The makeup artist Pat McGrath was a favourite of Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Madonna. Then she became a billion-dollar brand.
When you close your eyes and picture Taylor Swift, you may envision her bright red lipsticked mouth before any other detail comes into focus. Swift wore that red lipstick throughout her Eras Tour. She planted a kiss on her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2024, and the lipstick didn’t smear on his sweaty face.
Swift, who has refrained from endorsing products in recent years, did not reveal which brand of lipstick she was wearing. But swarms of online commenters decided it had to be Pat McGrath Labs LiquiLust in Elson 4. After all, Swift had signalled her approval of the brand when Pat McGrath appeared in the video for her song Bejeweled, playing a queen who applies makeup to the star’s face.
If a company tried to engineer this kind of promotion, the fee would reach several million dollars. But when the social media chatter tying McGrath to Swift was at its peak, the lipstick was out of stock – and it stayed that way for much of the nearly two-year run of the Eras Tour.
In the impulse-driven, rollercoaster cycle of makeup trends, the steady flow of products is crucial. The fact that one of the most promising cosmetics brands of the past decade was unable to fill eager fans’ handbags with LiquiLust suggested that something at the company was wrong.
Valued at more than US$1 billion ($1.67b) in 2018, Pat McGrath Cosmetics announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on January 22 to “simplify its capital structure, reduce its debt load and unlock the potential of this brand”. Last month, after having agreed to an interview for this article, McGrath decided against it.
The plunge from billion-dollar valuation to bankruptcy has baffled many people outside the company. Here was a brand founded by the most creative makeup artist since Max Factor, one who has touched the faces of Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Madonna, Rihanna and – well, how much time do you have?
McGrath didn’t just paint lipstick on the most recognised performer of our day. She applied 30,000 red Swarovski crystals to Doja Cat’s head and torso. She glued lace, vinyl, feathers and who knows what else on to faces at fashion shoots and runway shows. Meloney Moore, dean of the De Sole School of Business Innovation at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a former marketing executive at Estée Lauder, saw Pat McGrath Labs as a return to earth. With the makeup line, McGrath found a way to allow “everyone to participate in the moment instead of being spectators”.
A creative life
Born in Northampton, England, McGrath spent her childhood with her single Jamaican mother, Jean, a dressmaker. After school, Pat would plant herself in her neighbourhood newsstand, poring over the latest issue of Italian Vogue. “I was always obsessed,” she said in an interview for The Cut in 2016. Her nose was pressed against the glass because “fashion was such a closed arena”.
She eventually figured out a way into that arena. Step 1 was an introduction to Caron Wheeler, the lead singer of Soul II Soul, whom she joined in the early 1990s as her makeup artist while she was on tour in Japan. It was the first time McGrath had been on an aeroplane. Step 2 was, naturally, Paris. With a counterfeit Vogue ID, she slipped her way into the standing section of a few fashion shows. She recalled behaving like a superfan, shouting the names of the models as they hit the catwalk.
It didn’t take long for her to get her hands on those models. Her friend Edward Enninful, the fashion director of i-D magazine at the time, asked her to paint a model’s eyebrows banana yellow for an editorial photo shoot. In 2016, he described McGrath as having “a naive fearlessness”.
Her break came in 1994, on set with photographer Steven Meisel, a star-maker with the power to elevate models, stylists, makeup artists and Madonna. Soon, McGrath was doing shows for Prada, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Versace and Lanvin. In those days, she was known to bring more than 80 trunks filled with cosmetics, reference books and sequins, just in case.
She also functioned as a sort of brand whisperer, collaborating with designers on their nascent cosmetic collections, starting with Giorgio Armani for L’Oréal, which was introduced in 2000. Word spread, and McGrath translated the visions of other designers, including Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, into lipstick and eye shadow.
“She’s a true, true, true creative visionary,” said John Demsey, a beauty industry consultant and former Estée Lauder executive.
She wasn’t above Walmart or CVS, where she developed mass-market products as the global creative director of CoverGirl and Max Factor. The logical next step was to start her own brand. It had worked for François Nars, who sold Nars Cosmetics to Shiseido in 2000 and bought an island in Bora Bora; it had worked for Bobbi Brown. Certainly, the most inventive makeup artist of all time could pull it off. She called her brand Pat McGrath Labs, billing it as “a place of innovation, experimentation”.
Liquid gold
In the make-up labs of manufacturers in Italy, she found a highly reflective, prismatic gold eye shadow with a gel base that gave the pearlised finish a pure intensity. When McGrath dripped an activator on the disk, it became fluid without losing its vibrancy. In keeping with the laboratory theme, she named it Gold 001, left it in its plastic lab-sample compact and sold it with a liquid activator.
On a sunny afternoon in September 2015, McGrath and her fleet of assistants gathered at Tuileries Gardens in Paris to paint gold on the eyelids and lips of Bella Hadid, Imaan Hammam and other models who wandered over between fashion shows.
The organic, unchoreographed energy of the event mirrored McGrath’s approach to makeup, that chaotic backstage moment when inspiration strikes. “Most makeup lines would take years to come out,” she said in 2016. “I was thinking, why not now, just one?” She packaged 1000 kits of eye shadows and activators in sacks filled with a cushioning of gold sequins. She said the kits were for “people that are as mad about makeup and as obsessed as I am”.
Cosmetics companies work hard to be easy. They don’t expect people to mix their own formulas in their bathrooms. But McGrath wanted her customers to practice alchemy, to turn powder to liquid the way she did. The US$40 kit, offered on her website, sold out in minutes.
There was no business plan, no aspiration for 3 feet of shelves – called gondolas – at Sephora, no product pipeline on a seasonal cadence.
She followed the gold with other bright, shiny objects. Her Skin Fetish Highlighter and Balm duo was equally unconventional, equally reliant on at-home chemistry. The US$72 kits included a double-sided stick with a balm on one end and a silver or gold highlighter on the other, plus a wafer of pressed gel that looked like a holographic opal. And while the products may have held the secret to McGrath’s technique of bringing out the skin’s luminosity, good luck trying to figure out how to apply them without a beauty school diploma.
“I can’t bear to do something that’s already been done,” she said at the time.
At a 2016 event celebrating her line’s Sephora debut, fans waited outside the company’s Union Square location for hours to see McGrath, seated in the middle of the selling floor like visiting royalty. Grace Coddington, the longtime Vogue fashion editor; Kim Chi, a runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race; and a number of models leaned in to congratulate her. Shoppers hugged her, held her hand. A woman in head-to-toe leather fell to her knees and cried at McGrath’s feet.
Until then, McGrath had funded her company herself. In 2018, investors came courting. Eurazeo Brands, a private equity firm in Paris, invested US$60 million, valuing the brand at more than US$1 billion, even though its sales were estimated at only US$40 million.
You would think that investors had gone mad. That same year, Anastasia Beverly Hills, a brand devoted to eyebrow grooming, was valued at US$3 billion; Glossier and Huda Beauty also achieved unicorn valuations. Such heady numbers were extracted, in part, from the brands’ sales potential and earned media value, a metric that assesses unpaid social media exposure. Fame and promise were how one industry expert characterised the calculations, which aren’t calculations at all. In retrospect, it sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale.
Early chaos
In interviews since December, five former Pat McGrath Cosmetics employees described having been brought into the company with no formal titles and no specific job descriptions. They emphasised that McGrath made every decision, despite her lack of financial and operational experience. She approved every social post, creative campaign and piece of email marketing, even when she was out of the office – for several months each year – at fashion shows and photo shoots.
Meetings took place at all hours to accommodate her schedule. And yet, former employees said they were dazzled by McGrath’s talent. They endured the stress and sleeplessness for the privilege of working with a star.
The company was burning through that initial US$60m investment. Meisel shot several ads for Pat McGrath Labs featuring Naomi Campbell for an estimated US$1m apiece, according to two former executives at the company. At a typical beauty startup, campaigns cost tens of thousands of dollars, if they exist at all.
No one could deny the lavishness of the products, with names that sounded as if they had emerged from a fever dream. There was MatteTrance lipstick in a metal tube with gold sculpted lips in the centre, like Salvador Dalí’s lipstick from 1983. Her Mothership eye shadow palettes held 10 richly pigmented formulas for US$125. Skin Fetish: Sublime Perfection Foundation won multiple awards and five-star reviews.
In 2016, Pat McGrath Labs entered an exclusive relationship with Sephora. The retailer is partial to independent, founder-led brands – and if that brand pledges its loyalty, Sephora rewards it with its institutional knowledge, almost as if it were incubating a startup.
The game works like this: Sephora steers the new brand with frequent check-ins. It bestows prime shelf space while giving the brand time to ramp up. It offers promotional emails and prominent placement on Sephora.com. And it all goes swimmingly until it doesn’t.
“It’s relatively easy to get to the US$20 million threshold,” said Davin Staats, the global head of beauty and personal care at Lazard, a financial advisory and asset management firm. “And then you’re off to the races. It’s like printing money.” Reaching US$50 million in sales, however, is another matter entirely. At Sephora, Staats added, “if a brand doesn’t get significant scale quickly, it will actually get lost in the organisation. You wither.”
Pat McGrath Labs started missing deadlines and cancelling some product introductions altogether. Soon, Sephora turned its prized shelf space to other, brighter new things.
And then Pat McGrath Labs did something that bewildered industry experts: it broke its exclusive with Sephora by striking a deal with Ulta. And, poof, there went the favoured status at Sephora.
Ulta, a cosmetics retailer with headquarters in the Midwest and the genial corporate ethos to prove it, is an unusual choice for fashion-driven makeup. The chain attracts a price-conscious consumer, offering frequent discounts – not necessarily the best fit for a foundation called Skin Fetish.
The move brought added complexity to McGrath’s company. And managing distribution and deadlines was never its strong suit.
It was sometimes late on trends – mystifyingly, given its founder’s immersion in cutting-edge fashion – missing the moment when contour and blush were popular and instead doubling down on eye shadow palettes. When tastes changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, from show-off-y colours to neutrals, Pat McGrath Labs produced makeup better suited to clubs than 8am Zoom calls. The Mothership was taking on water.
McGrath is, more than anything, a creature of fashion, devoted to the runway and forsaking all else. She once said her favourite restaurant in Paris was the Ritz hotel (in other words, room service). She has been spotted at the Original Mayr Medical Resort, a spa in Austria where guests eat in silence, chewing each bite of buckwheat roll 40 times.
In fashion, practicality is the ultimate sin. If you want to insult a designer, call a collection “wearable” or, worse, “commercial”. But to be successful in the beauty business, you have to sell a lot of lipsticks to a lot of people; it’s a volume play. And in that way, Pat McGrath Labs seemed ill-equipped. McGrath’s Instagram and TikTok videos seem inspired by Fellini, not Nancy Meyers.
A different approach
Meanwhile, another makeup artist from the fashion world was managing to capture the everyday shopper. Charlotte Tilbury started her brand one year before McGrath. Two roads diverged in a wood and all that. Tilbury took the one more travelled by.
Tilbury, also English, also peppers her conversation with “darling” and “sweetheart,” with quippy phrases that sound as if they were lifted directly from your mum’s Pinterest board (“Every woman deserves a man to ruin her lipstick, not her mascara”). Her makeup isn’t a demonstration of artistry; it’s an invitation to self-mastery. At Sephora, Tilbury products were organised as makeup wardrobes with names including “The Uptown Girl” and “The Queen of Glow.” Shoppers could pluck several items for the whole look, a clever way to maximise sales.
Tilbury started her brand with a trusted operational partner who put together a business plan, budgets and unsexy things like infrastructure. And it worked. In 2020, fashion and beauty giant Puig acquired a majority stake in Charlotte Tilbury. Since then, Puig says, the brand has more than tripled its revenues.
While Charlotte Tilbury was rising, McGrath was creating viral moments unattached to her products. The ultimate example was the glass-skin makeup for a Maison Margiela fashion show in January 2024. Fans who wanted to re-create the effect at home were frustrated that Pat McGrath Labs didn’t have any products to satisfy the demand.
McGrath told Vogue that she had achieved the glassy finish by piling on skincare masks. Unfortunately, she waited a year to release the Glass 001 Artistry Mask. Who can remember what happened a year ago on a fashion runway? The viral moment had passed.
Head-scratchers
For all of McGrath’s couture high-mindedness, there were some lower-brow moments. She created two Star Wars collections and a tie-in to the Netflix romance Bridgerton. In 2025 came a head-scratcher: a collaboration with Candy Crush, in red-and-white candy cane packaging. McGrath announced that three US$10,000 ruby and diamond rings were hidden in boxes of makeup, a stunt that struck some as gimmicky.
Then there was the matter of the missing red lipstick during Swift’s Eras Tour. Several executives who were then working at the company suggested that late payments to vendors made it more difficult to get the makeup on the shelves. Competitors released videos describing how to duplicate Swift’s look with their own products.
Pat McGrath Labs wasn’t alone in its struggles. According to Staats, the Lazard banker, the entire makeup industry is suffering. Estée Lauder is looking for a buyer for Too Faced and Smashbox. Glossier, Makeup by Mario and Westman Atelier haven’t found buyers; and Anastasia Soare of Anastasia Beverly Hills bought back her shares from investors and is restructuring.
Eurazeo, the early investor in Pat McGrath Cosmetics, exited the brand in 2021, and Sienna Investment Managers put in US$204m. From there, the company’s performance declined. “Once you get the sense that a brand is tarnished, it’s hard to get rid of that tarnish,” Staats said.
In August, there was some good news for McGrath herself, if not for her company. Louis Vuitton announced that she was the new creative director for its lipsticks and eye shadows. But the move was puzzling. “The fact that, having her own brand, she would go to creative direct another – I didn’t understand that,” said Moore, of the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Was McGrath distancing herself from her company, shifting her allegiances back to luxury fashion? Some industry watchers believed that LVMH, the luxury giant that owns Louis Vuitton, might bring Pat McGrath Labs under its umbrella. That hasn’t happened. Perhaps she had grown weary of running a business and welcomed the chance to return to what she does best: creating impeccable makeup colours and textures.
With all she has achieved – the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (you may address her as Dame Pat), Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019 – McGrath had certainly earned the right to relax. But as Pat McGrath Labs entered its first month under bankruptcy protection, McGrath signalled that she was committed to her brand, saying in a statement: “This Chapter 11 will enable me to remain in the driver’s seat and keep the company’s vision focused.”
As if predicting the future, McGrath said in an interview in 2016: “The one thing about fashion, you’re only as good as 30 days ago or an hour ago. I’m always nervous, because I know you always want to, in a way, push back, do something outside the norm.” And while her brand is far from basic, it now risks looking a bit stale to trendsetters.
“It’s very sad,” said Demsey, the beauty consultant. McGrath is, “without question, the most important, talented makeup artist of modern times,” he added. “There is no one that has had a greater influence on the fusion of fashion, beauty and rethinking makeup looks in truly creative and unconventional ways.”
And maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe that was the problem.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Linda Wells
Photographs by: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, Doug Mills and Simbarashe Cha
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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