Sarah Creal
Courtesy
For her whole career as a product developer and brand builder, Sarah Creal has helped other people including Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford, Victoria Beckham and Miuccia Prada create beauty brands. Now she is stepping center stage to target an often forgotten demographic with her own brand.
Enter Sarah Creal Beauty, a luxury makeup and skin care brand for women age 40 and over. These consumers have different needs when it comes to products than their younger counterparts, according to Creal, whose cofounder is fellow beauty executive Jill Golden.
“After years of developing products for some of the biggest names in the beauty industry, I began to notice that a lot of my go-tos were simply no longer working. Concealer was too dry or creasing, lipstick was traveling, blush was drying and disappearing, mascara was leaving ‘panda eyes,’” said Creal, who had a long career at the Estée Lauder Cos. before moving on to work with Beckham on the designer’s beauty brand.
“The products hadn’t gotten worse, but my needs had evolved,” Creal continued. “One morning I sat up in bed and said aloud, ‘Why is no one talking to me? Where are the aspirational, cool luxury brands for women my age? With formulas that perform at the higher level I now require?’”
The brand will launch direct-to-consumer on Monday with seven products: Firm Offer 4-in-1 Ultimate Eye Cream, $95; Complexion Brush, $48; Back of the Cab Volumizing Longwear Tubing Mascara, $40; Moisture Source Bi-Phase Brightening Essence, $95; Brilliant Repair Shield SPF 50 Illuminating Serum Broad Spectrum Sunscreen, $64; Face Flex Concealer & Complexion Enhancer, $58, and The Adults Are Talking Solid Serum Lip Repair, $42.
Among the pain points for women 40-plus she will be addressing with this range is that it is harder to retain moisture in one’s skin. Another is so-called panda eyes that many mascaras cause as they react to the stronger eye creams and oils that people often use as they age, while volumizing mascara can look clumpy on older women, who will have fewer lashes than when they were younger.
“Eye makeup is the focal nightmare place. Anybody who thinks makeup is age-agnostic is not old enough yet,” said Creal. “What we realized in the research is they’re just quiet-quitting mascara…I’m like ‘oh my god, we have got to help.’ First of all, you need to use a tubing mascara. But for me, the challenge was really to create a creamy, volumizing mascara that doesn’t volumize with little clumps, so you don’t see that, but volumizes in a linear build, and that’s what Back of the Cab is.”
For brand imagery and marketing campaigns, only women over 40 were photographed. “We almost did no retouching. You can fully see the texture of her skin,” said Creal of one of the brand images. “We didn’t take out any dark circles.”
According to a recent report by Circana, the demand is certainly there. Within beauty, Gen X accounts for 20 percent of spend in both mass and prestige, combined contributing $23 billion.
But while it’s clear Gen X is spending and is highly engaged across beauty, most companies aren’t actively targeting this cohort — instead focusing on Gen Zs and Millennials, the report found.
On having her own brand after years of developing other lines, Creal said it was beyond exciting, but a little scary at the same time.
“I’ve obviously been really good at being behind the scenes so this is a new step for me. But it’s more exciting than it is anything else,” she said.
“For me, there’s some brands that are like, ‘OK, here’s our token older lady, she’s got gray hair. We’re like shouting, she’s our older person.’ That’s not been my experience. That’s not the experience I have with my friends, with my sisters. It’s not like all of a sudden, you turn 40, 45, 50, you go gray, you start hanging out on the beach in Florida like with all your friends. There’s really an opportunity to see what I have to say and to use my experience developing really complex, high performance formulas for this woman in a way that I’m hoping she’ll find inspiring.”
