Shine On

Glossier, the beauty brand born out of Emily Weiss’ popular beauty blog Into the Gloss, has gone with Melrose Place as the home for its first L.A. brick-and-mortar store. Weiss started her career as the Teen Vogue intern to Lauren Conrad on the TV show The Hills, before launching her editorial beauty website in 2010. She harnessed the power of social media to introduce web-savvy fans to her direct-to-consumer beauty brand she launched in 2014 starting with skin care. Bathed in millennial pink- similar to the Alfred Tea Room down the street- the 1,500-square-foot space has all of Glossier’s cult favorites, including the Lidstar liquid shadow that debuted on none other than Beyonce at the 2018 Grammy Awards in January. The calm, minimal but warm interior design of the store was inspired by the idea of escaping the city and driving in the California desert, and there are lots of features to appeal to Glossier’s digital community, including an immersive “Glossier Canyon” room with rosy rock formations and Zen-like nature sounds, and plenty of selfie mirrors throughout the store.

Some of the brand’s most popular products include a Boy Brow pomade that fills in and sculpts brows; Cloud Paints that offer a wash of color for cheekbones, lips or eyes and can be mixed with nursery school-age abandon; a Haloscope dew-effect highlighter for an instant sun-kissed glow; and Generation G sheer matte lip glosses, which are somewhere between a tint and balm. The brand’s less-is-more approach to beauty, direct-to-consumer business model, powerful female founder, and empowering ad campaigns (2017’s Body Hero ads featured a range of sizes) have made fans out of a number of Hollywood luminaries, including Karlie Kloss, Chrissy Teigen, Reese Witherspoon, Helen Mirren, Solange, Rashida Jones, Taraji P. Henson and many more. The Los Angeles store is the second permanent outpost for the brand. The first, in New York’s Soho, opened in 2016, and Weiss has said it has more sales per square foot than an Apple store. That’s a lot of gloss. www.glossier.com