It’s an age-old adage; Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For Houston entrepreneur and beauty expert Kimal Roxie, natural beauty emanates from the inside out. She should know. She is the owner of the cosmetics company LAMIK Beauty.
As a child, Roxie remembers her mom putting on makeup daily. “That’s something I continue to think about and look at as inspiration for me,” Roxie said in a recent interview with NJ Urban News. “That’s the way that she approached herself and how she appreciated herself,” she said.
Of the new women-led businesses in the U.S., Black women are at the head of about 42% of those businesses. Roxie started the company in March 2020, after 14 years of running a beauty salon. “We launched right with the pandemic,” she said. Women of color traditionally have more difficulty finding beauty products. Still, research has indicated that women of color are more likely to be exposed to harmful chemicals in beauty products. “I was going leave (the industry) or change it,” she said of her decision to start her own company. Roxie decided she was going to change it.
LAMIK Beauty boasts 88% natural and organic ingredients for various skin tones. The company prides itself on providing women of color with makeup and a vegan product. These practices inform the business’s name, which is an acronym for “Love And Makeup In Kindness” and an inversion of Roxie’s first name. “We are a makeup line that’s filling that gap of clean, colored cosmetics,” she said.
Lucky for Roxie, during the months leading up to LAMIK’s launch, she’d been researching ways for her product to be sold online, despite coming from the brick-and-mortar side of the beauty industry. She got the word out about her products during a global health crisis by turning on her camera. “We didn’t know what was happening – it was quarantined – for a lot of us the first time hearing the word ‘quarantine,'” she said. “I started something called Friday Night Live, where I turned on my camera and started selling them live makeup.”
Since then, Roxie reports seeing a 35% growth year-over-year and noted that LAMIK has become the first Black-owned vegan makeup line to be sold in Ulta beauty stores, even managing to sell out in a single day during Ulta’s 21 Days of Beauty series. The business’s main focuses are items that apply to eyebrows, like the Revelation Brow and Brow Gel. According to Roxie, she has a form of alopecia that causes hair loss, particularly for her eyebrows, so developing a product that can help conceal that hair loss is a special interest of hers.
As for the future, Roxie said she hopes to continue growing and increasing her offerings to those who need them the most–women of color. “The world is getting more brown and people are not going to stand for bad options,” she said. Visit LAMIK Beauty online at www.lamikbeauty.com.