Meet The New Beauty Queens

They’ve never had a bank loan – yet their brands are worth a fortune. They have over 29 million Instagram followers between them – but have never paid for one. They answer to no one but you – and they’re redefining how we buy beauty. Becci Vallis meets the cosmetics mavens getting the big-boy brands hot under the collar.

- Becci Vallis

Forget your nearest beauty counter; you’ll find the latest make-up trailblazers via Instagram. In fact, you probably already follow them, lured in by their colourful feeds and good-looking products you never knew you needed (mermaid lipstick, anyone?).

Whether it’s tattoo artist Kat Von D’s hotly anticipated Lolita eyeshadow (you heard it here first), or the new false lashes from the biggest beauty blogger in the universe, Huda Kattan, aka @hudabeauty (she has 16.4m followers in comparison to brands like @maybelline’s 4.4m and @diormakeup’s 627k), these self-made women have caught us hook, line and sinker with their cult cosmetics that sell out even before they’ve left the production line.

It helps that Kat already has a customer base thanks to appearing on reality show Miami Ink, and then her own spin-off, LA Ink. Her range was developed after fans pestered Sephora staff, desperate to discover what shade of lipstick she was wearing. Sephora approached Kat and practically begged her to create a range of four reds to keep customers happy. Nine years on and, while it’s still stocked in Sephora, Kat Von D Beauty is a brand in its own right, with two lipstick lines and a kaleidoscopic 50-plus shades.

For others, like the sisters behind Spectrum Collections, it was a case of going from zero to hero, one Instagram follower at a time. Sitting in pyjamas in their garage in Barry, Wales, living off biscuits and coffee and breaking only for light and air when their dogs scratched at the door, it was a pipe dream to think that two years later, Hannah and Sophie Pycroft would be heading up a multi-million-pound make-up brush business. Profits were hovering around £8 million per annum at last count.