Mata Marielle has done more in a few years than many people manage in an entire career in beauty.
When the make-up artist realised there weren’t enough nude shades for dark skin tones on the market, she created Mata Labs, curating a cosmetic brand of cruelty-free glosses that caters to a wide spectrum of skin tones. Her innovation quickly gained the attention of Vogue, gal-dem, and brands like Reebok; since then, she’s added NAO, Dev Hynes, and Lauryn Hill to her impressive roster of clients, with each calling on her talents when it came to editorial shoots and stage shows.
Earlier this year, Marielle was enlisted as a Dazed Beauty community member (“being in a community filled with amazingly talented people is always super cool”), and dropped out of university to launch her brand online.
While she let slip that she’ll be expanding her product range and making her signature brown lipsticks available to everyone, she’s sworn to secrecy about the other “sick projects” she has up her sleeve. However, given her impressive trajectory over the last couple of years, it’s sure to be something ambitious. “This is still crazy,” she says. “16-year-old me would be so, so proud.”
Kemi Alemoru