This New Beauty Startup Is Selling Luxury Lipstick for Less Than Your Daily Latte

Marcia Kilgore knows a thing or two about disrupting the beauty space. The Canadian-born personal trainer, who became an aesthetician when her own skin issues inspired her to learn the ins and outs of facials, opened Bliss Spa in New York’s Soho neighborhood in 1996. Her bubbly personality and strong, nimble hands instantly made her a go-to resource for young models looking for extractions and a quick oxygen boost. But Kilgore also managed to completely reinvent the once-stodgy spa experience, patenting a unique blend of skin-care expertise, downtown cool cred, and lighthearted, pun-heavy products that attracted LVMH, which bought a majority stake in her company for $30 million just three years later. Kilgore had similar success with Soap & Glory, her second tongue-in-chic product range, which she sold to the British beauty behemoth Boots in 2014. Her latest endeavor, however, isn’t so much disrupting the industry as blowing it totally wide open.

“If I died having not tried this, I would have really regretted it,” Kilgore says of Beauty Pie, her new membership-based online-only brand that’s bringing consumers prestige-quality products at totally transparent factory prices. Typically, makeup goes from the manufacturer to the supplier to the brand and then to the retailer—its cost multiplying every step of the way, explains Kilgore, who is now based in the U.K., where she launched Beauty Pie on December 6 ahead of its U.S. debut. In an effort to involve herself in something “totally authentic,” Kilgore decided to try to bring the same cosmetics that luxury brands source from the same handful of trusted labs direct to consumers while cutting out the middlemen—and the markups.

“It’s all about micro-curation,” she says of her approach with Beauty Pie, which brings its impressive range of color products to the masses at both a competitive prestige price for one-time shoppers—say, $25 for a lipstick—and at a factory cost for members. That version removes the additional marketing, distribution, packaging, and warehousing costs, discounting that same lipstick to a mere $2.39.

No, that is not a typo.

Membership costs $10 per month with a three-month minimum, and entitles you to $100 of monthly credit in full retail dollars that roll over if left unused. As a bonus, Kilgore’s pigment-rich, professional-quality products—Futurelipstick, Uber Curl Drama Mascara, and Everyday Great Skin Foundation, to name a few—have reduced a lot of the unnecessary packaging that’s pervasive in the cosmetics industry. This means that each bullet, compact, and bottle is unweighted and thus surprisingly light in feel, with plant-based inks and recyclable outer cartons.

High-end skin care packed with technologically advanced (and often costly) ingredients like encapsulated retinol, hyaluronic acid, and peptides will launch later this spring at similarly eye-popping prices. In the meantime, Kilgore and her team are adding more makeup to their e-commerce site every month—including these three as-yet-unreleased January newcomers that will make a Beauty Pie convert out of the staunchest traditionalist.

Superbrow 3-in-1 Powder Pencil
Membership Price: $1.81
Basically a pressed powder in a pencil, this clever product can shape, fill, and blend with the attached spoolie in a few easy motions. (Pro tip: top with a tinted gel, like Diorshow Brow Styler Gel, for hold and added separation.)

Beach Gloss in Bare Naked
Membership Price: $2.20
A wet-shine, plumping alternative to Beauty Pie’s excellent Superglazy gel-oil balms, this surprisingly perfect shade of beige-neutral has a hint of shimmer and absolutely zero stickiness, making it a great easy-wearing gloss even for people who think they hate gloss.

Moonlighting Balm Radiance Powder in Soft Soul
Membership Price: $3.41
The name of this radiance-boosting compact alone is enough to add it to your makeup bag. But the unique melt-on-contact texture and the transparent, totally natural-looking peachy-nude shine, courtesy of all-natural plant oils, give it plenty of extra clout. Plus, who wouldn’t love the idea of looking “moonlit,” rather than “sun-kissed”?