Milk Makeup, a cosmetic and skincare company headquartered in New York City, has carved out its own niche in the beauty industry since its inception in 2016. The brand was born in Milk Studios, a creative campus that has fostered innovative work in fashion, music, and photography, and thus, embodies a philosophy of self-expression, community, and clean beauty. Milk Makeup has attracted the beauty lovers of Gen Z and Millennials around the world by offering vegan, cruelty-free, and multi-use products. The article examines the history of the brand, the innovation of its products, the viral phenomenon, as well as the contribution of the brand to the beauty industry, relying on recent events and experiences.
Table of Contents
Origins and Philosophy
Created by Milk Studios co-founder Mazdack Rassi, fashion editor Zanna Roberts Rassi, creative director Georgie Greville, and product developer Dianna Ruth, the brand was born to make products that are all about individuality and simplicity to apply. The brand slogan, Live Your Look, focuses its mantra on beauty as a form of individual expression rather than conformity. With offices in Milk Studios (New York and Los Angeles), the brand parades its creative heritage into all of its products, choosing to specialize in clean, vegan, and cruelty-free formulations that do not contain over 2,500 controversial ingredients.
Diversity and inclusion are core of Milk Makeup. The brand promotes diversity in terms of race, gender, gender expression, and other identity aspects; it also employs unconventional and LGBTQ + models in its campaigns in respect to its inclusive nature. This strategy is appealing to an international audience of diverse people who are ambitious, curious, and enjoy originality and creativity.
Product Innovation and Viral Success
Milk Makeup is also famous for its multi-purpose, simple, consumer-friendly products that are made to inspire on-the-go makeup. It has such cult products as these new favorites: Hydro Grip Primer hydrates and keeps makeup in place up to 12 hours; Kush Mascara has hemp-derived cannabis seed oil to moisturize and volumize lashes. Cooling Water Jelly Tint, the newest item in the brand, which launched in January 2024, was a viral hit on TikTok, selling out twice and currently has a 60,000-person waitlist because of its sheer, buildable colour and hydrating ingredients, such as seawater, vegan collagen, and aloe.
The viral success of Cooling Water Jelly Tint made its parent company, Waldencast, experience a 25.7 percent growth in net revenue during Q2 2024 and a 32 percent growth in net revenue during Q4 2024, in part because of its popularity and the product reaching Walmart stores in March 2025. Nonetheless, sell-outs were so fast that they resulted in the problem of being out of stock, and the problem with predicting demand in innovative products appeared to be difficult..
Business Growth and Market Expansion
The brand of Milk Makeup has enjoyed healthy growth since its inception. In 2017, it pioneered the first external investment by Main Post Partners and made an international expansion breakthrough to other markets, e.g., Canada, the UK. In 2022, Waldencast bought Milk Makeup and Obagi Medical in a transaction worth 1.2 billion dollars, thus setting the brand up to expand. By 2023, Milk Makeup exceeded sales of more than $100M in net revenues, and in the first half of 2024, it had made an additional $63.2M in sales.
The retail presence of the brand has grown by a huge margin. Originally introduced at Sephora, Milk makeup is sold today at Cult Beauty, Space NK, Amazon, and as of March 2025, more than 600 stores of Ulta Beauty in the world. In 2024, it celebrated its fifth anniversary in the UK with products being launched in 32 stores across the UK, including the flagship Boots store on the Battersea Power Station high street. The aggressive growth is part of the strategy of Milk Makeup, which aims to reach multigenerational audiences.
Through Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Milk Makeup is able to level up its digital presence online, which has resulted in triple-digit annual growth since 2018. What has helped grow its e-commerce platform to become a hub of its audience of 60 percent focused on mobile is features such as shoppable videos and personalized content..
Community and Cultural Impact
The fact that Milk Makeup is community-focused heavily contributed to the business. The brand is very interactive with her fans and followers by using social media, tutorials, its online blog Milk Paper, which covers beauty tips, trends, and focuses on diversity and self-expression messages. Its partnerships in 2018 with such brands as Wu-Tang and TRUE NYC display its ties into the creative forward culture of New York, and its dedication to the queer and BIPOC communities demonstrates its inclusive goals.
The brand offers cool beauty status: everything is vegan, cruelty-free, and paraben-free, but it is also based on smart textures, such as a water jelly-like Cooling Water Jelly Tint, being at the fashion frontier in the industry. The fact that Milk Makeup offers active ingredients to its products, including niacinamide, bakuchiol, and vegan collagen, to combine the properties of makeup and skincare, also makes the brand a pioneer in the process of skinification of cosmetics.
Challenges and Future Outlook
Despite its successes, Milk Makeup faces challenges in inventory management, as seen with the Cooling Water Jelly Tint’s stock shortages. CEO Michel Brousset noted that forecasting demand for novel products like jelly tints is challenging, impacting Q2 2024 performance. Looking ahead, Waldencast projects slower growth in 2025, with a “mid-teens” revenue increase and a flat Q1 due to retailer inventory adjustments. However, the brand’s focus on innovation, such as expanding its jelly-based product line, and its Ulta partnership signal continued ambition.
Conclusion
Milk Makeup has disrupted the definition of beauty by bringing in creativity, inclusion, and clean innovation into this equation. The brand, a hit with a self-expressive audience, delivers products frequently that is on trend, including the Hydro Grip Primer to its blue-intensive viral Cooling Water Jelly Tint. Its well-placed strategic expansions, digital expansion, and caring about the community have placed it as a pioneer in the beauty industry. Although issues such as inventory management still exist, the way in which the company focuses on the creation of unique and high-performance products and its adherence to the trends of conscious beauty guarantee staying relevant.