Clean Makeup Line MOB Beauty Proves Natural Ingredients Can Perform | Health + Beauty

MOB Beauty co-founder and CEO Victor Casale has 41 years of experience, first as a chemist for MAC Cosmetics and then CoverFX, a brand he also co-founded. In their latest challenge, MOB Beauty, Casale and co-founder Alisha Gallagher seek to make products that perform just as well as big box brands while using only clean, vegan, renewable ingredients and biodegradable or reusable packaging. 

It’s all brewing in the East Nashville lab, where the brand recently moved from Palm Springs. Brands would typically outsource such work: a lab will make the product, and the brand will buy it from them. “What we’re doing and how we do it is extremely unique,” Gallagher tells Nfocus. “It doesn’t really happen in our industry. Most cosmetic brands go and buy their formulas from a lab.” 

The cream clay formula of eyeshadow and blush is the brand’s most beloved, Gallagher says. While MOB stands out with its “cyan blue” eyeshadow or lipstick that takes on a “wet concrete” tone, neutral shades are its bread and butter. In fact, the taupes are the hardest to make. They incorporate many pigments — black, white, red, yellow and blue. 

“We obsess over the taupe,” Gallagher says. “We want it to be the perfect taupe that’s not going to pull orange, it’s not going to pull purple. Those really gorgeous modern, neutral, wearable everyday essentials are core to our business.”

In the lab, Gallagher and Casale find a shade they like, then Casale recreates it using a scale and measurements. Gallagher tries the sample on herself for a few days and oftentimes shares it with members of the MOB community. (The lab is planning community events for the future.) It’s different from other brands, which typically don’t reveal shades before they go to market. The chosen shade is sent out to Toronto, where suppliers use Casale’s recipe to make a larger batch.

Moving the lab to Nashville meant being closer to Casale’s family and business relationships in Toronto. Most of Gallagher’s family lives in and around Nashville, too. The pair can now work face-to-face after spending years split between San Francisco and Palm Springs since the brand started in 2019. Nashville is also home to lots of makeup artists. “The concentration of creative people is incredible,” Gallagher says. “There’s a great community here that really supports makeup and beauty, which is awesome.” 

MOB Beauty is found locally at The Makeup Altar, as well as Credo Beauty and The Detox Market, two stores with a national focus on clean beauty. When Casale started his career, customers were mainly concerned about how the product looked. As time went on, people became more concerned about where ingredients come from, Casale observes. Today, there’s an added question: What happens to it after? Does it hurt downstream ecosystems, and is it renewable? 

To make a clean beauty brand, you simply have to commit to it, Casale says. For example, most liquid eyeshadows have a type of liquified rubber (isoprene rubber), and he’s trying countless formulas in the lab. “We’re using natural ingredients to give the same performance,” he says. “It just takes a little longer, and it possibly costs a little more, because we’re using a few things instead of one thing. But it can be done. You just have to want to do it.” 

Necessity is the mother of invention, and because MOB requires natural ingredients to stay in line with the brand’s mission, it has developed unique formulas. One example is a soft matte lipstick featuring plant emollients and silica (rather than silicone) to create a blurring, velvety finish. 

“For any consumer, even the most discerning consumer who demands really good, all-day-long performance and quality from their product, I have every confidence that we can get there in a more clean, cruelty-free, sustainable, conscious, better for people, planet [and] animals way,” Gallagher says. “So to me, there’s no reason not to. There’s no reason to compromise.”