Veil Cosmetics Marks a Decade in Beauty

Veil Cosmetics
Sebastien Tardif, Creator and CEO
Headquarters: New York City/Montreal
Founded: 2012

Why did you start Veil Cosmetics?
I saw an opportunity within the no-makeup makeup category and with improving makeup textures, hence my brand name and the Weightless Beauty tagline. I tackled the traditional approach to makeup by revealing gorgeous skin instead of masking it, with skincare infused and good for you, quality-sourced ingredients. My work is far from done.

What did you love about the process during those early days?
When I launched Veil Cosmetics, everything felt amazing and great to accomplish. I loved every aspect from creating new makeup: working with chemists and creating skincare-infused formulas, improving on textures, making sure that makeup was long-lasting and multi-tasking. I loved teaching and sharing my tips of how to use the makeup itself, creating the overall brand aesthetic, choosing packaging and graphic design. Creating a new website, creating the logo, doing the rounds and meeting the fans, meeting makeup lovers at trade shows, traveling to get the brand known everywhere…the list goes on. Launching at NY Fashion Week is a highlight too.

What didn’t you love so much?
When you’re a newcomer with over 15 years of professional makeup experience at the time but most people don’t know you and you are not a “celebrity,” nobody gives you a minute of their time and when I said that the brand was going to be sold online, I got a lot of cold shoulders. Today, it’s the standard.

Your brand recently had a major issue with social media. What happened?
Yes, my personal Facebook account got hacked, which then caused my professional Veil Cosmetics business Instagram account to also get taken down as I am managing it. When said community guidelines are “violated” it makes it very difficult to even attempt to recover it, if not outright impossible. I still have not recovered the account. The page got taken down immediately along with my business Instagram account.

Yikes! So It still isn’t fixed entirely?
It’s still not resolved. Meta does not have customer service, it’s always just bots and I got the run around and I still do to this day. I have not recovered my 50K plus followers on Instagram.

What’s your advice to other indie beauty brands coming out of that experience?
My advice for other indie brands coming out of the experience is to make sure that you have two way authentication, which I did. But make sure that your password is very secure, which I thought it was, but hey… I still don’t know to this day how the hack happened. Make sure that you’re resilient and that you have your data backed up, especially anything that has to do with Facebook adverts business accounts. Try to grow your customer email list as much as possible because that’s the only thing that you’re in control of at the end of the day. Even if you get hacked, you’ll still have your customer list. 

So, let’s talk beauty. Do you have new products coming out for Fall?
We are celebrating our 10th year anniversary this fall and we are planning a big launch. I cannot say at this very moment, it’s a big surprise. But it’s certainly a perfect evolution for the brand and it’s on-brand for Veil Cosmetics because we’re all about skin. So expect more skin solutions and innovations, improving on products that are very performant and that will use the highest quality ingredients. And I hate to use the word clean but it’s going to be within the acceptable range of doing away with harsh ingredients. It will make it easy for everybody to use without fearing any irritation or allergic reactions etc. Stay tuned!