Thursday, December 10, 2009

Meet Poppy King--The Lipstick Queen




You gotta love Poppy King. I find her fascinating and inspiring. Here is a glimpse of her success story:

Excerpt from Poppy's website:
As you may know....I am obsessed with the glamour of the lips. From the moment I was seven years old and playing dress ups with my mother’s lipsticks until now, I have been mesmerized by how transformative an amazing lip product can be. So much so that I started my own lipstick brand at 18 and have been designing lipsticks, glosses and other amazing, unique and wonderful lip products ever since.

I am far from alone with my passion and if you are on my site then I know you share it with me. Welcome to my brand! Please enter here to discover lip products like you have never seen before. Every single one of you is in my heart when I design them.
 Stick with me and my lipstick will stick with you.

Love,
Poppy

Why a love for lipstick? "It was the superhero feeling I got when I put it on as a little girl," says King. "The whole ritual just fascinated me. It's a rite of passage—a conduit, to me, of the experience of being female."

After not finding any lipsticks she liked, at 18 she found herself a business partner and founded Poppy lipsticks. She ran that business in her native Australia for 12 years. She was then approached by mega cosmetic conglomerate Estee Lauder and joined them in 2002. She soon was a top New York cosmetics executive but found that the corporate world didn’t suit her "As you go up the ladder, you get further and further away from the end user. That's not what I'm in the business for," she explains. Poppy left in 2005 and penned her first book Lessons of a Lipstick Queen: Finding and Developing the Great Idea That Can Change Your Life. How inspiring is that? In late 2006 she launched Lipstick Queen with Saints and Sinners, a collection of lipstick duos in a single shade with sheer and opaque options. And you gotta love her personal style--she looks like a 40's movie star!



Lipstick Queen products include Sinner lipsticks—matte full color, Saints—sheer and creamy, Big Bang glosses---full color shiny glosses in ‘test tube’ packaging, Chinatown Glossy Pencils—soft, shiny chubby pencils that come with a sharpener (see swatches here), the new Butterfly Ball lipsticks released for holiday and Fifteen Minutes of Fame glosses inspired by Andy Warhol’s quote about everyone in the future being famous for 15 minutes. Poppy says "This is my version of how to bring color back onto the lips without being so full-on." See swatches here

Poppy we love you too!

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