Few individuals are as inextricably linked with a single body part as Anastasia Soare is with the eyebrow. The woman behind the billion-dollar brand Anastasia Beverly Hills has an origin story as compelling as her success: Born in Romania, Soare immigrated to the United States with no English skills and zero financial backing, settling in Los Angeles. Her breakthrough came from an epiphany—that perfectly shaped eyebrows could serve as a “walking advertisement” for her work, a concept virtually revolutionary in the early 1990s. Now, as the “Queen of Brows” documents her journey in her memoir, Raising Brows, she shares the principles that guided her from a Beverly Hills salon room to founding a cosmetics line valued in the billions, proving that vision, determination, and a patented technique can indeed transform a niche service into a global beauty empire.
The Epiphany: Why Eyebrows Became the Focus
Anastasia Soare’s early career in Los Angeles was typical of a talented esthetician, encompassing various services from facials to waxing. She quickly built a clientele of A-list celebrities, but a conversation with a famous client marked the turning point that would redefine her career and the entire beauty industry.
In the early 1990s, when a magazine wanted to feature her talent, a celebrity client—Michelle Pfeiffer—declined to speak about her body waxing services, preferring to keep such intimate body care discreet. This led Soare to an immediate realization: she needed to focus on a service that was always visible, always on display, and could not be hidden.
The epiphany was simple yet profound: eyebrows. Soare realized that nobody was truly paying attention to them, yet their shape held immense power to frame and change the emotion of the face. By focusing on brows, her work would become a “walking advertisement” for her skill. This niche focus quickly drew demand, particularly from makeup artists who realized they could save time by having their clients’ brows perfectly shaped before a session. This simple, client-driven demand for a neglected service laid the groundwork for a powerhouse brand.
Perfecting the Golden Ratio: The Mathematics of Beauty
What truly set Soare apart from every other service provider in Beverly Hills was her development and patented use of the Golden Ratio—a technique she transposed from classical art and architecture onto the human face. This mathematical principle, dating back to the Ancient Greeks and famously studied by Leonardo da Vinci, dictates the “divine proportion” that is considered the most aesthetically pleasing.
Inspired by her art teacher’s lessons on how eyebrows could change a portrait’s emotion, Soare began practicing the Golden Ratio on herself. She determined that the most aesthetically pleasing brow could be achieved by using three key points to ensure spatial correctness and balance across the face. These three points ensure the brow is aligned to the nose, the iris, and the outer corner of the eye.
Soare learned that the face is split into invisible horizontal and vertical “zones,” with the eyebrow acting as a separator to keep these zones equally spaced and symmetrical. She was so convinced of the transformative power of her technique that she began offering the service without even charging clients, as it wasn’t yet recognized as a distinct beauty treatment. This commitment to a measurable, technical standard of beauty—the intersection of art and science—cemented her reputation and became the foundation upon which her entire brand was built.
From Salon Room to Product Line: The Necessity of Innovation
As demand for her Golden Ratio brow shaping grew, Soare opened her own salon space in Beverly Hills in 1992. However, she faced two major challenges: the dominant aesthetic of the time and the lack of suitable products.
The popular trend in the 1990s was the pencil-thin eyebrow, a look that often resulted in clients over-tweezing or damaging their natural shape. Soare’s technique required clients to grow their brows out, and she needed a solution for filling in sparse areas during this grow-out phase. Because dedicated brow products barely existed, she took matters into her own hands, mixing an impromptu pomade from eyeshadow, aloe vera, and Vaseline to fill in her clients’ brows in the salon.
The obvious next step was to create a product line that clients could use at home, allowing them to maintain the look she had perfected. By 1997, when she found a larger space, she officially launched the Anastasia Beverly Hills brand with a makeup line alongside her services. This necessity-driven innovation, which transformed a homemade remedy into a commercial product line, was the first key to scaling her business far beyond the confines of a single salon.
The Billion-Dollar Leap: Disrupting Retail and Establishing a Category
The true ascent of Anastasia Beverly Hills from a celebrity-frequented salon brand to a global empire occurred when it made the leap into mainstream retail. When Nordstrom expressed interest in stocking the brand, Soare insisted on a seemingly radical condition: the stores must also offer brow services performed by trained estheticians.
At the time, consumers did not know how to use specialized brow products like powders. Soare understood that education was integral to the product’s success. “It was very important from the beginning to have a service to train the customer,” she notes. Nordstrom agreed, launching the brand in 20 stores with service stations—a model that was revolutionary and immediately set ABH apart. Despite initial skepticism from industry peers who dismissed the idea of a brand dedicated solely to eyebrows, Soare pressed on, offering a wide range of shades and textures to accommodate her diverse, global clientele.
This blend of retail distribution and essential in-store education effectively created a new category in the cosmetics world. The success was meteoric: by 2018, the company was valued at $3 billion. Products like the iconic Brow Wiz pencil became runaway successes, with one being sold every 10 seconds. Soare had not just built a brand; she had established the very blueprint for the modern brow industry.
