At the third annual WWD L.A. Beauty conference Oct. 6, Mary Phillips introduced herself as the founder and chief creative officer as M.Ph, which launched earlier this year.
In fact, she’s had more job titles than one could count.
“I remember at a very young age telling my parents I wanted to do makeup for movie stars,” Phillips, a veteran makeup artist who also holds an aesthetician’s license, said onstage. Her winding path included assisting various makeup artists and heading to set with the likes of Mario Sorrenti and Annie Leibowitz, and more recently includes becoming a social media phenomenon with millions of followers on Instagram.
“I get to bring all of that out into the open. After decades of gatekeeping my techniques, because I was too scared people would take them and I wouldn’t have a job, M.Ph is me taking all of those secrets and putting them out there in everyone’s hands,” Phillips said.
Even before Phillips started developing a brand of her own, she started making what she called “homemade makeup kits” for her clients. “And in those makeup kits were personalized underpainting palettes I would make for them. I would give them lessons on how they could recreate looks I did on them,” she said. A business idea was born.
“I have a very skin-first approach to makeup. The looks I create are soft, they’re natural and very lifted and structured. My makeup looks very effortless, but there’s a lot of technique under those natural looks,” Phillips said. “My signature techniques — soft, layered, sculpting, defining — simplified into essentials. Underpainting is a very old-school way of doing makeup in the artist community, and I wanted to take that technique and make it extremely user-friendly.”
Phillips first went viral on TikTok for underpainting, which “showed me people were hungry for artistry that they could use at home,” she said. She’s also noticed that makeup is just as emotional as it is visual.
“Makeup isn’t just makeup. It’s an armor of confidence,” she said, noting that a lot of consumers dropped off their routines during the pandemic. “I also know when you feel good, you show up differently, you stand taller, you ask for more, people respond to you differently. Makeup gives you that edge, that power to step into what you want.”
Entrepreneurship came with its own surprises, but product quality was her north star. “My obsession with performance never wavered. If it wasn’t perfect, it didn’t ship. And when we launched, it went beyond what I had even hoped for,” she said.
The brand met its Sephora sales projections for the first month in the first week. “When Sephora told me six months before launch that I would be included in the makeup artist activation along with Mario [Dedivanovic], Patrick Ta, Nikki DeRoest, Gucci Westman and Charlotte Tilbury, I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “If you take anything away from my story, it’s that artistry, discipline, collaboration will take you far. But the real magic happens when you share it with the world.”