The Live Tinted founder was born for this role.
“I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a model; I grew up dreaming of being a CEO,” says Deepica Mutyala over a video call. The founder of Live Tinted, which launched at Sephora Canada this past summer, is dialing in from a gorgeous light-filled living room in L.A. (“Can you believe this is an actual house and not just a Zoom background?” she laughs.)
Mutyala is celebrating Live Tinted’s five-year anniversary, but she is quick to point out that it’s been “five years for the brand but a lifetime of manifestation [for her].” Prior to launching Live Tinted, Mutyala was doing “the influencer thing,” and before that, she worked in the corporate side of the beauty industry. But she rose to fame after her second-ever YouTube video (2015’s “How to Cover Dark Under Eye Circles”), which showed her using red lipstick as an undereye colour corrector, went viral, racking up 10 million views.
Shortly after, she launched a digital platform — also called Live Tinted — to celebrate diversity in beauty and encourage fellow women of colour (Mutyala is of Indian descent herself) to share their makeup tips and questions. “When I launched the online community, I knew I wanted to one day create a line of beauty products, so it was kind of like a focus group,” she says. “But the conversations had to be organic; I didn’t want to launch a brand just to launch something. So I asked this group of women of colour what their biggest beauty concern was, and 98 per cent said it was hyperpigmentation. It quickly became obvious that there was a gap to fill in the market.”
In May 2019, Live Tinted officially made the transition from a digital platform to a beauty brand, with the launch of its first product, Huestick Color Corrector, a multi-use colour stick that can be worn on lips, eyes and cheeks and, of course, as an undereye colour corrector. Since then, the company has…
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