August 5, 2026
Mikayla Nogueira may be TikTok’s reigning beauty queen, but as her beauty brand POV Beauty heads to Sephora this fall, co-founder and CEO Ani Hadjinian asserts the company has been building for retail from day one.
“Retail is a different muscle,” says Hadjinian, who previously helped shepherd Augustinus Bader and Bobbi Brown at stores. “You have to earn your place every single day.”
Whether POV earns that place will be an important test of TikTok’s ability to translate popularity into sustained retail success. It will also test whether Sephora remains the retailer capable of transforming breakout brands into category leaders, one of the key reasons POV Beauty chose it over Ulta Beauty even though Nogueira worked as a beauty advisor at Ulta before becoming a full-time content creator.
POV’s Sephora debut comes as TikTok has become a potent commercial engine in beauty. According to e-commerce intelligence platform , beauty sales on TikTok Shop in the United States $928.5 million in the first quarter, up 96% year over year. If that pace holds, beauty sales on the platform will exceed $4 billion this year. The challenge is proving TikTok traction delivers retail staying power.
Rhode has already shown what’s possible, becoming Sephora’s biggest brand launch ever last year. Still, not every creator-founded brand has made the transition from screens to shelves smoothly. Selfless by Hyram retreated from retail after partnerships with Sephora and Target, and Item Beauty by Addison Rae shuttered in 2023.
Despite those setbacks, Sephora has established an enviable track record of scaling creator-founded brands into major prestige beauty businesses. Huda Beauty, Summer Fridays and One/Size have evolved from founder-led concepts into prestige beauty powerhouses.
TikTok beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira’s POV Beauty lands chainwide in Sephora stores across the United States and in select stores in Canada on Sept. 3 with its full assortment of skin prep and makeup products.
POV Beauty enters Sephora from a position of strength. Powered by Nogueira’s following of more than 17 million on TikTok, the brand generated roughly $1 million in sales during its first seven minutes and $3 million before inventory completely sold out at launch last April, according to , which described Nogueira as an “Ulta Cinderella story.”
Beyond its direct-to-consumer business, the brand generated roughly $2.7 million on TikTok Shop during the first six months of this year, according to Charm.io. Backing from Imaginary Ventures gives POV Beauty the financial resources to compete in Sephora’s demanding retail environment.
Ari Bloom, founder of , a beauty incubator that’s developed brands with John Legend, Gabrielle Union and Naomi Osaka, argues that POV Beauty represents a second generation of influencer-founded beauty brands designed more for longevity than their predecessors. Rather than relying on fame alone, today’s creators have spent years mastering content creation, audience-building and consumer behavior, allowing them to crack retail with a deeper understanding of consumers than many founders before them.
“The first version was, ‘Ryan Reynolds sold Aviation Gin, so everybody should have a celebrity brand,'” says Bloom. “Version two is people who actually understand the attention economy and know how to build audiences. Great product and serving a market need is the price of entry.” He adds, “It’s really hard to build a brand regardless. Unless you have everything working for you, the odds are incredibly low. Single-digit odds you’re going to be successful.”
Nogueira has certainly built an audience. She joined TikTok in 2020 and amassed 10 million followers within a year through her full-glam makeup looks, bold personality and product reviews. Her TikTok videos have since generated more than 2 billion likes.
“She’s put in her 10,000 hours,” says Hadjinian. “She instinctively knows what’s commercially viable because she’s been having these conversations with her community every single day.”
That strategy comes to retail Sept. 3, when POV Beauty launches chainwide at the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Sephora in the United States and in select stores in Canada. The assortment will include hero skin prep products Drench It, a priming milk, and Drip It, a face serum, alongside newer makeup products Amp It, a colored lip treatment, and Contour It, a lip pencil.
Reflecting Sephora’s confidence in the launch, POV Beauty will receive a two-bay fixture in roughly 30 of the retailer’s highest-volume stores, a one-bay fixture in the remaining locations and secondary front-of-store placement for most of its assortment. reports that POV Beauty will get floor-to-ceiling window displays at Sephora’s Times Square flagship, and Nogueira will embark on a store tour across the United States in September and October.
Launched direct-to-consumer in April 2025 to strong consumer demand and blockbuster early sales, POV Beauty’s Sephora debut will test whether TikTok buzz can translate into long-term retail success.
What’s commercially viable isn’t putting out the same old products. Rather than competing head-on with Patrick Ta or Makeup by Mario, POV has sought to carve out a differentiated position in skincare prep before expanding into makeup, the category Nogueira is best known for. Hadjinian sees the brand creating a skin prep destination within Sephora that complements, rather than competes directly with, established makeup brands. “That’s the magic of skin prep,” she says. Hadjinian adds that POV will continue to innovate across skincare and makeup as it expands its Sephora business.
“The responsibility is on the brand to drive traffic,” says Kate Foster Lengyel, founder of consultancy Harmonic Sum and former CEO of Scarlett Johansson’s skincare brand The Outset, which was once carried by Sephora. “You have to come in with that momentum already built.” She emphasizes, “You have to have the credibility piece, you have to have the audience, and you have to have products that are really solving a problem. You kind of have to have all three.”
Although Nogueira has a massive audience, Hadjinian maintains that the next decade of influencer beauty brands won’t be defined by who has the largest audience, but by which founders can transform that audience into an enduring brand by combining content and community with the fundamentals of brand-building. She points to Skims as the blueprint.
“People come back because it’s just such an awesome product,” she says. “How do you join community commerce with the essence of what it means to really have a brand? To me, that’s trust, that’s advocacy, that’s having a heart and soul for a brand.