overwhelm of me losing my mother as a child in the local neighborhood Caldor, I’m not delusional enough to think that prestige automatically equates to profitability.

I don’t think any brand builder who seriously wants to make any real money should dream about becoming the next Byredo right now.

Our relationship to entrepreneurship has changed for good (thank God)

For one, I’m glad walking away is becoming so popular.

The mechanics that once governed success (raise capital, scale methodically, build for institutional validation) are so over. We will see a wave of established brands continue to bow out, many of them fatigued from the unpredictability of a market that no longer rewards slow, strategic, predictive thinking.

The brand closures of 2025 can hardly be reduced to bad business decisions, which I think by now we collectively understand.

They reflect an entire shift in how attention is captured (discovery) and loyalty is won (incentive).

If the old playbook is dead and aspiration no longer drives purchase behavior as it once did, what does a winning strategy actually look like in 2026?

In the near future I see a few things:

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Hello and welcome back to my shit show.

The British Accent is back, although I fear it’s lost a bit of its whimsy.

With the exception of Miami, things have felt so slow this month. I’ve been reading (more than writing — at least publicly—and not feeling any guilt around owing you a newsletter), pilate-ing, cooking at home, and catching up on my shows.

With that, since Owning Manhattan was trending, I was reminded to share a career story with you that I’ve been holding out on although I’ve promised it for a while.

Why was I holding back on this humiliation ritual of a story when it adds such great context to my career journey and personal development?!

Few of you know this about me, but in one of my many former lives, I ingloriously did real estate. I say that as I do not consider this, nor the nature of that industry a bright spot in my career. Nonetheless, I’m very proud of what I did to become licensed as I did so with one shoe on my foot.

I’m sure there is a future lesson to takeaway from this, but I’ll leave it up to you to extract what that is.

Picture:

The year is 2015 and I am desperate. I’m living in New York, I’m a recent-ish college grad and nothing is really working out (obviously). I am, after all a 2008 millennial IYKYK—you know how it was. Robbed from a promised career path even after doing everything right. I got my degree, was a rockstar intern at several record labels, and even still ended up working at Bloomingdale’s Flagship on 59th Street in Contemporary, thinking to myself — what the HELL am I doing here!?!?!!!

Even with my retail background, Bloomingdale's ran far too tight a ship for me.

Commissioned sales meant showing up to work in my one good blazer and running around that massive store so much that my Toms started to unseam at the sole. The managers watched us like they had nothing better to do, because they didn’t—clocking in on our progress through the register every few hours to make sure we were hitting our individual numbers.

Naturally, as someone with an innate aversion to hard pay-rolled work, I was over it within weeks.

After a few months of this I had reached a breaking point.

I wasn’t going to get comfortable financially from this! I was already in commissioned sales — why didn’t I just transfer that experience over to getting my real estate license for bigger money? Then let that be my final straw.

I had 3 years worth of proof that the resume thing wasn’t working, I had been nearly job scammed resulting in a permanent block from Venmo for accepting a payment in Bitcoin, and I didn’t know what else I was going do to remain in New York at any cost.

As my interest in Bloomie’s rapidly waned, my manager pulled me to the side and said to me in her bone-chilling Australian accent that I could become great enough at this to buy a home one day, but it appeared too much as though I didn’t care. I looked down at the black and white checkered floors, took a long inhale through gritted teeth, and told her as though it were a revelation, that it was because I didn’t.

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There’s so much happening on the ground, or at least, I assume there is because I haven’t been invited. Who’s doing the work at these PR companies? I’m literally the Slutty Founder. Get real!

Mark these words for next year when I’m at Dior, but for today don’t feel sorry for me. I’m ready to go see about a m*n and a yacht.

What is it about a little sun and humidity that makes me want to act a fool?! And I do mean sexually.

Anyways, on Tuesday I caught up on my feed while my plane was in taxi to see the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 came out.

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A PR girlie I follow had won, as well as a handful of creators I follow (including Substackers and TikTokers). This intrigued me because it signaled a new direction the list was clearly moving in.

The media and social media categories are somehow separate, which feels both unnecessary and telling.

The discourse around this year’s list has been fascinating, particularly the disappointment.

I, for one, don’t think the list got any worse, I actually think it’s the most honest one we’ve had.

The Death of Founder Mythology

Some time ago, the Forbes 30 Under 30 celebrated 24 year-olds raising $30 million Series As off the strength of a deck and maybe a Stanford rec. That era produced its own mythology, one that encouraged a very specific delusion of success that even I was once heavily invested in.

There once was a time when every birthday made me sick to my stomach, knowing I was creeping closer to the Forbes Under 30 cutoff.

To think this was the type of shit that used to keep me up at night.

But after watching a generation of ‘visionary’ founders collapse under fraud charges, inflated valuations, and fantasy metrics, we can’t even pretend the Forbes 30 Under 30 list still means what it used to.

What The List Actually Reflects Now

The discourse around this year’s list is particularly interesting to me because of the cultural timing, the economic mood, and the collective disappointment.

This year’s list is made up of podcasters, short-form content creators, writers, and people who built audiences first, businesses second—some with no business or product at all.

Whatever aura the accolade used to have evaporated with the times. The cultural conditions that made the list feel aspirational simply don’t exist anymore, and honestly, I’m kind of happy to see it.

As a casual follower of some of the girls who won, I’m happy for them because it’s an achievement I once aspired to myself. Although I’d agree this year’s list does feel particularly lightweight. Not in a bad way, but in a way that’s feels irresponsible for me to ignore.

Perhaps it should be a good thing that the barrier to entry has dropped, and this goal of achieving the Forbes 30 Under 30 is no longer some mythic, untouchable prize. That it feels, at least on paper, more democratic.

It finally reflects the society we actually live in, not the fantasy world of lauding people whose prefrontal cortexes haven’t even fully developed, raising millions to reinvent some bullshit.

The Performance of Competence

This year’s list is a symptom of something bigger in that we’ve fundamentally changed what we’re measuring.

We’re realizing extraordinary competence was never what we were actually rewarding in the first place. The old system that claimed to measure vision and innovation was just measuring who could perform those things most convincingly.

The attention economy has fundamentally shifted the need to be attached to a product, which, if I’m honest is one of many reasons I shut my own company down. The way I was convinced I had to build something to be validated and worthy of being seen and rewarded, instead of just… allowing myself to be seen and rewarded.

You really don’t need the company as the vehicle. Shamelessness alone is enough to bring home the gold.

The attention economy isn’t the only economy that matters, but it’s perhaps the most visibly rewarded. Attention converts to everything now—money, credibility, opportunity, legitimacy.

Even corporate jobs now are rewarding public persona.

Look at Vivian Tu of Your Rich BFF, moving from corporate → creator → corporate again at SoFi.

She’s not an outlier. This year, Forbes included literal employees(!) on their list. I never thought we would see that.

In the age of a 30 second video and the portfolio career, you don’t need to build brick by brick anymore. You just. need. attention.

I think this shift is permanent.

What Forbes Is Actually Rewarding

Forbes itself is responding to this reality.

Contrary to popular belief you actually don’t have to pay or apply to be on this list. I know because I was approached to be on a couple years ago and I couldn’t bring myself to lie about the fact that I had already been 32 for 9 months.

The recent Forbes list is rewarding those who are positioned exactly where attention and trust are flowing. I noticed a shift in coverage which has gone from writing about how much money was raised, to writing about the brand deals Forbes’ honorees have landed.

The Forbes list has become a single node in the economic ouroboros of attention. Content generates attention, attention becomes the product, the product becomes more content, you get more content from the content. You get paid from content, become content in life from your content. The contentification of the list itself is it’s own form of content!

Why the Fantasy Doesn’t Work Anymore

The Forbes 30 Under 30 from five years ago celebrated twenty somethings raising $30 million Series As, promising to revolutionize whatever or tokenize whatever.

We know how those stories ended.

People may want the list to still represent the fantasy, but that requires a suspension of disbelief and history has made us too aware to keep pretending.

The generation who ran companies from that old success model are either all grown up on their third acts or in JAIL. The extreme early success illusion is so played, and I’m not sure how many people are still buying it. That’s precisely why this current list feels so underwhelming compared to those prior—it’s because the mask has fallen.

On Being 30-Something and Still Figuring It Out

Society’s expectations of what we’re supposed to have accomplished by 30 have fundamentally shifted. Maybe that’s just what I tell myself to feel better as someone who’s settled into her thirties and still has a (small) ways to go.

By 35, you’ve presumably lived multiple lives. You’ve pivoted, burned things down, started over... this idea that your twenties are supposed to be your peak achievement years feels like a relic from a different economic reality—one where stability (somewhat) existed and linear career paths made sense.

It should go without saying that it’s never too late.

And this certainly isn’t to diminish what the young people on today’s Forbes list are doing—but the most recent iteration validates a new timeline, one where building an audience is simply enough to count.

Forbes is acknowledging that the definition of success has expanded beyond traditional entrepreneurship. But it also highlights something I think a lot of us are resisting: to be successful now, you must become discoverable, shareable, and watchable. We just have to get over it if we all wanna be rich.

The 30 Under 30 list isn’t worse than it used to be. I think it accurately reflects our broader society in the most truthful way.

Who’s in Miami? Drop me a line if you’re around!

Ta ta!

xox,

SF

Slutty Founder is a weekly newsletter about the culture of beauty and the business behind it.

Inside this week’s newsletter: My time at Axios Pro Rata’s BFD Event in NYC with notes from Emma Grede’s Panel; Lizzo’s Substack, L’Oréal wants to capitalize off your scars.

💥 CYBER WEEK SALE — get an annual subscription for just $60 (from $99/year) until Dec. 5th. 💥

Tis the season to re-watch Gossip Girl Season 1 Episode 9 🍁 !!! Let’s get into this week.

Inside Jobs

Head of Growth — Nopalera
Full-time | Senior / Director
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Communications Manager — Foundation
New York, NY (Hybrid) | Full-time | Mid
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Senior Manager/Director of Global E-Commerce — Topicals
Remote | Full-time | Senior / Director
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Fractional Brand Strategist (Manager-Level) — Mid-Luxury Home-Fragrance Brand
West Coast Only (LA preferred) | Part-time | Mid | $120–$130/hr
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Partnerships Lead — Fazit — Apply

Trade/Retail Marketing Associate — Fazit — Apply

• I went to Axios Pro Rata’s BFD Summit last week in New York mostly for a complimentary nosh and some vino and to see what Emma Grede was talking about. Despite being there fresh off of SKIMS’ $225M raise, she kept pivoting every question back to Good American, which I found bizarre.

1. “As you know it’s very expensive,” she noted of the raise which will fund the opening of one retail store per month. She did not go into details around where the retail stores plan to open.

2. She mentions SKIMS Beauty was a no-brainer since the brand already has such a specific aesthetic and unique POV on product. There weren’t any additional details on beauty apart from her excitement to establish it as a new vertical, which makes me feel like it may be more of an afterthought cash grab after all.

3. She kept swinging back to things we can find in her upcoming book which will be titled: Start With Yourself.

   Between this and dodging all of the SKIMS questions, I picked up that Emma’s next journey includes striking out on her own.

4. Despite reports of about 1 in 5 women on a GLP-1 for weight loss, Emma notes that Good American has not been affected by a shift in down-sizing. She attributes this to their tight focus “true inclusivity.” which they’ve had since inception.

5. She says most companies don’t have the end consumer in mind because their leaders aren’t the end consumer.

6. “What is a disaster anymore. We’re all talking and I don’t think it hurts,” she says on the attention economy. Sydney Sweeney’s Great Jeans campaign was referenced. Considering Emma’s proximity to the you know who’s, I think Emma would know best here.

7. Emma doesn’t make cutesy sandwiches for her kids. I felt seen by this despite not having any. She is a master of owning her time and hates the work life balance myth (which unlike her, Mark Cuban would never be criticized for — her words). To that point, she thinks if your business is flailing, the best people to hire are moms.

💥 CYBER WEEK SALE — get an annual subscription for just $60 (from $99/year) until Dec. 5th. 💥

• I read ’s debut Substack piece on our cultural obsession with weight and I was not expecting it to be such an emotive and eloquent read.

  Celebrities joining Substack don’t bother me. Are they charging people for subscriptions? I’m struggling to envision Charli XCX enabling Stripe.

• The latest grift are the people on Threads pretending that they have event spots to give away for Art Basel by asking you to message them for one. They are then redirecting you to a purchase link for “access” all of the events.

  A bait and switch gets more and more sophisticated every day!

• I’d like to ask Shay Mitchell in what ways she thinks skincare starts at birth.

• The scar care category is expected to reach $5B by 2030 and L’Oreal is smelling the money. With 80 million new scars formed every year in the US alone, who can blame them.

  My thing is….

  Remember when I said these large beauty conglomerates have their ears to the streets on what the indie founders are doing to establish market fit? I feel like this supports my suspicion.

  I instantly thought of Motivo Scar Care — the only medical-grade scar care system co-created by a patient and (world-renowned) plastic surgeon duo. I am also learning 1 in 3 people experience trauma and anxiety related to their scars, which makes sense because I can’t even tell you how irrationally angry I get when I think about the one I have from being attacked by an evil pitbull while walking my little angel.

  Motivo was founded after Jadis Montijo underwent top surgery and the scar recovery products he used irritated and inflamed his skin so severely that he ended up needing an additional corrective procedure just to undo the damage. Thus Motivo was born. This is such an OG, genuine need-to-market brand formation story. We just don’t get them like this anymore!

  I swear this isn’t a plug. I just love what this brand is doing so much and think it’s one of the most inventive that I’ve seen (and will see) in a very long time. I’m actually deeply considering getting onto their cap table.

  Motivo, by the way, is doing a site-wide sale of 25% off from this Thursday-Monday.

• Is Merit the first beauty brand to run a campaign featuring used products?

  I got slight PTSD thinking about when I would do my own product photography and would panic if there was so much as a teensy smear on a single letter on the back of the bottle. It almost seems silly how committed we were to perfection just a few short years ago.

  Dare I say this creative direction is absolutely brilliant. This is always the case with Merit though, frankly.

• Don’t forget to get your applications in for:

  1. Sephora Beauty Grant ($100,000) — Application closes November 28th, 2025

  2. Sonsie x Shopify Mindful Beauty Award ($100,000 cash award and resources to support and nurture female-founded beauty and wellness brands) — Application closes December 14, 2025

I’m open for a few sessions over the next couple of days while I let my greens soak. If you want to review application questions and feedback you can book me: HERE.

That’s it for today.

Will I be seeing any of you at Art Basel next week? Drop me a line!

xxo,

SF

Happy Friday!

I’m shamelessly accepting Art Basel invites from any of my gorgeous and well-connected readers. I’m down for any event short of the opening of an envelope, so if you have any golden tickets to spare, you know where to find me:

📧 hello@sluttyfounder.com.

Love youu xox

Inside Jobs (Week ending 11/14):

• Senior Manager, Influencer & Community Marketing — Nuuly (Philadelphia, PA · Full-time · Mid · Fashion)
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• Associate Director of Brand Marketing — Nuuly (Philadelphia, PA · Full-time · Senior/Director · Fashion)
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• Manager, Operations — Saie (Remote, US · Full-time · Mid · Beauty)
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• Associate Director, Brand Marketing — Reformation (Los Angeles, CA · Full-time · Senior/Director · Fashion · $100k–$120k)
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• Brand and Product Marketing Manager — Rare Beauty (El Segundo, CA · Full-time · Mid · Beauty · $80k–$100k)
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• Senior Social Media Manager — Beauty/Skin Care Brand — The Grapevine Agency (Los Angeles, CA · Hybrid · Full-time · Senior/Director · Beauty · $150k–$180k)
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• UI/UX Designer — Anastasia Beverly Hills (Los Angeles, CA · Full-time · Senior/Director · Beauty · $100k–$120k)
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• Copywriter — Supplements Client — Creative People Inc. (Remote, US · Full-time · Senior/Director · Wellness · $100k–$120k)
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• Social Media Coordinator — Aspire with Emma Grede (Los Angeles, CA · Full-time · Entry-Level · Media)
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• Social Media Coordinator — Beauty Matter (New York, NY · Hybrid · Full-time · Entry-Level · Media)
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📰 What Got My Attention This Week

• Are Black women in beauty under attack?

• Hourglass founder Carisa Janes launched her new brand Outside In, which will offer premium skincare-makeup hybrid products including a Silk Serum Foundation in 25 shades and a Floral Reserve Facial Oil. Hourglass has never missed with me, and I doubt this will be the exception.

  I didn’t realize Janes also acquired Nature of Things in 2023 and is relaunching it while continuing to oversee Hourglass (which she sold to Unilever in 2017). Some people just really have the bug, I feel!

  Plans for Outside In include a store in New York’s SoHo slated to open in spring 2026. This is like the third brand I’ve seen this week have plans to expand into brick-and-mortar, which makes me think about how the future of retail is quietly moving back offline. A few years ago this was such a taboo goal to have as a beauty brand.

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