Bobbi Brown

Bobbi Brown Cosmetics dates its beginning to 1991 and a range of ten lipsticks.^[1] They were the idea of a New York editorial makeup artist who wanted a lipstick that looked like the colour of lips, and they went on sale at Bergdorf Goodman.^[2] Four years later the Estée Lauder Companies bought the whole business.^[3]

The house matters here for the category it helped to build. It was one of the makeup artists’ lines that, in the trade press’s own account, changed how department-store counters sold colour in the 1990s, and whose rise the Estée Lauder Companies answered by buying its way in.^[4] Its founding argument, that makeup should look like the face wearing it, has outlasted the founder’s time at the company.^[5]

Bobbi Brown moved to New York in 1980 with a degree in theatrical makeup and a beginner’s portfolio, and worked as a freelance makeup artist on magazine shoots.^[6] CNN later called a Vogue cover with Naomi Campbell her first big break.^[7] By her own account the fashionable face of the decade was what she disliked. “Makeup was really extreme in the ’80s”, she told Inc. in 2007, remembering white skin, red lips and contouring, where she preferred “healthy, natural, simple skin”.^[6]

The lipstick began, in the same telling, on a Mademoiselle shoot in about 1988 that took in Kiehl’s pharmacy. She told a chemist there what she wanted — creamy rather than dry, long-wearing, with no odour and in “colors that look like lips” — and sent him a swatch she had mixed from a taupe eye pencil and a blush.^[6] The first lipstick to come of it was a shade called Brown.^[7]

She sold the early lipsticks from home, posting them or delivering them by hand in manila envelopes with an ingredient card inside, and the telephone began to ring when Leslie Seymour, a beauty editor at Glamour, wrote about them.^[8]

She did not found the company alone. Her husband, Steven Plofker, and a second couple, Rosalind and Ken Landis, were partners from the start.^[9][10] Ken Landis then ran the cosmetics division of the Benetton Group and Rosalind Landis worked in beauty public relations. By his account the four built the business in the evenings without giving up their day jobs, never raised outside capital, and left Rosalind Landis to run it day to day once it began to grow.^[10]

By Brown’s account Bobbi Brown Essentials went on sale in February 1991, on a small table in the middle of Bergdorf Goodman’s makeup floor.^[9] Women’s Wear Daily noticed it on 1 March in a 199-word item headed “Brown on Brown”: ten lipsticks called Essentials, “based on her belief that brown undertones would produce more skin-flattering hues”.^[11] She described them as ten brown-based colours, creamy, matte and odourless, made to be mixed and blended.^[9]

Distribution was kept narrow on purpose. Ken Landis recalled the line being exclusive to Bergdorf Goodman and then to Neiman Marcus, refusing Saks, Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom until the partners had the penetration they wanted, and going abroad only to a few stores, among them Harrods, Joyce and Galeries Lafayette.^[10]

The foundation followed. Style.com, Condé Nast’s fashion site, dated her yellow-toned foundation stick to 1992,^[13] and in 2012 The New York Times described her as “a makeup artist who built a company on a brown lipstick and yellow-based foundation”.^[14] In her own words the aim was “foundation that disappeared on your face”, which she put down to her “yellow-toned formula”.^[15]

It had to be explained at the counter. She later remembered going into stores to show women how they could use a yellow-toned foundation, and why blush should be the colour of the cheek, and working hard to teach them “this new way”.^[16] The phrase is hers, and so is the claim of novelty.

Matching the product to the wearer was not a new principle in 1991. Flori Roberts, Inc. had been founded in the 1960s by Flori Roberts and her husband, a doctor who had studied the science of Black skin,^[17] and Fashion Fair launched in 1973, designed for women of darker skin who were often unable to find products to match their complexion.^[18]

By 1997 the trade treated makeup artists’ lines as a category. WWD reported that August that once lines such as M·A·C had made an impact in the early 1990s, a host of others had joined them, “from Bobbi Brown Essentials to Trish McEvoy to Francois Nars”. The same report found Laura Mercier’s line in two stores in Atlanta, and Neiman Marcus counting Bobbi Brown among its best-selling cosmetics lines.^[19]

It also set down what the newcomers had done to the older houses. Retailers described established brands going into the brush business, reworking their testers to be more approachable and hold more colour, and bringing back the makeover, while more shoppers expected advice from a makeup authority at the counter.^[19] Brown’s own statement of purpose fits the pattern: the company was created, she wrote in 2017, “to teach women just how simple makeup could be”.^[20]

She taught in print as well. Her first book, Bobbi Brown Beauty: The Ultimate Beauty Resource, written with Annemarie Iverson, was published by HarperStyle in 1997,^[21] and by 2024 she had written nine.^[22]

The Estée Lauder Companies had already bought into one makeup artist’s line, taking a majority interest in M·A·C in 1994.^[23] By Brown’s account Leonard Lauder then asked to meet her, and told her that his company wanted to buy hers “because you are beating us in all the stores”.^[24]

In October 1995 the company acquired a 100 per cent interest in Bobbi Brown Essentials. It paid with short-term notes that matured in January 1996, and took on further earn-out payments that depended on the brand’s results in 1997 and 1998.^[25] The price was not disclosed.^[24] Ken Landis later described the earn-out as a way of valuing the company at different points in its development while the partners kept their autonomy.^[26]

Brown said she sold because Leonard Lauder told her, “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing.”^[24] The New York Times later described the sale as one in which she kept creative control, and quoted Leonard Lauder on her in 2012: “She wants everyone to look like themselves, every woman a queen, and I love that.”^[27] She stayed with the company for more than twenty years.

On 19 December 2016 the Estée Lauder Companies said that Brown would leave by the end of the year, and that the global brand president, Peter Lichtenthal, would continue to oversee the business. WWD’s report summed up her breakthrough as “promoting a natural beauty which enhanced a woman’s look, rather than altered it”, and recorded that she was said to have a non-compete clause in her contract.^[28] In 2019 she was plainer about why she had gone: after eighteen to twenty years as the boss, “all of a sudden things changed”, and she realised “I am not doing what I believe in”.^[29]

On 26 October 2020, the day WWD’s sources said that non-compete ran out, she launched a new line online. It does not carry her name. She called it Jones Road, after a name she found on a traffic app,^[30] and Bobbi Brown remains a trademark the Estée Lauder Companies lists as its own.^[31]

The house went on without her. In 2019 The Business of Fashion reported its most extensive refresh since the 1995 acquisition, with a rotating cast of influencers and celebrity endorsers such as Yara Shahidi as its new face.^[32] In December 2025 it went on sale in Amazon’s Premium Beauty store in the United States.^[33] In its annual report for the year to 30 June 2026 the parent placed it among its “Scaling Brands”, those with net sales of 400 million dollars or more but under a billion, and described it as known for “undertone-correct” makeup: a founder’s argument about skin, kept on as a company’s description of itself.^[31]