Written by LAURA REGENSDORF

Photos courtesy of Annie Kreighbaum & Nick Axelrod-Welk

What makes a beauty veteran in our warp-speed world? It’s not just about silver-haired seniority—millennials have joined the club—but about a breadth of cross-linked experience. In the case of Nick Axelrod-Welk and Annie Kreighbaum, they met more than a decade ago at the beauty platform Into the Gloss. When Glossier’s first products arrived a year later, they saw the machinery of a brand launch from the inside. The two each went on to shape influential body care startups before moving on to their current endeavors: Kreighbaum with Kraum, a line of ultra-considered makeup brushes, and Axelrod-Welk with the new fragrance collection Contrapposto. Here, the founders log on—Kreighbaum from Dallas, Axelrod-Welk from Los Angeles—for a tête-à-tête about beauty influences, marketing pet peeves, and the fast-moving landscape of cosmetic procedures.

NICK AXELROD-WELK: I just got Apollo tattooed on my chest. Casey, my husband, had a medical conference in London a month or so ago, and I tagged along. I like to get tattoos wherever I go, so I was figuring out what I was going to get as I was in the Uber to the tattoo studio in Shoreditch.

VIOLET GREY: That's a big commitment to decide on the fly.

NA-W: I know. I have probably 11 or 12 tattoos, so I've decided that I've separated my identity from my body.

VG: Which is a very interesting thought in the beauty space: how much of your identity is wrapped up in your physical shell. What have you each done today that is beauty-oriented?

NA-W:I worked out. I used to be able to exercise from 7 to 8 a.m. and then shower and get to the office by 9:30 a.m. Now that we have to get two kids out the door to school, I work out at 5:30, but I did it. I will say, though, the further I get into the beauty industry, the less vain I am. Casey, my husband, is always telling me, “You need to have a skin care routine.”

ANNIE KREIGHBAUM: It's unfair to expect a beauty editor to have a routine, right? We've had to test so many products and have opinions on so many things. My morning is a good foil to yours because I've chosen not to have children. I wake up ravenous and eat breakfast, and then I go back to bed for about an hour. I'm trying to prioritize sleep for once in my life, so I'm being gentle.

VG: Annie, a tagline on Kraum’s website is “Do not fear perfection.” How do each of you think about ideas of perfection?

NA-W: I was talking the other day with my creative collaborator Brian Roettinger about the definition of contrapposto. In art history, it's a position of the body where the weight is shifted onto one foot and the body's shown in a dynamic movement versus a static front-facing posture. It's about perfection versus imperfection—and did we want to talk about imperfection as part of the brand? We were like, no. That is our standard, and there’s nothing wrong with striving to create a perfectly executed thing. I don't think that asymmetry or movement and dynamism should be at odds with being perfect.

AK: When I say “don't fear perfection,” don't fear picking up this tool to create the perfect cat eye. I think a lot of women get so intimidated, they don't even try—and part of becoming good at a skill is just taking more ownership. Practice makes perfect. There are so many different kinds of beauty and so many interesting facial features. I'm so attracted now to specific noses that we seem to be erasing and shapes of lips and ears and jawlines that feel unacceptable today or not “perfect,” and that's just such a shame. Studying your face should unlock your idea of perfection versus making yourself feel imperfect.

VG: What were each of your earliest beauty purchases as a kid?

NA-W: My first fragrance was Tommy. I was 10 years old, and I was going to this sleepaway camp called Bucks Rock Camp for the Arts in Connecticut, and I bought a bottle. I wore so much of it every single day that on the last day of camp—imagine those scenes in movies where everyone's crying and hugging and being like, "Oh, I’ll miss you. I can't believe you're my best friend," after, you know, four weeks—the girls that I was friends with ripped apart one of my T-shirts and doused it with Tommy to remember me by.

AK: Beauty products have been such a part of my life since I can remember, because my mom is very glamorous and got dressed up for work every single day in a suit and five-inch heels and had her whole routine of Erno Lazlo, Bobbi Brown, Chanel makeup. So I would always watch her get ready. All of our nannies growing up were college girls at SMU. Each year we had a new personality of a girl come through, and they had their own beauty take. One nanny named Nicole was a professional ballerina, and she took me to Sephora for the first time. It felt like I was in Europe, even though I had no idea what Europe was. They used to have these tiny nail polish bottles in every single color, and Nicole let me pick out three or four. I just remember that being the coolest day: this glamorous older girl was taking me on a makeup shopping spree.

NA-W: If I had had the psychological freedom to buy it, Hard Candy nail polish from Hot Topic would've been my first beauty purchase.

VG: What excited you beauty-wise in the visual culture back then?

NA-W: New Kids on the Block and George Clooney in ER. He had a Caesar cut, and I went to the Astor Place barbers in New York and asked for the George Clooney Caesar. It was the Rachel before the Rachel.

AK: MTV, especially on summer break, would play music videos back to back. The Madonna “Ray of Light” video always sticks out to me. Gwen Stefani in all of the early No Doubt videos, like “Magic’s in the Makeup.” And sometimes they’d talk about making the music video, and you got to see those little glimpses of makeup tutorials or the thought process that went into the look. You revisit the music videos now and see new details, like a metallic plum lip color on Lauryn Hill. Everything was just so beautiful.

VG: When have you taken a beauty risk or given yourself over to transformation?

NA-W: The last day of fifth or sixth grade, I convinced my mom to take me to the hair salon. I really wanted to bleach my hair. I had a bowl cut at the time, and I decided with my hairstylist that we would just bleach the bowl—the hair on top—and leave the undercut my black hair color. It was sort of like a black-and-white cookie. Even in the hands of the best colorists working in New York today, it would take hours and hours to get my hair to a nice color blonde. This was at a strip mall in Chatham, New York. You best believe that it was brassy.

AK: I was in a sorority in college, trying to conform to what I thought that look was, and then I realized it wasn't for me. I had this rebellious streak and started writing beauty articles and moved to New York. I kind of got exhausted with trying to be pretty and not being taken seriously.

NA-W: Let me paint a picture of Annie at this point: bleach-blonde hair and a huge fur coat. The first time I met her, I was like, “This is the coolest, most glamorous downtown ingenue.” When you showed me the pictures from your pretty recent sorority days, I was like, "This is your first story for Into the Gloss. Your debut is talking about your beauty evolution from chunky highlights and Daisy Dukes and spaghetti-strap tank tops to Edie Sedgwick.”

AK: In my mind, the ultimate rebellion was that I lost my retainer and was like, “You know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to have gnarly teeth.” And then I got a gold tooth. It was removable, but I thought I was very edgy.

VG: People in the beauty industry are often guinea pigs. Have you tried things you wish you hadn't, or have you purposely sat on the sidelines at times?

AK: I'm like most people in that I have such insecurities about the way I look, and some people's answer to that is to change it. I'll be 40 in a few years, and I see more and more people talking about how plastic surgery is becoming more prevalent and more accessible. The technology and the innovations are leaps and bounds better than they were 10 years ago. But I really worry about the psychological effect of a drastic change, especially if it were something I chose to do, to the point where I wouldn't recognize myself. Of course, I've done non-invasive procedures. I'll experiment there, though there are certain things I'm wary of because Nick has done them and scared me out of them.

NA-W: I'm down for anything that's relatively reversible. I've never gone under the knife, but I got “small face” in Korea once.

AK: You didn't know that you were being put to sleep, right?

NA-W: I sort of let it happen. There was a language barrier. This was probably over 10 years ago, but in Korea, the derm offices were much more like spas. So I'm under this gorgeous duvet, and there are all these nurses in this quiet, softly lit room. As I was being put under, sort of unbeknownst to me, I was like, "If this goes south and my mother gets a phone call that her son died on the operating table in Korea getting “small face,” she's going to be like, “I never knew my son!” I've now pieced together that what I probably got was jaw Botox to extend my face shape.

VG: Did you like the results of your smaller face?

NA-W: I didn't notice a single thing—though I'll try most anything. Maybe this is the journalist in me, but it's either a good result or a good story.

VG: What pet peeves do you have in beauty?

AK: I remember when the Federal Trade Commission changed regulations on Photoshop in advertising. Yet now we have ads completely made of AI, with no disclaimer saying this whole thing is fake. I saw a big hair care brand that had an entire social media campaign that was all AI-generated—the hair, everything. Where are the adults in the room? How are we okay with this?

VG: Who do you each look up to in business?

AK: Ramdane Touhami, who bought and re-envisioned Officine Universelle Buly. I'm impressed by someone who has maintained this creative and brand integrity—because oftentimes you're devalued as a creative once the business grows. Nick and I have both worked with people who make you feel like a diva or a roadblock to growth because you care about things like quality.

NA-W: My answer would be Frédéric Malle, the person, and also Ben Gorham. It was a sea change when Frédéric Malle began publishing perfumes and putting the perfumer's name on the label. The perfumes that these people were creating for him were phenomenal, but it was also this idea that giving credit doesn't devalue your ability to build a business, especially in fragrance. And Ben Gorham had an interesting background in professional sports but then had this conviction to reignite niche perfumery. He worked with one perfumer, Jérome Epinette, for the entirety of his tenure, and considered it a creative collaboration. I really admire him.

VG: Who would you like to work with as a creative collaborator—on a campaign, say?

AK: I'm dying to direct a video myself for the brand, and I’d love to work with Mia Goth. I love her face. But then I also know I have so much to learn—so, I mean, Sofia Coppola is always someone I’m thinking about. I remember the exact movie theater I sat in when I saw Marie Antoinette as a teenager. For millennial girls, that was such a major moment: beauty, fashion, music, everything.

NA-W: For me, Nick Knight, the photographer. He not only creates really interesting images, they’re also unmistakably his. He's been one of the first people to use AI creatively, which I don't think is an oxymoron in his case. He has a series called “Roses From My Garden,” which he shot during COVID on his iPhone. Very ethereal, with natural light streaming in through roses and peonies that he had picked from his garden. He and his retoucher, a longtime creative collaborator of his, used an AI program to add pixels in order to transform the iPhone pictures into something that could be blown up. The final images are triple a poster size. That kind of imagination and experimentation is really exciting to me. I also love Tim Walker’s ability to make worlds. It's sort of like the golden days of Vogue and W Magazine—where they would shoot, like, a crazy explosion of flowers on the Pyramids.

VG: Are there times when what’s beautiful can tip toward grotesque or tawdry or deliciously dirty?

NA-W: One of the Contrapposto fragrances is called Musc Pétille, and there’s a body-heat character to it from the musks. It's 48% musks in the formula. Words like visceral and tactile—that's how I want my brand to feel, and this has a “you just ran a mile” feel when you wear it on skin.

AK: I'm always inspired by references in makeup that show the woman after she’s been wearing it. I was looking at the rock singer Arrow de Wilde's Instagram, and the WNBA's a bigger part of culture now than it's ever been—and I love seeing these women in the throes of physical activity and what their hair is doing, what their makeup is doing. Maybe that's why I get frustrated with makeup marketing: They sell you this perfect moment in time, when for me the process is the best part. Ch'lita Collins, who’s a stylist based in London and the fashion director of i-D, is up all night at shows—her boyfriend is a musician. Her makeup and hair is so much more inspiring to me than layering a primer with powders and setting spray—this idea of perfection that is just so unreal. That's not life.