CALABASAS, Calif. — “I’ll try anything,” Kim Kardashian said last month during an interview in her huge office here. It houses a photo studio, a showroom, a video room, staff offices, your personal office, a glam room (where you get ready for shoots), a model glam room (where models get ready for shoots ), a conference room, a theater and more. “If you told me that I literally have to eat poop every day and that I would look younger, I would. I just could.
So far, excrement isn’t one of the ingredients in Ms. Kardashian’s new skincare line.
But vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, niacinamide, glycolic and lactic acid, shea butter, and squalene are among the more traditional ingredients you’ll find in SKKN by Kim, which debuts later this month. Skin care is a first for Ms. Kardashian, who is 41 years old. Ella (Previously, she sold fragrances and makeup through KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance, both defunct.) Her first nine products are a mirror of her own regimen, which is thorough indeed.
Why would the woman who brought the concept of contouring into the world want to start with skincare instead of, well, contouring for her return to beauty? Simple: Mrs. Kardashian wants to show off the tone and texture of her own skin. Up close, it’s a sight to behold: shiny, hydrated and smooth.
“I wanted to stay true to exactly what I wear, even if everyone said this is overwhelming,” said Ms. Kardashian, who wore a black Balenciaga tracksuit and black Yeezy foam slides with plenty of glamour: camera-ready makeup and blonde hair. smooth platinum that reaches her waist.
Despite being a latecomer to the gazillion-step regimens popularized by Korean skincare brands, Ms. Kardashian is touting a lengthy routine. Her nine-step system “may seem scary to some,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, to break it down, to say, ‘They’re all needed.'” If there is any step to be eliminated, it is the exfoliants (there are two), which, depending on your skin, do not require daily use.
SKKN products are considerably more expensive than most skin care products, created by celebrities or not. (A hyaluronic acid serum and night oil are $90 and $95.) Together, the nine items (cleanser, toner, scrub, hyaluronic acid serum, vitamin C serum, face cream, eye cream, oil drops, and night oil) come to a total of $630. It’s a price that may be out of reach for many of his potential customers and 313 million Instagram followers. (All products are refillable, and replacement pods cost approximately 15 percent less than the original packaging.)
Ms. Kardashian isn’t too concerned that people can’t afford their skin care.
“It’s definitely more prestige, and to get the kinds of ingredients that I really wouldn’t miss out on, it was kind of a necessity,” he said. “The products that I was using that were comparable were much more expensive, not to compare anything. I tried to get the quality at the best price we could, especially the vitamin C serum.”
Ms. Kardashian’s office, packed with beauty samples, is in chaos. Almost every surface is covered in product and packaging prototypes. The cluttered scene is at odds with the rest of your tidy, multi-level workspace. She offered a glimpse of the planned products, which include makeup, perfume, bath accessories and items for the home (“a lifestyle,” she said). Everything has a “stone effect,” and the bottles, jars, and more have a neutral color scheme, as does her Skims shapewear brand.
‘It’s not just a part of my job, it’s who I am.’
Ms. Kardashian’s appearance is now a decades-long source of fascination focused on her physique. The perpetual fluctuations and evolution of her weight, dramatic proportions, buttocks, waist, lips, cheekbones, hair and makeup are key to attracting the audience.
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“A lot of people want to act like they don’t care what they look like,” he said. “I don’t act like it’s easier or more natural. You just don’t wake up and use whatever. You wake up, you use ingredients. PRP facials, stem cell facials, lasers, all of that is work.”
Ms. Kardashian’s whole business is image, and she takes it seriously. Her net worth, estimated at over a billion dollars, is based on her body. Her face. The look of her. Everything else is an extension of that. Her physical appearance and her willingness to manipulate her is her career, whether it’s putting on a dress or spending 18 hours dying her hair platinum.
She’s been in the news for trying extreme beauty treatments for years. Remember when she posted a selfie of her bloody face after undergoing a “vampire facial”?
Ms. Kardashian is often credited with changing modern beauty standards, and that didn’t happen because of her allegiance to a particular cream or serum. She is not a dermatologist or a beautician. Why, then, should anyone take her skin care products seriously?
“I think the credibility of knowing that I got the best advice and the best wording from some of the people that I respect the most,” Ms. Kardashian said. With Skims, she said, she wanted to find solutions that she felt were missing from the market. For her skin care line, she was looking for solutions to her everyday skin problems.
Over the years, Ms. Kardashian said, she has tried just about every high-quality skincare product and treatment in the beauty aisle, integrated research and development for SKKN. To develop her formulas, she worked with Joanna Czech, a celebrity esthetician and facialist who has her own skincare line.
Ms. Czech, who has over 35 years of experience, advised on a skin care vocabulary (they don’t use the term “anti-aging”); she taught Mrs. Kardashian about different molecule sizes and versions of vitamin C; and she helped reformulate products to meet European Union skin care standards.
“There weren’t three tests of one product, there were 23,” Ms. Czech said, noting that achieving the optimal consistency for each serum, especially the oils, was the most challenging.
Ms Czech, who said the products were “created from scratch”, added: “People don’t expect more from celebrities than olive oil.”
Most celebrity brands are little more than a famous face lending their name to a product and promoting it online, making it that much more difficult for the few celebrities who are actually involved in their companies. Kylie Jenner introduced Kylie Skin in 2019, an extension of her Kylie Cosmetics brand, and was criticized online after she appeared to wear foundation in a video promoting her face wash; the same year, Kendall Jenner became an ambassador for Proactiv and received backlash because the association was perceived as “bogus”.
But Ms. Kardashian is unfazed by the public’s perception of lines from celebrities and influencers. Consider what she did with Skims, a girdle behemoth that, as of January, was valued at a staggering $3.2 billion.
Ms. Kardashian has similar visions for SKKN. “People might have assumed at first that Skims was a celebrity clothing brand for sure,” she said. “I get it, but once they got the product, I think they realized it was a product-based brand. I’ve been able to access skin treatments and other things, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. It’s like I’m sharing my solutions, like I did with Skims.”
‘The shine of a lifetime’
SKKN by Kim is Ms. Kardashian’s most ambitious beauty venture, but it’s far from first. Her first beauty lines were disparate companies, not all of them successful. There was KKW Fragrance, a line of kitschy, emoji-themed perfumes; and KKW Beauty, a makeup collection.
It closed both: KKW Fragrance in April; KKW beauty, last summer. French beauty conglomerate Coty, which had a minority investment in KKW Beauty, will help expand SKKN by Kim internationally and be a resource for things like packaging, Kardashian said.
Vanessa Reggiardo, general manager of the SKKN brand at Coty, said the line has been extensively tested by consumers and is “formulated to care for all skin types, tones and textures at every stage of maturity, for use by both men and women.” women. .”
Ms. Kardashian plans to consolidate and eventually relaunch her other beauty and lifestyle products under a single SKKN by Kim brand. A new website, skknbykim.com, will be the only place to shop for her new skincare. Next year, SKKN by Kim will be available at a major beauty supply store, she said. (Details are still being finalized.)
For now, potential customers will have to rely on online content and tutorials before ordering a $95 face oil that, when mixed with face cream, will give you, she said, “the glow of a lifetime.”
She wants to prove it.
After reviewing the SKKN swatches, Ms. Kardashian headed to the bathroom to wash her face and remove makeup from a previous photo shoot. She pinned her long, mermaid-like hair up into a giant clip and performed a shortened version of her nightly skincare routine. She cleansed, exfoliated and patted her face with a mixture of illuminating oil and face cream.
“I always go down to my chest, to my nipples, always to the pinches,” Ms. Kardashian said, massaging the emulsion into her neck, décolleté and upper half of her breasts. Expect a flurry of TikTok tutorials to follow, featuring influencers taking their skincare regimen “to the teeth,” like Ms. Kardashian.
Does exerting that kind of influence ever become a liability?
When asked about the controversy surrounding her significant weight loss to fit into her Met Gala gown, the same dazzling sheer dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 when she sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, the Ms Kardashian said: “For me it was like, ‘Okay, Christian Bale can do it for a movie role and that’s okay.’ Even Renée Zellweger gained weight for a role. It’s all the same to me. I wasn’t saying , ‘Hello everyone, why don’t you lose this weight in a short period of time?’”
In his mind, it was about commitment, like that of a boxer who needs to gain weight for a fight. He lost about 16 pounds in a month, with a diet, a sauna suit and running twice a day. “I didn’t do anything unhealthy,” he said.
What if he didn’t make weight for the Met?
“I just couldn’t have gone, which wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “It was important for me to reach that goal.”
It was just one scene in the role of Mrs. Kardashian’s life: playing herself. And if there’s one thing Ms. Kardashian has shown her fans over the years, it’s that she never gives up on a goal.
Source: www.nytimes.com