This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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In May, Live Tinted turned five years old. The brand was founded by Deepica Mutyala, a veteran of both the corporate beauty space, as a one-time manager at Birchbox, and the creator space — Mutyala has 502,000 followers on Instagram. Live Tinted launched in 2018, four years after Mutyala went viral on YouTube (333,000 followers) for a video about correcting dark circles with red lipstick. That video, which has 10 million views, landed her a segment on “The Today Show,” and led to her quitting her full-time job and focusing full-time on the beauty brand.
Today, Live Tinted sells the Huestick All-Over Color Corrector, which is inspired by Mutyala’s viral hack. The brand also doubling down on complexion products. Live Tinted’s Hueguard Skin Tint SPF 50 Mineral Sunscreen Broad Spectrum, which has become a best-seller, was an inflection point for the brand, Mutyala said. She now believes Live Tinted can become known for its complexion category.
On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Mutyala discusses how she always knew she’d start a beauty brand and what progress has been made since the BLM movement in 2020. She also talks about why the complexion category has been, and will continue to be, a game changer for Live Tinted. The excerpts below have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Starting a company was only a matter of time
“I’ve been obsessed with the beauty industry since I was a little girl. Every part of my journey has been to get to launching this brand. I said at 16 that I was going to start it. Everything from majoring in marketing in college to my first internship at L’Oréal in New York City to working at Limited Brands for a brief period of time and then getting to Birchbox, … It was always with the mindset of how can I learn and position myself to understand the beauty industry to then one day launch my own brand. When I was at Birchbox, it was around 2015, and it was [during the] rise of beauty influencers. I realized nobody looked like me. As a beauty junkie, it felt [it was a] missed opportunity [that] no one who looked like me [was] playing in the influencer space. … I basically just said, ‘It’s a fun hobby,’ woke up in January of 2015 and recorded a video on my phone. I used a red lipstick under my eyes to mask dark circles, and that video went viral and got 10 million views. I got asked to come on the ‘Today Show’ to do the segment on air. I quit my job and went to be this thing called a ‘beauty influencer’ full time. And, again, always the goal was to one day create my own brand.”
On progress in inclusivity in beauty
“The Fentys of the world are great. And hopefully the Live Tinteds of the world are able to make [inclusivity] the new norm. My goal and dream is that, when my kids are growing up, this is just the standard — there is no conversation needed. Because they think it’s crazy that we even think inclusivity is a necessary convo, because it’s just like, ‘Mom, I don’t even think about this. I don’t even think about race, I don’t think about someone’s gender, I don’t think about this stuff.’ … We’re not there, at all. But what brands, I hope, can do is look at themselves and think about the values of what they want to stand for as a company.”
On her goals for the brand’s complexion category
“The skin tint has been the inflection point in the business. It’s exciting because, after we started the brand, we said for years that we wanted to come out with a mineral SPF 50 skin tint. It takes time to create that. First of all, just a mineral SPF [is hard to create], period. Then, a skin tint is hard because it’s a shaded product, which means there are minimum order quantities across 10 shades — and you want to be able to do it right. You want to make sure you have a retailer supporting you, so that people can actually try [it] and see what shade matches them. But we always had this feeling that this skin tint and concealer would be the products that we stood out for. It just makes sense for Live Tinted. We are a brand that’s all about tints and hues and celebrating those things. So my dream is that, when you think of Live Tinted 10 years from now, you think of complexion.”
