United States
Janna Mandell is a San Francisco Bay Area-based strategic advisor and journalist covering everything beauty: innovative companies, runway and industry trends, disrupting indie brands, the green beauty movement, and the spa industry. She has been called a trend-spotter by industry peers for her early coverage of trends like the Korean beauty craze and the natural beauty boom years before hitting the mainstream. In her reporting, she has interviewed everyone from CEOs to celebrity makeup artists to Gwyneth Paltrow. Janna has written several in-depth company profiles for Forbes and the S.F. Chronicle on companies like Benefit Cosmetics, e.l.f., and FOREO. Janna has also created marketing content for Kendo brands Marc Jacobs Beauty and Kat Von D as well as acted as a strategic consultant for other companies. Previously, she was an executive on Wall Street, running strategy, business development and sales for an electronic trading company.
Waiting for my Botox appointment in a posh medical spa in San Francisco, I started chatting up the 20-something woman sitting next to me. With her flawless skin and apparently amazing genetics (sky-high cheekbones and full lips), I couldn't figure out what she could possibly need done at a medical spa.
How did EO Products come to be? We were working in fashion/retail in San Francisco, making oil blends for our friends and family when Bloomingdale's asked us to create 360 sets of four custom oil blends for their holiday catalog. We had to think of a name-and quick.
Mainstream beauty brands have jumped headfirst into the crystal-infused skin care trend. But for independent Northern California brands such as This Magic Life, Laurel Whole Plant Organics and Pink Light Botanicals, crystal formulations are integral to their practice, helping customers connect with their own bodies and sense of themselves.
Before the days of Instagram's #Instastories and r/MakeupAddiction on Reddit, young women got their makeup inspiration from glossy magazines and the local beauty counter. The trajectory usually involved starting one's teen years with Clinique and MAC, and eventually graduating to Chanel and Dior.
When Botnia skin-care founder Justine Kahn and her husband bought their home in Sausalito in 2010, it was a "contractor's special" to say the least. The house was leaning to one side like the famous tower in Pisa and was accessible only via a ladder.
Summer weather in the Bay Area means different things depending on where you live - cold and dreary in the city, foggy and windy in Mill Valley and scorching everywhere else. If you commute between microclimates, how do you expect your skin to survive all that change?
It takes a second for your eyes to adjust when you enter Earthbody, a day spa in Hayes Valley. Once you've settled on the dimly lit pillowed banquette, a spa employee brings you paperwork along with a tray of goodies to begin your cannabis ritual.
Talk to any beauty-product enthusiast and she probably has an early memory of her first visit to the beauty floor at her local department store. Stepping in from the drab parking lot into a magical world where heavily made-up women offered perfume spritzes, vivid signage showed pouting models in glossy bright makeup, and glass cabinets filled with tubes, bottles and jars sang their siren songs of glamour and smooth skin.
Victoria Tsai, founder and CEO of San Francisco beauty brand Tatcha, wants you to forget everything you learned from the best-selling book "Memoirs of a Geisha." The Harvard Business School-educated Tsai would know; she based her entire brand on the beauty rituals of the geisha.
The first thing you notice when you open the door to luxury botanical skincare brand In Fiore's studio and showroom in San Francisco is the scent - otherworldly yet grounded, like Big Sur after the rain. The showroom itself looks like an old-world apothecary: wood and glass cabinets filled with etched bottles and jars housing potent balms, oils, and other skincare and fragrance potions.
Los Angeles-based vegan skincare company Youth to the People (YTTP) announced today they received a minority investment from private equity firm Strand Equity, also based in Los Angeles, to further expand the brand and fuel growth. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
French cosmetics giant L'Oreal SA announced today it will acquire Toronto-based ModiFace, a creator of augmented reality and artificial intelligence for beauty brands like MAC Cosmetics, LVMH-owned Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics.
Millennial-favorite beauty brand Glossier is about to make a whole lot more "meaningful connections." The New York-based startup announced today that the direct-to-consumer beauty brand received $52 million in a Series C round.
Reading through recent headlines about Amazon disrupting the beauty industry, one would think that it's time for Sephora and Ulta to panic and rethink their strategies. Yes, I know the power of Amazon and how it's eating almost every retail sector's lunch.
Lord Jones co-founder Cindy Capobianco describes her luxury cannabis-infused product business in much the same manner as any maker of a prestige natural skincare brand: it's made in small batches, organic ingredients, medicinal value of said ingredients. With a body lotion and face products slated for release later this year, Lord Jones is trying to be a prestige natural skincare brand.
When Kristina Holey and Marie Veronique Nadeau launched their skincare line, they found themselves in a vortex of negative attention around natural beauty. Find out how the discussion around natural vs. synthetic beauty is quickly becoming the most polarizing debate in the personal care industry.
Navigating the Green Beauty Trend
Gone are the days of having to give up performance to swap out a conventional beauty product for a nontoxic option. Thanks to recent innovations from "green" chemistry and rapid growth in the industry, many clean products are outperforming their conventional counterparts.
Juice Beauty Backer Spreads Message of Clean Cosmetics
Julie Lynge's facial massage targets jaw pain and adds a rejuvenating lift
Looking through the windows of the Bite Beauty Lip Lab on Fillmore, you might mistake the lip boutique for a candy store. The shelves are lined with jars full of brightly hued pellets, and there are stools set up around high tables. The glass case at checkout looks to be stocked with candy-colored truffles.
On a recent Saturday morning at Neve & Hawk in San Anselmo, the boutique's namesakes are making themselves at home. The owners' 9-year-old daughter, Neve, is working the register - and getting a lecture from her mother, Kris Galmarini, on giving the correct change.
More than 4,000 years later, locals and visitors still come to Calistoga to take advantage of the restorative geothermal mineral waters and volcanic ash mud baths.
Indie brand credits success to loyal fanbase, social media, and "girlfriend-to-girlfriend" effect
Reporter experiences how makeup artist interprets runway trends for the every day woman.
NEW YORK - Skin was the star again this season with models' faces that looked scrubbed clean until they caught the bright lights on the New York Fashion Week runways, revealing soft palettes of iridescent pinks and nudes.
The first thing you'll notice about Tata Harper is her ethereal, glowing complexion. Harper's eponymous skin-care line, adored by celebrities and beauty editors, is known for its natural ingredients and high degree of efficacy. [...] Harper is opening her first-ever spa room for facials and other skin treatments inside Credo, where we spoke to her while she was in town putting on its finishing touches.
When Shashi Batra, founder of new beauty boutique Credo in Pacific Heights, talks about Credo's featured brands his face lights up and he transforms into a proud parent. A longtime veteran of the beauty industry (Batra brought a little shop called Sephora to the U.S.
You don’t need to travel far for a relaxing, rejevenating spa day
Not all members of the media and attendees and of New York Fashion Week strut from their trendy apartments in recently gentrified neighborhoods on Day 1 rearing to go. Some of us who cover fashion week actually come from far away lands like, in my case, the hippy hills of Fairfax, CA.
You really did it this time... It doesn't matter if it was going away for a boys' weekend on her birthday or drunkenly flirting with her friend at a party, you're going to need to plan one hell of a Valentine's Day weekend to make up for your errant ways.
From manis to massages, brows to braids, stylish insiders share their top recommendations of transformative services and top practitioners: Jeannie Jarnot is founder and CEO of Beauty Heroes, a curated beauty subscription-box service featuring luxury nontoxic brands like True Nature Botanicals, Vintner's Daughter and In Fiore.
Damon Schechter emerges from the dressing room at Denim & Soul on Union wearing olive green cords, plaid shirt, cashmere hoodie and a denim shirt as a jacket and exclaims, "I would have never thought of putting this outfit together!" His style consultant Victoria Hitchcock quickly goes to work cuffing his sleeves and fixing his collars.
Sure, he may have put a signed basketball from Steph Curry and a Beer of the Month Club on his wish list, but really, does he "need" those things? Is he actually going to admire that ball every day or is it just going to sit in a tacky plastic case on your mantle?
Kristina Holey brings pioneering French massage technique to S.F.
2-year-old Foreo launched itself with a sonic facial brush, and now offers a line of cleansers
Michele Holmes brings an expert eye, gentle products to tame, tease or transform eyebrows
Getting a facial can be a bit intimidating. It's like using an online dating site - you know people who swear by it and others who have been burned. Or perhaps you've actually been scarred by overly aggressive extractions or too-harsh exfoliations in the past.
Making similar decisions about the cosmetics and skin care you put on your body, however, has traditionally been more difficult, with fuzzy terminology and little industry regulation leading to confusion about what's organic, natural - or toxic.
Late at night when I should be sleeping, but instead I am trying to rack up $150 in product purchases to qualify for Neiman Marcus's Gift with Purchase, I wonder if there could be a support group for addicts like myself. Then again, it would probably do more harm than good.
Youthful nation obsessed with perfect skin pioneers innovative products with a playful touch
At Marc by Marc Jacobs, noted makeup artist Diane Kendal used Marc Jacobs Beauty Lip Lock Moisture Balm as a highlighter to accentuate models' cheekbones and eye contours. $24, www.sephora.com. The Nars Matte Multiple in Cappadoce earned its namesake at shows like Alexander Wang and Naeem Khan, where makeup artists applied the traditional blush and lipstick on eyelids.
Talk to any employee at Benefit Cosmetics' Bush Street headquarters or Bay Area boutiques and you can expect to hear about the "DNA of the brand" as well as its motto, "Laughter is the best cosmetic." Today, on the heels of the 25th anniversary of its San Francisco boutique openings, Benefit is poised to become a billion-dollar company, "exporting" its quintessentially S.F.
Parisa/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES We love it when past Beauty Police victims redeem themselves and show us they can obviously take a little constructive criticism. We hammered Sophia Bush a few short months ago for wearing a thick wall of bangs and matronly makeup, demanding she tried to look her age.
Steve Granitz/WireImage Miley Cyrus and Christina Aguilera , get out your notepads cause it's time to take some notes! Let these photos of Jennifer Garner teach you that you don't need 10 coats of mascara (yeah you, Miley) or enough makeup to scare a drag queen (yep, we're talking to you, Christina) to bring the sex kitten to the red carpet.
Marketing Content
Browse the recent headlines of retail trades and you will get nothing but a picture of doom and gloom - how Amazon and social media are killing the country's bricks-and-mortar retail locations. How is it, though, that retailers like Ulta Beauty are able to grow in these tumultuous times when their department store rivals are closing locations and filing for bankruptcy?
Product page copy for Sephora.com
Marketing copy used for internal presentations as well as Sephora.com.