Today is the day, friends, because this week Cheekbone Beauty officially launched our first skincare product, which means I guess I can officially introduce myself as a new skincare founder. Hello! Although the funny thing is that this doesn't actually feel entirely new to me because skincare and skin have been such a huge part of what I've been learning about for the last decade.
I've been in the beauty space for almost 12 years now, and for about 10 of those years I've been putting makeup on people's faces. And just as a reminder, I am not a trained makeup artist. I came from the hospitality and food industry, eventually working in sales and marketing before Cheekbone Beauty became my entire world. But I have absolutely been a beauty consumer since I was much younger, and at this point I've probably been playing with beauty products for 40 years, which is slightly terrifying to type, but also kind of amazing when I think about it.
Everything I know about makeup I've learned by doing, listening, testing and putting makeup on thousands of faces. I've learned what actually works for regular people who don't necessarily want to look completely different when they put makeup on. They want to look like themselves, just a little more polished, and that philosophy has shaped almost everything we make at Cheekbone Beauty.
I Have Always Believed Beauty Should Be Simple
There's a reason so many Cheekbone Beauty products are pencils and sticks. We've been using pencils since we were kids, so we know how to hold them, we know how to control them and they just make sense. They're easy, portable and uncomplicated, and that is really how I think makeup, and now skincare, should feel.
I love a monochromatic makeup look, and I love a bold lip or a bold eye, but personally I don't love them both at the same time. I want to see your skin, your freckles, your texture, your lines and your actual face. Our philosophy at Cheekbone has always been that we want the world to see your skin, just a little bit better, and I think that idea is becoming even more important to me as I get older.
I've never been convinced that we need to completely cover our complexions. You guys know I've been playing around behind the scenes with liquid foundations, and I'm still not convinced. Our Unify Multi-Pencils do such an incredible job of evening out the complexion while still allowing your actual skin to show through, and that is what I personally want from makeup.
I also love SPF, and I don't care if it's mineral or chemical, friends. They both work, and I think the best SPF is the one you actually like enough to put on your face every single day. Sun damage has been proven to be the biggest cause of premature skin aging.
I believe deeply in science-based cosmetics because I want to understand what works, why it works and what the evidence actually tells us. At the same time, I love approaching formulation through the lens of nature and asking what plants and naturally derived ingredients can do for our skin, while also thinking about the ingredients we use and the impact we leave behind. After almost 12 years of doing this, the logical next evolution of Cheekbone Beauty became pretty obvious to me: it had to be skincare.
Great Makeup Starts With Great Skin
After all these years working in colour cosmetics, one of the biggest things I've learned actually has very little to do with makeup. You can buy the most beautiful foundation, concealer, blush or highlighter in the world, but makeup simply looks better when your skin is hydrated, healthy and cared for.
Now that I'm 50, I think about this even more because my skin has changed, and I know it will continue to change. I'm much less interested in chasing every skincare trend that shows up on my feed and much more interested in understanding what is actually happening to our skin as we age. Why does it feel different? Why does it get drier? What does it actually need, and what can we realistically do to support it?
The more I've learned about skin, the more fascinated I've become by the skin barrier. Your outermost layer of skin, called the stratum corneum, basically works like a wall. Think of your skin cells as the bricks and the natural fats in your skin, including things like ceramides, cholesterol and fatty acids, as the mortar holding everything together. That wall has a really important job because it helps keep moisture in while helping keep irritants and other environmental stressors out.
When that barrier isn't functioning as well, more water can escape from the skin. Scientists actually measure this through something called transepidermal water loss, or TEWL, which is essentially a measurement of how much water is escaping through your skin into the surrounding environment. When we're losing more water, that's when skin can start feeling tight and dry, looking dull, and those little dehydration lines can suddenly become much more noticeable.
This is one of the reasons I've become so interested in hydration and barrier support, and it's also why nighttime skincare makes so much sense to me. Our skin follows its own circadian rhythm and important repair and renewal processes happen overnight. You're also not putting more makeup or SPF on your face, and you're not walking around encountering all of the things our skin deals with throughout the day, so nighttime gives us this beautiful opportunity to support what our skin is already naturally doing.
The question for me became how we could support that process while still making the routine incredibly simple, and that is really where the Restorative Barrier Serum Stick began.
Meet the Restorative Barrier Serum Stick
The Restorative Barrier Serum Stick is our very first skincare product, and I think it makes complete sense that Cheekbone's first skincare product is a stick. We love sticks and pencils because they're intuitive, easy to use and already familiar to us, and I didn't want another serum with a dropper running down your hand or another product that makes your skincare routine feel more complicated than it needs to be.
The formula combines rich emollient and occlusive ingredients, including shea butter, murumuru seed butter, sunflower seed oil and olive fruit oil, which help soften the skin and support the skin barrier while reducing moisture loss. We also have sodium hyaluronate, a form of hyaluronic acid, which helps attract and hold onto moisture in the skin.
If you've heard about slugging in skincare, this is inspired by the same basic idea of helping seal hydration into the skin, except we wanted to make that idea easier and less messy. Instead of covering your face in a thick layer of product with your hands, you can simply glide the stick across your skin and get on with your night.
I also didn't want this to just be a stick filled with beautiful oils and butters. I wanted active ingredients in there that I was genuinely excited about, and one of those is Bidens pilosa, a plant-derived ingredient that is sometimes described as a bio-retinol alternative. We use a standardized extract, alongside sodium hyaluronate, bisabolol and licorice root extract, to support the appearance of hydrated, smoother, calmer and more radiant-looking skin.
This is where science and nature become so interesting to me because I'm not interested in telling you that something is automatically better just because it comes from a plant. That's not how science works. I want to know what the research says, what concentration was studied at .5%, how an ingredient performs and whether there is actually evidence behind the claims we're making. That curiosity has become a huge part of what I want to continue learning about and where I want Cheekbone Beauty to go next.
Here's How I Use It
You know that feeling when you get home from work and the first thing you want to do is take off your bra? That's basically how I feel about taking my makeup off now. I want to wash off the makeup, the SPF and honestly just the entire day, and I have become a huge fan of doing it earlier in the evening when I can instead of waiting until I'm exhausted and ready to fall into bed.
I'm a huge believer in double cleansing, so I start with an oil or balm cleanser and then follow with a gentle gel cleanser. After cleansing, I love putting hydration back into my skin with a facial mist, and then I grab the Restorative Barrier Serum Stick and glide it over my face and neck. I use it on my forehead, cheeks, around the eye area and all over my neck, and some nights I'll even use the stick almost like a little massage tool and glide it across my face and neck.
That is really what I want skincare to feel like. I don't want serum dripping down my hands, I don't want a complicated routine and I definitely don't want to stand in the bathroom wondering which of seven products I'm supposed to use first. I want effective ingredients in products that make sense for real life, and then I want to go to bed knowing I've given my skin some extra support while it does what it already naturally knows how to do overnight.
Welcome to the Next Chapter of Cheekbone Beauty
This little stick represents something much bigger for me and for Cheekbone Beauty. I've spent almost 12 years learning about beauty and nearly a decade looking closely at people's faces, skin, ingredients, formulas and how makeup actually behaves on real skin, and somehow I still feel like there is so much more to learn.
I want Cheekbone Beauty to continue being known for incredible colour cosmetics, obviously, but I also want us to become known for understanding skin and creating beautiful, effective products that make taking care of it easier. I want products inspired by nature and informed by science, products that make sense in real people's lives, and products that continue to consider people and planet while we make them.
Most importantly, I don't want skincare to become another thing we're supposed to use to fix ourselves. Now that I'm 50, I have lines, I have texture and my skin has absolutely changed, and I know it will continue to change. I'm not interested in trying to erase any of that. I'm much more interested in understanding what my skin needs at this stage of my life, taking really good care of it and helping it look and feel its best.
And when I really think about it, that philosophy isn't actually very different from what we've always believed about makeup at Cheekbone Beauty. I don't want to cover you up, and I don't want to change your face. I want you to see your skin, your features and yourself, just a little bit better.
So this is the beginning of skincare for Cheekbone Beauty, and the Restorative Barrier Serum Stick is our first step into what I think is going to be a really exciting next chapter.
Thank you for believing in this little Indigenous beauty brand, for buying our products, telling your friends about us, supporting our scholarship fund and allowing us to keep learning, growing and dreaming bigger. I have so many ideas about where we can take skincare next, and I genuinely cannot wait to show you what we're working on.
Miigwech,
Jenn Harper
Founder & CEO, Cheekbone Beauty