Dr. Shereene Idriss on building a community and rarely accepting brand partnerships

10/05/23 • 41 min

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For the past 10 years, Dr. Shereene Idriss has been a practicing dermatologist in New York City. And in 2018, she also became a social media star. Today, Dr. Idriss has 657,000 followers on Instagram, 441,000 on TikTok and 704,000 on YouTube. In October 2021, she opened her own practice, Idriss Dermatology, in Manhattan. Then, a year later, in October 2022, she launched PillowtalkDerm, her skin-care brand, named for the content series she'd become known for. In #PillowtalkDerm social media content, Dr. Idriss can often be found in bed, in her pajamas, educating her followers about skin care in her typical no-B.S. style. While Dr. Idriss built her robust following of "nerds," as she calls her followers, by calling out trends she's deemed unworthy of their hype and mostly shying away from paid brand deals, it's worth noting that she's also very funny.

When PillowtalkDerm, the brand, became available for pre-sale in September 2022, it sold out in less than 36 hours. It launched with three products, all aimed at hyperpigmentation and discoloration and labeled the Major Fade collection. Since then, it has released just one more product, the Depuffer, in April 2023. The arnica-filled roller serum was inspired by Dr. Idriss's patients recovering from treatments including injectables and Sculptra.

Dr. Shereene Idriss, spoke with Glossy senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner about the inception of #PillowtalkDerm on social, the reason she's turned down lucrative brand deals and the decision to kick off the brand with a focus on hyperpigmentation.

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Noble Panacea CEO Céline Talabaza on why luxury beauty ‘cannot be copied’

It is notoriously difficult to succeed in the luxury indie beauty space, and not many brands do. But by all accounts, Noble Panacea has superseded all expectations.

Noble Panacea launched in Oct. 2019, emerging as the result of the scientific discoveries of Sir Fraser Stoddard, a scientist who has received numerous awards, including the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His discovery of the organic super molecular vessel technology, also called OSMV, is the core of Nobel Panacea and its unique ingredient delivery system. The brand made a splash with a launch event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and has since signed on actress Jodie Comer as a brand ambassador. The brand is distributed in 13 countries and sold through retailers like Neiman Marcus, Harrods, Net-a-Porter and Moda Operandi. It has approximately 50 full-time employees.

Céline Talabaza, CEO of Noble Panacea, spoke with Glossy beauty and wellness editor Emma Sandler about what attracted her to the brand, how the brand is approaching the Asian market and what a luxury approach to social media looks like.

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Jo Malone on her second act, Jo Loves: 'I wanted to sit at the banquet of opportunity.’

Jo Malone, CBE, was born special.

She was born with synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon wherein one sensory stimulation can create involuntary experiences for another. For Malone, this means she can experience smells visually. Malone parlayed this uniqueness into creating Jo Malone London, a global fragrance brand that The Estée Lauder Companies bought in 1999 for an undisclosed sum. Malone left the brand in 2006 after a breast cancer diagnosis, which rendered her unable to smell at the time. After a 5-year hiatus from fragrance, she reentered the category with Jo Loves.

“I've learned over the last few years that fragrance is not a business or a career. To me, it's my best friend and the thing I love doing most in the whole world,” said Malone on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

Jo Loves has become a Gen-Z favorite. And it's notable for its fragrance paintbrushes, released in 2017, and an in-store tapas bar concept to introduce customers to scents in a playful way. As the brand steadily expands internationally, it’s also adding more hospitality partnerships including Shangri-La The Shard in London and the Park Lane Hotel in New York. For Malone, the goal is to change the world through fragrance.

Malone spoke with Glossy about how she restarted a brand from scratch, why Dubai inspires her creatively, what she thinks of clean-beauty fragrances and why she aspires to create 101 fragrances.