She swirls a brush in a compact holding Celebration Foundation Illumination and sweeps the powder over her forehead, under her eyes, along her cheekbone, on her cheek.
#IT COSMETICS QVC EYE CREAM SKIN#
“Hello, rosacea!” Lima says genially as she uncovers a patch of skin as red and bright as a burn. Then she takes a face wipe and rubs it on her right cheek (always the right cheek). In Lima’s YouTube and QVC demonstrations, the pitch works like this: She appears before the camera looking impeccable, without a blemish or a hair out of place. In addition to IT Cosmetics, L’Oréal bought Urban Decay, the makeup line with a cult following, for an estimated $300 to $400 million. In the past five years alone, crazy money has rained down on the founders of one beauty brand after another: The Too Faced and the Becca makeup businesses sold last fall to Estée Lauder for $1.45 billion and an estimated $200 million, respectively. Investors practically drool like a cartoon fox at the sight of a ripe young creator with untapped potential.
#IT COSMETICS QVC EYE CREAM PLUS#
The barrier to entering the department stores used to be nearly prohibitive, with department stores requiring annual sales of about $400 per square foot, plus a staff of beauty advisers and an advertising budget in the hundreds of thousands now, marketing is as easy and cheap as a presence on social media and a copy of Building a Website for Dummies (that’s what Paulo Lima used). The business of beauty - of makeup, fragrance, skin-care and hair-care products - has become especially welcoming to newcomers like Lima with a fresh idea and a knack for selling it. In fact, Lima refers to her Superhero mascara as the “Spanx of mascaras.” “It takes your lashes and lifts ’em up,” says QVC host Shawn Killinger, who, perhaps for emphasis, exaggeratedly tugs up the Spanx under her hot-pink evening gown. IT Cosmetics is to makeup as Spanx is to lingerie it’s unsexy but gets the job done. Lima’s collection of concealers and foundations is neither cool nor trendy. Lima, in slippers with her lucky shoes standing by, waits to go on set. In September, eight years after creating IT - which stands for Innovative Technology - they sold the company to L’Oréal for a stunning $1.2 billion.
She and her husband, Paulo Lima, consulted with plastic surgeons in Brazil, his native country, on formulas for makeup pumped with skin-care ingredients. The dazzling success story of Jamie Kern Lima and IT Cosmetics began with her face, specifically her cheeks, whose blazing-pink rosacea sent her on a quest for makeup that would simultaneously cover and soothe the condition.
In the span of 40 hours, Lima will sell more than 250,000 products to the tune of about $10 million. She has exactly six minutes before she has to slip back into her lucky shoes (nude platform pumps covered in slightly worn sparkles) and perform in front of the cameras for another 15 hours. “It will not crease, it will not crack, it will not make you look older,” she recites over and over about her Bye Bye Under Eye concealer. She has been on the air pitching her line of beauty products, IT Cosmetics, for 25 hours with only momentary breaks. A couch in the greenroom at the willfully cheerful QVC studios in West Chester, Pennsylvania, has been turned into a pretend bed with sheets, pillows, and a QVC velvet-soft blanket, but Lima is wide awake, propped up like Manet’s Olympia, although fully dressed. It is seven o’clock on a Saturday night in November, and Jamie Kern Lima is resting, if you can call it that.
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