Janna Mandell

Meet The Beauty Industry Watchdogs Calling Bulls**t On Brands And Retailers

Estee Laundry and beauty reporter Jessica DeFino break the silence on companies who need to be held accountable.

'This Is A Very Strange Time To Be A Black-Owned Business'

This story, as told to Janna Mandell, is from the perspective of Trinity Mouzon Wofford, the co-founder of Golde , a Brooklyn-based superfood-fueled beauty and wellness brand, which she co-founded with partner Issey Kobori in 2017.

The Alchemist And The Scientist: How Strange Bedfellows Created The Future Of Skincare

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.

The Demonizing Of Essential Oils: How A Skincare Launch Started A Witch Hunt Against Natural Beauty

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.

Cannabis Could Be The Most Profitable Ingredient In Skincare, If The U.S. Government Allows It

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.

VSCO Girls And E-Girls: The TikTok Subcultures You Need To Know About

Zoe Holland is a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Southern California, where she is surrounded by possibly unintentional VSCO girls (pronounced "visco"). With her jet-black hair, blunt Bettie Page bangs, black-winged eyeliner, heart cheek stamp and pink-blushed nose and cheeks, Holland is the quintessential e-girl, lost in a sea of Malibu Barbies taking selfies.

What Is Collagen Banking? And Do We Need To Start In Our 20s?

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.

Beauty Goes Green (Cover Story)

Navigating the Green Beauty Trend

How EO Products Became An Organic Body Care Powerhouse Expected To Reach Nearly $70M In Sales...

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.

Are next-generation fast beauty brands worth the hype?

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.

How Botnia skin-care line started in Sausalito founder's backyard

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 skin-care solutions by microclimate

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?

Spas embrace cannabis-infused massage rituals

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.

Saks Fifth Avenue Rolls The Dice By Moving Beauty Department Off Ground Floor

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.

Tatcha CEO's book takes a beauty lesson from the geisha culture

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.

Strand Equity Declares 'Youth To The People' With Minority Investment

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.

L'Oreal Says 'In Your Face' To Competition With Strategic Acquisition

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.

Glossier Just Got $52 Million In Fresh Capital, Bringing Total Funding To $86 Million

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.

Why Amazon Isn't Ready To Dominate Beauty (Yet)

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.

Skin Care Turns to a Buffet of Superfoods

Clean beauty swaps: It's time to go nontoxic

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.

A Squeeze of Star Power

Juice Beauty Backer Spreads Message of Clean Cosmetics

Put Your Best Face Forward

Julie Lynge's facial massage targets jaw pain and adds a rejuvenating lift

Bite Lip Lab offers possibility of that perfect shade

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.

Neve & Hawk combines creativity and commerce

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.

Non-Toxic By Nature

Take the water at a hot springs spa in St. Helena

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.

E.L.F. Turns Spotlight on Its Biggest Fans

Indie brand credits success to loyal fanbase, social media, and "girlfriend-to-girlfriend" effect

Rockin' a Runway Look

Reporter experiences how makeup artist interprets runway trends for the every day woman.

Backstage beauty notes from 10 top fashion shows

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.

Tata Harper is comfortable in her skin

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.

Credo a showcase for natural beauty

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.

Bay Area Bliss

You don’t need to travel far for a relaxing, rejevenating spa day

3 Must-Have Beauty Treatments for New York Fashion Week

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.

Planning the Perfect "I F'd Up" Romantic Wine Country Weekend

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.

Best Bay Area Beauty Finds (Cover Story)

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.

Silicon Valley stylist takes clients beyond the hoodie

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.

5 Slightly Passive-Aggressive Gifts for Him

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?

Facial Goes Beyond Skin Deep

Kristina Holey brings pioneering French massage technique to S.F.

BRUSHING UP ON SKIN CARE AT NEW S.F. HQ

2-year-old Foreo launched itself with a sonic facial brush, and now offers a line of cleansers

THE BROW WHISPERER

Michele Holmes brings an expert eye, gentle products to tame, tease or transform eyebrows

Put your best face forward: Our favorite facials

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.

Cover Story: MEET THE NEXT GENERATION OF NATURAL BEAUTY PRODUCTS

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.

Beauty Addicts Anonymous: We Admit We Are Powerless Over Gift with Purchase Events

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.

Cover Story: KOREA EXPORTS A BEAUTY CRAZE

Youthful nation obsessed with perfect skin pioneers innovative products with a playful touch

N.Y. Fashion Week's makeup artists let cosmetics multitask

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.

Benefit Cosmetics traces its success to being born in S.F.

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.

Beauty Police: Sophia Bush Rocks a Fresh Face and Youthful Braid at BeautyCon on Fashion Police

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.

Beauty Police: Jennifer Garner Proves Subtle Can Be Sexy at Draft Day Premiere on Fashion Police...

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.

Think Tank: Taking Cues From the Playbook of Digital-First Brands

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?

Marc Jacobs Beauty New Nudes Sheer Lip Gel

Copy for Sephora.com

Marc Jacobs Beauty the Shape Brush

Product page copy for Sephora.com

Marc Jacobs Beauty (P)outliner Longwear Lip Pencil

Product page copy for Sephora.com

Marc Jacobs Beauty Le Marc Lip Creme

Copy for Sephora.com

Kat Von D The Kat Eye Set

Marketing copy used for internal presentations as well as Sephora.com.