Born: 1961, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Another success in the cosmetics industry is Beautyblender founder Rea Ann Silva. Born in 1961, she was studying at Los Angeles’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising when she took a job at a local department store. Working at the cosmetics counter would lead to her career as a make-up artist for various television and film projects. Working her way up in a competitive industry was not the only challenge she faced as both a single mother and a Latina in a white-dominated field. By 2000, Silva had developed a reputation for her work with artists of color, including Macy Gray, Brandy, Kerry Washington, Vivica Fox, and Regina King, with credits on films and television shows like Friday, Set It Off, Arsenio, The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show and Moesha. But it was the popular sitcom Girlfriends, which premiered in 2000, that changed her career forever.
Girlfriends was one of the first shows to film in high definition, which magnified any flaws in actors’ skin or make-up. HD forced make-up artists to try new techniques to compensate, such as airbrushing. The problem with this approach was that, after hours of shooting, actors would be covered in layer after layer of the make-up, plus it delayed shooting with the time it took to get the actors to and from the machine off-set. Instead, Silva turned to sponges, but found the traditional geometric shapes made them imprecise, or unable to touch difficult-to-reach areas. So, she put her design skills to work and crafted the egg-shaped sponge that would later be known as the Beautyblender, with no edges and a pointed tip. She started an LLC with the same name in 2003, but it would be another decade before the company turned enough of a profit for Silva to step back from her work as a make-up artist; the signature product began to be carried by Sephora nationally in 2012. By 2019, Beautyblender sales reached $175 million. “When I was in my thirties looking at 50, I thought I would be one foot in the grave. I made a promise to myself by the time I was 50 years old,” she told Forbes in 2021, “[that I would] create products and bring simplicity to women and make them feel good about their age.”