TINA CRAIG
The beauty entrepreneur paving the way to incandescent skin.
Tina Craig was just 13 when she got hired to work the register at Sam Goody in her local Maryland mall. “I wanted to buy a red bikini,” she recalls, “and my very conservative Chinese family just said, ‘No—unless you get a job and buy it yourself.’” As Craig has proved ever since, she is nothing if not determined.
After working as an MTV VJ and in fashion, she launched the pioneering blog Bag Snob two decades ago, followed by a beauty-focused spin-off. “Skin care was ingrained in me,” she says, remembering the collagen-rich chicken feet that were endearingly “force-fed” to her as a kid. “In Chinese, the word beautiful was only used to describe inanimate things. When you wanted to call a woman beautiful, you told her she had great skin.” Besides, her two interests were aligned: “Beauty and bags at department stores are always on the same floor. They don’t require sizing!”
What prompted Craig and her cofounders to launch U Beauty in 2019 was scientific innovation: specifically, the patent-pending SIREN capsules, which mimic skin cells and serve as a sly delivery mechanism for active ingredients. But what earns the brand its devotees are the ingenious formulas fed by the “constant stream of ideas in my head,” says Craig, “like, ‘I want invisible shapewear in a bottle.’” She remains her own target audience: “Obviously aging is a privilege, but I wanted to do it as well as possible.” There is efficacy to consider, but also unbridled delight. When a new product is in development, she says, “I want my whole team obsessed.” Craig brings exactly that enthusiasm to her well-edited BAG.
