Grammy nominee and 30 Under 30 alum Halsey raked in $50 million in revenue with her new makeup brand about-face.
By Alex York
Halsey knows that fans don’t always know what she looks like—and that’s on purpose. In 2015, shortly after she released her first album Badlands, she grew tired of everyone referring to her as “the blue-haired singer.” So, she shaved her head and made it a mission to constantly evolve her look. In 2017 she walked the Grammys red carpet with a bleach blonde pixie cut; a 2020 magazine cover showcased hip-length braids; and at her opening concert for the 2022 “Love and Power Tour” she rocked half-up blonde curls.
Now, sitting on a couch in the green room at the 2023 Forbes Under 30 Summit, Halsey, 29, has changed once again. This time out of a floral Moschino dress into black sweats and a light blue Mayfair crewneck that reads “I’m still growing” on the chest.
Tim Tadder for Forbes
“I feel like that's arguably the most identifiable thing about me—that I'm always unidentifiable in some way, shape, or form,” says Halsey, who was featured on the 2016 30 Under 30 list in the music category and performed at this year’s Under 30 Summit in Cleveland.
Core to their chameleon act: make-up. “I do my own makeup and I started doing it out of necessity,” says Halsey, who uses she/they pronouns and was born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane. “I had a real motivation to make products, quite frankly, that would just work for me that I couldn't find on the market.”
That passion and experience led beauty industry veterans Jeanne Chavez and Dineh Mohajer—who’d founded Hard Candy, a popular cosmetics brand, three decades prior—to approach Halsey in 2019 about creating a new makeup line. Since its January 2021 launch, about-face, which is vegan with a focus on “clean” ingredients, has sold more than 5 million products. In 2022, Halsey says the company raked in $50 million in revenue.
Known for products like the best-selling “Matte Fluid Eye Paint,” about-face targets Gen Z and is sold directly to consumers through its website and at Ulta stores across America. Affordability is vital for this demographic and Halsey’s makeup products range in price from $7 to $18. If that is still too pricey, there is also a cheaper, sister line called “af94” that Halsey launched with Walmart last year. All af94 products cost less than $10.
It’s a crowded space, filled with famous faces like Selena Gomez (Rare Beauty), Hailey Bieber (Rhode Beauty), and Kylie Jenner (Kylie Cosmetics). But so far, there seems to be enough room for everyone. From October 2022 to October 2023, the 40-some celebrity beauty brands studied by Nielsen IQ surpassed $1 billion in annual sales—up 57% since the year before, says Anna Mayo, vice president of beauty and personal care thought leadership at Nielsen IQ. Meanwhile, the total U.S. beauty and personal care industry grew by just 11.7% from August 2022 to August 2023, according to NIQ.
“I'm young enough to be engaging with the media and the cultural commentary, and to be in the spaces where young consumers are,” says the singer. “But I'm old enough and I have enough lived experience to effectively run my business.”
Halsey grew up hopping between towns in New Jersey as her parents moved around for work. Before starting high school, Halsey lived in nine different houses and attended many different schools. The constant uprooting left her lonely. Hobbies provided comfort: theater, reading, painting and, ultimately, music. It wasn’t until 2013, when she was 18 years old and met aspiring musician Anthony Li (one of her now managers, who’s also a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum) at a hotel party in New Jersey, that she told anyone she sang. Later that year, Li reconnected with Halsey to ask if she’d sing for a yogurt commercial he wanted to make. The ad didn’t work out but while working with Li, she ended up writing and recording her first song, “Ghost.”
“I just wanted to do something and be something.”
In 2014, she and Li uploaded “Ghost” to music self-distribution platform TuneCore and other online sites. It was an instant hit, quickly charting on SoundCloud’s alternative category. That same year, they signed with their first label, New York-based Astralwerks.
“I'm so glad that Anthony brought up music, because if he’d said anything… I need a model, or I need a photographer… I would've committed to being that,” Halsey says. “I just wanted to do something and be something.”
With her new career, Halsey needed new makeup, stuff that would hold up in extreme situations like sweating on stage or under the bright lights of the red carpet. They tried everything on the market, but nothing was good enough until they started brewing up their own blends with Chavez and Mohajer. To this day, Halsey still does their own makeup and concocts new cosmetics with about-face as the chief creative officer.
Halsey’s often the makeup artist for about-face campaign shoots and works closely with a lab in Europe, where her cosmetics are manufactured. She makes all shade selections—down to their names like “Art Of Darkness,” “Sweet Disposition” or “Marigold.”
“It takes up as much of my time as music,” Halsey says.
Marketing is vital in the makeup biz and on her Instagram account (31.9 million followers) Halsey constantly touts the brand’s tenets like inclusivity and clean ingredients. About-face’s social media campaigns and retail displays include a diverse range of genders and ethnicities, and the website includes ingredient-by-ingredient explanations as to why they are necessary.
"The fact that about-face has their own chemist means they are really committed to the formulas and bringing something unique to the market that will be different,” Nielsen IQ’s Mayo says.
Next up: international expansion. In 2024, about-face will debut in European brick-and-mortar stores, including London-based Selfridges and luxury beauty shop SpaceNK. The brand will also launch a new line of complexion products next year. And in January, af94 will expand from its Walmart-exclusive deal to 350 Ulta stores. Halsey’s fan base currently accounts for a significant portion of about-face’s customers, but as it grows, they want the brand to be able to stand on its own.
“I find more and more that so many people love the products and they either don't know that it's my line or they don't even know who the hell I am,” Halsey says. “That's what you want to see.”
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