Halsey knows that fans don’t always know what she looks like—and that’s on purpose. In 2015, shortly after she released her first album Badlands, she grew tired of everyone referring to her as “the blue-haired singer.” So, she shaved her head and made it a mission to constantly evolve her look. In 2017 she walked the Grammys red carpet with a bleach blonde pixie cut; a 2020 magazine cover showcased hip-length braids; and at her opening concert for the 2022 “Love and Power Tour” she rocked half-up blonde curls.

Core to their chameleon act: make-up. “I do my own makeup and I started doing it out of necessity,” says Halsey, who uses she/they pronouns and was born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane. “I had a real motivation to make products, quite frankly, that would just work for me that I couldn't find on the market.”

That passion and experience led beauty industry veterans Jeanne Chavez and Dineh Mohajer—who’d founded Hard Candy, a popular cosmetics brand, three decades prior—to approach Halsey in 2019 about creating a new makeup line. Since its January 2021 launch, about-face, which is vegan with a focus on “clean” ingredients, has sold more than 5 million products. In 2022, Halsey says the company raked in $50 million in revenue.