Every so often a beauty product escapes the shelf and takes over the internet. For Wonderskin, that product was a peel off lip stain, and the moment was impossible to miss. Across TikTok, users smeared on a strange metallic blue masque, peeled it away, and revealed a long lasting stain underneath, a small piece of theatre that racked up billions of views. Founded in 2020 by Michael Malinsky, Marina Kalenchyts, and Doug Cooper, the brand had found the rarest thing in the industry, a genuinely new trick.
The product behind the spectacle is the Wonder Blading Peel and Reveal Lip Stain, built on a patented technology the company calls Liquid Blading. A high concentration water based gel lays pigment into the top layer of the lip, an activator seals it, and the wearer peels off the film to reveal colour that stays put for hours. Malinsky is quick to insist it was never only a stunt.
It wasn't just a gimmick that would be interesting to hook people's attention, but a way to give a consumer something that wasn't quite there in the market.
The viral wave brought famous faces with it. The blue lip turned up on Kylie Minogue, Hailey Bieber, Doja Cat, Iris Law, Eva Longoria, and Olivia Wilde, and even made an appearance on Love Island, the kind of exposure money struggles to buy.
Escaping the one hit trap
The danger of a viral product is that it becomes the whole brand, and then the trend passes. Wonderskin has spent the years since deliberately building around it. Today, Malinsky says, the famous lip stain accounts for less than half of sales. The company has turned out a run of what he calls hero launches in their own right, including a Wonder Blading Eyeliner that leads its category, a Phlush Stick blush, and a Hyper Bond foundation that has grown month after month since its debut.
That diversification is why the numbers now look like a real business rather than a fad. Wonderskin is on track to pass 200 million dollars in annual revenue this year, with roughly three quarters of sales still coming direct to consumer and the remaining quarter through wholesale. In May 2026 the company raised its first outside money, a 50 million dollar Series A led by Insight Partners, earmarked for retail, product development, research, and inventory.
From the phone screen to the store shelf
The next chapter is physical. Wonderskin is adding 1,500 new doors across the United States through Sephora alone this year, with further openings abroad, a major push for a company born online. Malinsky is careful to frame the move as an expansion rather than a pivot away from its origins.
We're not losing our digital roots. We have accepted that our identity is in our DTC.
To protect what makes the products distinctive, the brand bought the New Jersey laboratory that invented its Liquid Blading formula, bringing the science in house. For Kalenchyts, keeping that engine under one roof is the point, a way to keep generating the next breakthrough rather than defending a single one against imitators like Sacheu or giants like L'Oreal now eyeing the long wear category.
It was very important to keep that innovation really in-house and be able to multiply these innovation moments.
Many small voices, not one big face
Wonderskin's marketing is as unusual as its formulas. Rather than crowning a single celebrity to sell the brand, it spreads its bets across a wide field of creators chosen to match specific audiences. Kalenchyts describes the logic plainly.
We do not pick one big celebrity to narrate their viewpoint on the product.
Instead the company seeks out particular types, makeup artists, young athletes, active lifestyle influencers, and busy parents, looking for a natural fit between creator and product. That approach reaches into its own staff, who make content too, and out into the real world, with a summer pop up tour spanning New York, Edinburgh, Bristol, London, and Belfast to mark the Sephora rollout.
Built to keep moving
The through line is speed. Malinsky treats restlessness as a competitive advantage rather than a liability, and he says he never wants the company to lose it.
I take some pride in us moving fast, and I never want to lose that as part of our business essence.
That instinct is steering the brand toward stickier categories like foundation and skincare, the kind of products people buy on repeat, and toward newer sales channels such as TikTok Shop, which did not exist when Wonderskin launched and is now among the largest places to sell beauty online. It is a fitting destination for a company the platform helped create. Wonderskin was made by a viral moment, and its whole strategy since has been a bet that it can keep manufacturing the next one.
