The Glossy Beauty Podcast

There’s an interesting tension happening in the beauty industry today around makeup.

Last year, consumer beauty publications and industry executives heralded 2026 as the year bold, maximalist makeup would return. Top publications predicted a shift away from the persistent "clean girl aesthetic" that entered the zeitgeist around 2021 toward bolder, brighter makeup. Meanwhile, executives from Sephora, Ulta Beauty and Revlon told Glossy they were betting big on a return to more expressive makeup in 2026.

But that hasn’t happened at scale – at least not yet. Instead, sales at conglomerates that report earnings, like L’Oréal Group and E.l.f. Beauty, tell us that top-selling categories in 2026 remain the mainstays of "no-makeup makeup," like lip gloss, balm and liner; complexion products, like tinted sunscreen, blush, bronzer, and setting spray; and mascara.

For today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack sat down with veteran celebrity makeup artist Jamie Greenberg to unpack exactly where makeup is headed next.

Greenberg has been a working makeup artist for more than 20 years. Her client list today includes Rashida Jones, Kaley Cuoco, Chelsea Handler, Tracee Ellis Ross and Kristen Stewart, among others.

Greenberg is also the founder of the DTC makeup line Jamie Makeup, known best for its blush/highlighter hybrid product called Blighlighter and spray makeup remover named B.F.M.R. Mist. She’s also a prolific social media creator with more than 700,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, and she runs a monthly subscription beauty box called SwagBag that features her latest favorite products from a wide array of brands.

Press play now for a candid conversation on where makeup is headed, including the trends and signals Greenberg is paying attention to now.

Midi Health is betting on topical skin care and body care as it diversifies its telehealth offerings to capture more women.

“Women in midlife go through amazing changes with their hormones, … [and] our skin care needs actually change over time with our hormone evolution,” Dr. Kathleen Jordan, MD, chief medical officer of Midi Health, told Glossy. “I usually talk about [this care expansion] as ‘hormone informed skin care’ because that's really what the market's been lacking.”

That is, skin care that treats a variety of skin concerns that can develop in mid-life such as dryness, loss of collagen, hyperpigmentation, and acne.

“We saw patients for many years without having [skin-care] products, but what we saw was them struggling to get good products that were actually designed for them,” Dr. Jordan said. “We now see tens of thousands of women every week, and we actually hear from them. We hear their questions. We understand where they're struggling to get products that actually are meaningful [for their skin concerns], and then in response, we can develop products that actually help them.”

For Midi Health, this means offering prescription and OTC products with ingredients like estrogen, retinol, hydroquinone and tretinoin. In June, Midi expanded its skin-care selection to include topical copper peptides. According to Dr. Jordan, this is just the start for the company.

Midi Health launched in 2021 and currently treats around 25,000 women per week. Oftentimes, this includes care for issues dismissed by the traditional medical industry, like fatigue, weight gain, mood and sleep disturbance, which can be treated with things like hormone replacement therapies or other OTC and prescription interventions.

Midi Health is privately held by its founders plus investors like Connie Britton, Brandi Chastain, Tory Burch, Amy Schumer, and Meghan Markle, as well as private equity firms like Google Ventures and Emerson Collective, plus a laundry list of tech execs including Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta, and Tekedra Mawakana, the co-CEO of Waymo. Midi Health was valued at $1 billion following a $100 million series D funding round in February.

Glossy West Coast correspondent Lexy Lebsack sat down with Dr. Jordan to discuss Midi Health’s skin- and body-care aspirations, the category’s role in telehealth in the future, and how Midi Health hopes to earn more market share.

Behind every great in-person beauty or wellness event is an invisible team of insiders that has engineered the gathering for maximum impact.

Bilal Kaiser, the founder and principal of Agency Guacamole, is one of those insiders. Kaiser and his team have produced events for leading retailers and brands like Olive Young, NYX, Therabody, Matrix, Redken, Ole Henriksen, Evereden and many more.

Kaiser is a former L’Oréal Group executive and marketing instructor at UCLA and NYC’s General Assembly. He launched Agency Guacamole in 2016, a boutique communications agency based in Los Angeles and New York City that provides experiential, media communications, and influencer marketing services to the beauty and lifestyle industries.

For today’s episode, host Lexy Lebsack challenged Kaiser to break down the ins and outs of eventing in 2026. More specifically, he was asked to break down the nuances behind a successful event made for different age groups, including Gen Alpha, Gen Z, millennials and Gen X, and industry demographics, like press, influencers and consumers. Kaiser also fielded questions about event budgets, timelines, the future of eventing, and the optics to consider when planning luxury events or brand trips.

Have you ever wondered how awards show beauty partnerships come together to create big, splashy red carpet moments that seem to reverberate across social media for weeks or months?

Award season partnerships are big business for everyone involved: the celebrity, who may be fulfilling, or courting, a spokesperson deal; beauty and lifestyle brands, which are often promoting a new product or simply seeking brand awareness; and professional artists, who are oftentimes the glue that holds it all together.

In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack interviews beauty industry agents Marissa Alfe and Lauren FitzGerald. The duo opened their full-service Los Angeles talent agency, Prtnrs Mgnt, in 2020. They currently represent 18 standout hair, makeup and nail artists including Patrick Ta, Ariel Tejada and Laura Polko. Together, their artists work with stars like Gigi Hadid, Rosalia, Kylie Jenner, Olivia Munn and Alix Earle, while Alfe and FitzGerald have brokered deals for their clients with brands like La Mer, Chanel, Morphe and Redken.

Alfe and FitzGerald are longtime friends and former colleagues at competing agency Cloutier Remix Agency. Alfe’s CV also includes Burberry and founder of Greyscale Management, while FitzGerald has held roles at InStyler and Digital Brand Products, the licensing and products division to Digital Brand Architects.

Teen boys have become an increasingly important consumer demographic over the past few years thanks, primarily, to their insatiable appetite for fragrance.

This includes the accumulation of "fragrance wardrobes," where users rotate their fragrances daily based on mood and occasion, often selecting from a robust collection of both designer and dupe scents. Teen boys also care about their fragrance atomizers and save for niche fragrances that signal access and knowledge about the category. Much of this stems from TikTok or Reddit, where "fragheads" — short for "fragrance heads" — follow the latest trends and industry news.

“It is very much a collector mentality,” said Glossy senior editor Emily Jensen. “There are actually a lot of parallels with how [teen boys] are discovering and purchasing [fragrances today] with the ‘sneakerhead’ community that was big in the 2010s.”

But teens are also notoriously fickle, changing their minds with such vigor that it can be considered a curse to attract too much focus from young people. For example, attention from teens and tweens crushed the once skin-care darling Drunk Elephant after young shoppers claimed the brand as their own, then quickly moved on, causing quarterly sales to fall by as much as 65%.

Teen boys today straddle two generations: Gen Alpha boys 16 and younger and Gen Z boys 17 and older. Together, they’ve been dubbed Gen Zalpha.

So how do brands and retailers reach Gen Zalpha boys hungry for the latest fragrance to add to their wardrobes?

In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, we unpack the latest strategy shift from Ulta Beauty reported by Glossy’s international fashion reporter Zofia Zwieglinska. Launching this week, the retailer is partnering with fragrance brand Snif to attract young male fragrance enthusiasts with its first dedicated masstige men’s fragrance brand, Notewrks. Through this, the brand and retailer hope to target the gap between mass and prestige fragrance.

Host Lexy Lebsack is joined by Jensen and Zwieglinska to unpack the rise of the Gen Zalpha fraghead and how Ulta Beauty is hoping to woo them.